FBI Urges Educators to Spot Signs of Violence

Educators must do a better job of detecting signs of potential violence in students, but they should be careful not to overreact to perceived threats by simply expelling students and exacerbating the risk of real violence, FBI officials warned Wednesday.

In a two-year study of school violence given new urgency by last year’s tragic shooting at Columbine High School near Denver, the FBI listed dozens of behavioral problems that could be telltale signs of potential violence. They include a student’s macabre sense of humor, a fascination with violence-filled entertainment or an affinity for “inappropriate role models such as Hitler [or] Satan.”

FBI officials stressed that their report is not meant to represent a profile of the next rampaging school shooter. Rather, they said, the study of 18 episodes of school violence should be used by educators to help develop a systematic way of assessing how seriously to regard threats and how best to deal with them.

But some experts in the field of juvenile justice and psychology--and even within the Clinton administration--were skeptical about whether the report added much to the ongoing debate about how to deal with high-profile shootings.

At best, some critics suggested, the FBI report may represent a waste of time, chronicling trouble signs that are largely self-evident. At worst, they said, there is a risk that school officials would use it to vilify kids experiencing nothing more than awkward adolescence.

“To simply release a report like this across the country--into the hands of people in the schools who are for the most part not well trained in identifying kids with mental health problems--seems to me an open invitation to stigmatize children who may simply be expressing opinions that they’re entitled to have,” said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who specializes in juvenile justice issues.

School violence has been declining sharply in the last few years, with the number of homicides on school property remaining relatively stable at a rate of about 30 per year nationwide, officials said. But a series of high-profile student shootings in the last three years has put parents and educators nationwide on alert, looking for ways to avoid “another Columbine.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many schools have clamped down on even the mildest hint of potential violence, disciplining or expelling any students who utter threats.

But overreaction--simply “kicking the problem out the door” instead of examining the roots--”may actually exacerbate the danger” by making a student angrier and more determined to carry out an act of violence, the report concludes.

“We can’t respond to every child who makes a threat as though [he or she] were a potential killer,” warned Dewey Cornell, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who took part in the FBI study.

The FBI found that in many cases attackers revealed “clues” to their thinking “that may signal an impending violent act.” The key, officials said, comes in learning how to differentiate between legitimate threats and idle ones.

An e-mail from a student telling another that “you are a dead man” may be only a “low-level threat,” vague and indirect and sent in anger, the FBI said.

But an anonymous call to the principal giving specific information about a pipe bomb scheduled to go off in the gymnasium is a “high-level threat” because it is “direct and specific” and requires intervention by local law enforcement, the FBI said.

The task of telling such threats apart, FBI officials acknowledged, is often subjective. Yet the agency’s report proposes no recommendations for new funding to help schools bring in trained mental health professionals or specialists who might aid in the process.

The FBI said that educators and parents should be on the lookout for a host of behavioral signs in children, including depression, a failed love relationship, narcissism, poor coping skills, low self-esteem and anger management problems.

The more “warning signs” demonstrated by a student, “the greater the level of concern for the assessor,” the report concludes.

But some experts were skeptical.

“A failed love relationship? Who didn’t have a failed love relationship in high school?” said Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based research and policy group.

“Some of these categories are so broad that school administrators could very well net in a bunch of kids who are just going through normal adolescent behaviors. It almost smacks of being stuff that adults don’t like about kids, which really worries me,” he said.

FBI officials refused to reveal the cost of the study. The 36-page report, titled “School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,” is available on the Internet at https://www.fbi.gov.