Fundamentals of Threat Assessments

Identifying and assessing threats depends on having timely, reliable, unambiguous information. You should work closely with Forest Service law enforcement officers and other employees (such as the employees working in human resources) to help them understand the information you need to better evaluate your facility’s physical security.

The personalities and politics of various groups such as the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and others are not the primary concerns; rather, the primary concerns of a threat assessment are the groups’ timing of attacks, their favored targets, methods of attack, techniques, and so forth.

Presume that threat assessment and good intelligence will not be available quickly enough to allow physical security to be adjusted. Presume that your physical security measures will have to stand alone to deter, delay, and detect attackers and deny them access to their intended targets or to any meaningful target of opportunity.

Remember, a threat communicated is not automatically a threat posed. The most common type of communicated threat is a bomb threat. If you have been identified as the physical security expert for your facility, you should be asked to help assess the credibility of a communicated threat. You may be asked to determine whether your physical security measures make it unlikely or impossible that the specific communicated threat could have been implemented by the person making the threat.

The adequacy of physical security measures is sometimes overlooked when deciding whether a communicated threat actually poses a real threat to a facility. If all security measures at a facility are adequate—not just the physical security measures—it is far easier to dismiss a nonspecific threat as unfounded. It is also easier to dismiss a specific threat as unfounded if good security measures discredit specific information in the threat.

Some businesses and institutions have policies that require facilities to be evacuated when any communicated threat is received, regardless of the threat’s credibility. This is a mistake. Such a policy fails to consider that a communicated threat can be used to move intended targets from a secure environment (their office space) to a less secure environment (a rally point such as a parking lot) where they can be attacked more easily.