About the TAB

Welcome to the Threat Assessment Brief! The TAB is a new weekly newsletter that delivers curated, high-impact insights on behavioral threat assessment and management, aka BTAM. It’s built for professionals who don’t have time to read everything, but can’t afford to miss what matters. On the weekly, the TAB will brief you on new or freshly relevant research, legal developments, answers to your questions, and, to a limited extent (more on that below), significant case updates. The TAB filters for pressing issues with practical ramifications, geared toward professionals responsible for preventing targeted violence who don’t have hours to spend on academic journals and appellate court rulings. The TAB distills and operationalizes it for you.

What you’ll get

Each issue focuses on what matters:

Research, distilled
Key findings from new and overlooked studies, translated into operational insight

Legal and policy updates
Recent developments and what they mean in practice

Case Analysis
What recent incidents reveal about patterns, trends, and interventions

Expert Insight
Practical perspective grounded in real-world threat assessment and trial experience

Who the TAB is for

This publication is designed for individual professionals responsible for identifying, assessing, and managing the risk of targeted violence, including:

Threat assessment practitioners
School and campus safety professionals
Corporate security and intelligence professionals
Mental health professionals involved in threat assessment
Law enforcement and public safety personnel

If your work involves recognizing risk before it escalates, this is for you.

About me

I’m Molly Amman, an attorney and former prosecutor, retired FBI special agent, former FBI targeted violence profiler, and a Certified Threat Manager. Now I’m in private practice, doing cases, training, and research—pretty much no different than before I retired from the Bureau, except now I don’t have to ask permission to write or speak on topics that matter to me! I’ve been nurturing the idea of this newsletter for a long time. Anytime I hear about someone misconstruing an important Supreme Court case (even fellow attorneys) or not knowing a key research finding applicable to their case, I find myself drifting back to the idea. So I finally decided to launch the TAB.

My content comes from a few perspectives. First, I’m an experienced BTAM professional, beginning with my years at the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, to now as a private sector threat management professional. I’ve worked and taught all over the world and in just about every kind of targeted violence context you can think of. Second, as an attorney and former prosecutor, I understand the many ways in which the law is complex and nuanced. It doesn’t always work the way a plain reading says it should. Statutes, regulations, rules, and court cases all affect how the others actually apply. We can't afford to be unaware. Third, as a researcher and contributor to the body of knowledge myself. I understand gleaning operationally relevant information from study data, what to make of a study’s limitations, and don’t forget just the volume involved with keeping up. New studies drop all the time.

Why subscribe?

The TAB’s goal is to save you time while improving the quality of your judgment.

I have an earnest desire to help us all be better practitioners of BTAM. After all, there’s a lot on the line in our work. I’ll never claim to have all the answers, but I’ll do my best to address big questions and generally try to keep you apprized of the most important developments in BTAM. I’ll inform you about published research that’s new or freshly relevant in my opinion (in a way that doesn’t infringe on copyrights). I’ll cover significant rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appellate courts, and others. I’ll flag developments in signifiant real-world cases that are of interest to the practice of BTAM, with the caveat that I will never get out in front of law enforcement and/or publicly comment on the direction of cases under active investigation. Nor will I weigh in on the merits of one party’s stance versus the other in civil litigation. And finally, the TAB will be human-derived and verified, not AI-generated.

The TAB will drop on Mondays and will be free to subscribe. I hope you will, and invite your colleagues to do the same. If you decide to upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll have additional, deeper analysis and operational insights. For now, though, I hope you’ll give the free version a try and, if you like what you see, support the endeavor by becoming a paid subscriber if your circumstances allow.

Thanks for checking out the TAB and stay safe.