By Beth Mole
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 10, 2012
In science-fiction movies like Minority Report,psychics could identify future murderers before they ever picked up a weapon. But the task of predicting the future and thwarting violence by identifying students who are likely to do harm is, in reality, complex, difficult, and full of pitfalls.
Many American colleges set up teams after the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to monitor campus incidents and, they hope, intervene before a potentially violent member of the community snaps. But those entities - which go by such names as threat-assessment teams, behavioral-intervention teams, or caring teams - face many challenges. Mental-health disorders often develop among young people in the traditional college-age years, but it can be difficult if not impossible to assess the extent of a person's illness early on.
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Many campuses lack ready access to mental-health experts who can authoritatively assess the risk of violence, and some experts say the assessment teams rely too little on those authorities.
At the University of Colorado at Denver, a threat-assessment team reportedly was alerted to a university psychiatrist's concerns about James E. Holmes, a former graduate student there. Mr. Holmes, who withdrew in June from a Ph.D. program in neurosciences at the university's medical campus, in neighboring Aurora, is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others in a movie theater there last month.
News reports have said that the threat-assessment team did not meet to discuss Mr. Holmes because he had announced his intent to withdraw from the university.
The entire story is here.
Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.
