Before the Sirens: What the Annunciation Investigation Reinforces About Prevention

BTAP PERSPECTIVE

What newly released investigative records remind us about behavioral awareness, context, and the work that must happen before an emergency begins.

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One year after the deadly attack at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, newly released investigative records provide considerably more detail about what happened before, during, and immediately after the shooting.

What they do not provide is equally important.

They do not produce a simple explanation for why it happened.

The records describe an extraordinarily rapid law-enforcement response. They also document writings and other material reflecting an interest in previous mass attackers, hateful statements, emotional distress, and actions taken before the attack. Yet investigators still have not identified a clear, singular motive that neatly explains why the violence occurred.

That distinction matters. After an act of targeted violence, people understandably want an answer to the question “Why?” But prevention cannot begin by waiting until the answer to that question becomes obvious. It has to begin earlier.

The Question Before “Why?”

The recently released records illustrate something that professionals working in behavioral threat assessment have understood for years: human behavior rarely arrives with a label attached to it.

A person does not normally announce, in unmistakable terms, that he or she has crossed from personal difficulty, grievance, anger, fixation, or emotional distress into preparation for violence.

Instead, the available information may be fragmented.

• One person notices a change in behavior.
• Another notices unusual communication.
• Someone else sees increasing isolation, fixation, anger, or difficulty coping.
• A coworker, family member, teacher, supervisor, friend, security professional, or acquaintance may see only one small part of a much larger picture.

And sometimes those observations mean nothing dangerous at all.

That point is essential.

Behavioral threat awareness is not about treating sadness, isolation, unusual beliefs, anger, mental-health concerns, or any other single behavior as proof that someone is dangerous.

The FBI makes the same distinction in its public violence-prevention guidance: no single behavior means that a person is on a path toward violence. Concern grows when behaviors, changes, circumstances, and patterns begin to accumulate in context. That is where behavioral awareness becomes important.

Behavior Is Not Prediction

At Kinesic Media, Behavioral Threat Assessment Prevention — “BTAP” — was never designed to turn employees, educators, administrators, security personnel, supervisors, or other participants into psychologists or investigators.

It was designed to make them better observers.

There is an enormous difference.

Prediction asks someone to decide what another person will do.

Observation asks someone to recognize what is actually happening.

Those are much more useful questions than attempting to determine, from a single observation, whether someone is “dangerous.”

The purpose is not diagnosis. The purpose is awareness.

Prevention and Response Are Different Parts of Safety

The Annunciation records also document a remarkably fast emergency response. According to the released material, the first officers arrived approximately three and a half minutes after the initial report and immediately began confronting an extraordinarily difficult scene and helping the wounded.

That response undoubtedly mattered.

But even the fastest emergency response begins after an emergency already exists.

This is why organizations cannot afford to think about safety only in terms of what happens once shots are fired, an assault begins, a confrontation erupts, or an emergency notification is activated.

• Emergency planning is essential.
• Security procedures are essential.
• Law enforcement response is essential.
• So are trained employees who understand that prevention may begin much earlier.

Those approaches are not competitors. They are different layers of the same safety strategy.

The Importance of Context

Some of the information contained in the Annunciation records is particularly useful because it demonstrates the difficulty of evaluating behavior retrospectively.

Investigators reviewed writings, electronic evidence, interviews, personal history, behavior before the attack, and other material. People who knew the attacker described depression, isolation, and earlier suicidal thoughts, but several also said they had not believed the individual was capable of violence against others.

That should caution us against an easy conclusion that someone simply “should have known.”

Hindsight allows investigators to assemble information that the people involved may never have possessed collectively before an event.

That is why one of the most important organizational questions is not simply:

“Did somebody notice something?”

It is also:

“If different people notice different things, does the organization have a way to bring those observations together?”

A behavioral change that appears insignificant in isolation may take on different meaning when considered with additional information.

Conversely, information that initially appears alarming may prove much less significant when the full context becomes known. The answer is not suspicion. The answer is better information.

Creating Organizations That Notice Earlier

This is one of the fundamental ideas behind “BTAP”.

Organizations spend considerable time teaching people what to do during emergencies.

Far fewer deliberately teach their personnel how to recognize and communicate meaningful behavioral concerns before an emergency.

“BTAP” is intended to help close that gap.

Participants learn to pay greater attention to observable behavior and meaningful changes from established patterns. The training addresses Inside Threats, Outside Threats, and Confrontational Avoidance while reinforcing a broader principle:

That does not mean every observation requires police involvement.

It does not mean every unusual person represents a threat.

It does not mean an employee should conduct an investigation.

It means organizations benefit when their people have enough behavioral awareness to recognize that something has changed — and enough organizational structure to communicate a legitimate concern to the appropriate person.

The FBI’s Behavioral Threat Assessment Center operates from a related prevention principle at a much more specialized level: behavior, patterns, circumstances, and movement toward violence can be evaluated before an attack occurs. The FBI also emphasizes that people around an individual are often in a unique position to observe concerning behavior and that earlier recognition creates more opportunities for intervention. That principle should matter to every organization.

What This Investigation Does — and Does Not — Tell Us

The newly released Annunciation records do not prove that this attack could have been prevented.

They do not prove that one particular behavior should have produced a particular response.

And they should not be treated as a checklist for identifying the next attacker.

That would be an irresponsible use of the information.

What the records do reinforce is something broader.

Targeted violence can involve a progression of thoughts, behaviors, preparation, changes, circumstances, and actions that may exist before the moment when violence finally becomes visible to everyone.

The challenge is that those pieces may be scattered among different people and may not appear significant until they are considered together. That is precisely why behavioral awareness matters.

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The Work Before the Sirens

Kinesic Media developed “BTAP” around a straightforward proposition:

There is no training program capable of guaranteeing that violence will never occur.

“BTAP” does not make that promise.

What it offers is something more practical: a way to strengthen the human component of prevention.

• Better observers.
• Greater awareness.
• More attention to behavior in context.
• A common understanding that meaningful change deserves attention.
• Recognition that prevention begins long before anyone calls 911.

The Annunciation investigation reminds us how much work takes place after violence occurs — thousands of pages of records, interviews, photographs, evidence, reconstruction, and analysis devoted to understanding what happened.

That work is necessary.

But at Kinesic Media, our focus is on the question organizations have an opportunity to ask before the investigation ever has to begin:

That is where Behavioral Threat Assessment Prevention begins.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Associated Press — Newly released Annunciation investigation records
• FBI — Prevent Mass Violence
• FBI — Behavioral Analysis and Threat Assessment