How to Conduct a Threat Assessment
In this day and age violent crime is on the rise and everyone is concerned for the safety of their family and property. Doing a threat assessment can help you identify problem areas and take certain measures to avoid an incident. Many different organisations around the world are conducting threat assessments to help them prevent criminal activity from happening. If you want to conduct a professional threat assessment then there are a few basic techniques that you can use to help you analyse a situation and take the appropriate measures.
Instructions
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1
Develop threat model:
Develop a threat model that represents a given scenario or location that can be perceived as vulnerable. Your threat model should include all the variables that you can later identify and produce a threat classification based on the relevant output. -
2
Measure vulnerability:
Carefully identify and measure the vulnerability of the particular location or scenario that you are conducting your threat assessment for. Be sure to carefully analyse all the levels of vulnerabilities that can be observed. -
3
Measure operator:
Next you should measure or identify the operator. The operator is the perceived individual that the threat can come from. Remember there can be multiple operators involved as very few acts of violence happen from just a single individual. Usually operators are various groups or gangs that are known to be involved in various criminal activities. -
4
Measure capabilities:
Identify the capabilities of your perceived operator in the threat assessment. Capabilities can be measured by past behaviour or previous violent crime statistics. Try to put a numerical value on the potential capabilities of your operator in the threat assessment. -
5
Measure intent:
Once you have measured or identified vulnerability, operators and capabilities then now you should understand the intent. You have to measure the level of intent that you feel your potential operator has and whether or he or she can act on this very same level of intent. Measuring intent is rather difficult as it is hard to understand what is going on inside someone’s head. These variables can also be given numerical values to give you a threat level. -
6
Develop threat scale:
After using your threat model to identify and measure the multiple variables, you should now develop a threat scale. Using the numerical values on this threat scale will give you a perceived threat level in terms of high or low. You can also use colour coding where the colour red is defined as a threat being imminent to green being defined as no real threat.
