Threat Assessment in Practice
June 4 & 5, 2026
This immersive two-day certification course is designed to move threat assessment professionals from theory to practice. Led by Dr. Brian Van Brunt and the DPrep Safety team, participants will gain direct, practical guidance on the real-world challenges that threat assessment teams face every day, including interviewing subjects, analyzing social media, and creating accurate and defensible reports.
Virtual Option Available!
Virtual participants will be formed into teams. Each virtual team will be assigned a facilitator who will guide them through case development, answer questions, and ensure access to resources.
June case study details coming soon!
The case will involve a student making threats, with suicide risk.
Live Actor Interviews
Each participant will interview a professional actor portraying the subject in a complex threat case. You will receive detailed feedback and advice for strengthening your interviewing skills.
Applied Teamwork
Collaborate with your cohort to analyze the threat, assess risk, and create a tailored mitigation plan using strategies relevant to your own institution or workplace.
Case-Based Learning
You’ll review case details, form a team, gather intelligence, and conduct structured interviews. From there, your team will develop an assessment report and risk mitigation plan.
Rotating Experiences
Across two days, participants rotate through different roles and scenarios, developing agility in handling personalities, defensiveness, and complex case dynamics.
Train with the BTAM Institute
Topics Include:
Interview Recording & Transcription: When should you record an interview? When is transcription more effective? We’ll explore best practices, weighing legal, ethical, and practical considerations.
Assessing Social Media Threats: Learn structured approaches to gathering, interpreting, and weighing online content in your threat assessments.
Interview Accuracy & Deception: Practice strategies to gain information from subjects who may minimize, distort, or attempt to manage impressions. Learn how to spot inconsistencies, build rapport, and verify information.
Managing Bias: Instructors will highlight common biases that affect casework and demonstrate ways to maintain objectivity, improve decision-making, and avoid pitfalls.
Sample Interview Feedback
At points, you move quickly through interview questions in a way that can feel like a checklist or “machine-gun” pace, even when the intent is engagement and curiosity. Rapid-fire questioning can work in some contexts, but in these interviews, it risks shifting the tone toward interrogation rather than collaboration. The fix is simple but powerful. Use fewer stacked prompts, more purposeful pauses, and periodic “here’s where we are and where we’re going next” signposting.
Increase emotional reflection and validation and pause more often to name and validate feelings (hurt, frustration, isolation) before moving to the next question, especially around repeated themes like being called “naïve.”
You interview like a friendly locksmith, trying a few gentle keys (curiosity, humility, small self-disclosures) until the door swings open on its own. You lean into “step-down” rapport, responding to the person’s “does that make sense?” in a way that lowers the temperature and builds connection, rather than asserting authority. This is evident in how you build interest and engagement before pivoting into safety, then ask direct but grounded questions about lashing out or harming others. You also use “humanizing” bridges to convey empathy and persistence in a tough professor/student dynamic.
The interview pivots into a new lane (supports, counseling, conduct expectations) without enough of a verbal bridge, which can feel abrupt and spike defensiveness. For instance, when you pivot into meds/diagnosis or other intimate territory, add a one-sentence bridge (“I’m going to ask a couple standard items, so I understand supports and context”). It preserves dignity and reduces the “why are you asking me that?” spike.
You accurately sense and name emotional themes (not being heard, irritation, feeling judged), but spend a lot of time paraphrasing his experience and relatively less time pinning down specific classroom and email behaviors, sequences, and triggers. That leaves you with rich process insight but thinner behavioral data to plug into a rubric.
Your questions tend to be short and specific: when the leave was put in place, what he was told about the reasons, whether he references suicide in lectures, and how colleagues/students have reacted. Those questions generate exactly the kind of factual content the team needs.
You bring a consistently steady, empathic presence to this interview, and the subject clearly responds to it. Early on, you join the conversation with a strengths-based reflection: “It sounds like you're extremely passionate about the work that you do, and I can hear that in what you're saying,” which earns an immediate “Yes, thank you” from him, one of the few clean affirmations he offers the team. You also skillfully normalize and soften language when you revisit student discomfort: “you said that some of the students, I guess, were uncomfortable, I'm going to use that word loosely,” which shows you’re aware of how loaded certain terms can feel to him.
Previous Cases
Meet Ella Moreau...
This tough-as-nails student can take care of herself. Ella is insightful and challenging in the classroom as she studies mortuary science and dreams of opening a funeral business, building on the idea of renewable and sustainable burial processes that involve placing the body into the ground to nourish a tree. There have been concerns in the classroom and on social media regarding some frequent and slightly gruesome posts related to her criticism of the existing funeral business model. This recently escalated into a threat against her professor, which came to the attention of the CARE/BIT team and local police.
Meet Professor Dusty Harrington...
Students find this middle-aged professor's lectures increasingly hard to follow and off topic. Staff and colleagues give Professor Harrington a wide berth due to his eccentricities. However, recent discussions related to his extremist views on the Middle Eastern conflict in Gaza and his warnings about an approaching apocalypse have caused Human Resources and the University Threat team to put the professor on temporary leave to be assessed for safety. There are requests for a threat assessment, a psychological assessment, a level of care determination (involuntary hold), and a determination of fitness to return to campus.
