Welcome back to “The TAB,” a publication that curates relevant-right-now developments in behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) that I think are most worth your attention. Thanks for being a reader, and if you find it helpful, please consider sharing with your networks.
Every other week, a new issue of the TAB will arrive with operationally useful updates for professionals in BTAM. Every issue is researched, written, and edited by me. No AI-generated articles and no recycled summaries—just my assessment of what matters and why. And it’s free to subscribe.
Spotlight Read: Strangulation Paradox—The Limits on Homicide Forecasting
I recently watched a fantastic webinar put on by the Canadian Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (I’m a member), featuring a guest speaker on strangulation and homicide in intimate partner violence. It inspired me to focus on strangulation as a homicide risk factor in this issue of the TAB.
You may have heard some version of this: A woman who has been strangled by her intimate partner is 750% more likely to be subsequently killed by him. Memorable for sure, and widely repeated across various sources. It's also not exactly what the study behind it established. But don't write its underlying idea off—that strangulation should get our immediate attention. The research is pretty interesting, and a newly published study gives us a good reason to revisit what we think it means.
Here's the question I see after this latest study: How can strangulation be dramatically overrepresented in the histories of women killed by their partners, yet do poorly at predicting which women will be killed by their partners?
Highlights:
The famous statistic turns an odds ratio into a percentage increase in risk. Those two things aren't actually interchangeable.
That a substantial proportion of homicide victims have a history of strangulation doesn't tell us what proportion of strangulation victims will subsequently experience homicide.
Newly published research on a large police-reported population found that strangulation, stalking, and sexual assault did not significantly predict subsequent lethal or near-lethal violence. Broader assessments also struggled to prospectively identify individual cases accurately.
Below the fold, I explain why 750% increased risk isn’t exactly what the research found, why it matters, and what the latest study discovered about trying to use strangulation as a predictor of subsequent homicide.
The long-expected, probable return to (without ever having really departed from) General Motors LLC by the National Labor Relations Board. More or less.
The NLRB has telegraphed a return to General Motors LLC, which is relevant to corporate BTAM teams.
When protected concerted activity (like union stuff or discussing working conditions with others) is mixed with abusive speech (like threats or harassment), it can make an employers’s options in dealing with the abusive conduct cloudy.
A method widely viewed as making it easier on employers to enforce codes of conduct will now be the rule.
If a disciplined employee offers evidence of wrongful motive by an employer, the employer has the opportunity to rebut by demonstrating the employee’s conduct would have resulted in discipline regardless of whether the protected activity was happening or now.
This is relevant to private sector employers’ ability to act in response to harassment, threats, and stalking in the workplace. Very (very) long story made short, the way in which the NLRB assesses protections on allegedly abusive speech and conduct in the workplace will now follow a method called Wright Line, as adopted in another case called General Motors LLC. I’ve written at length about this issue in my book with co-editors Ron Schouten and Rachel Solov, Threat Assessment and the Law, due out from Oxford University Press in the spring.
SIGNALS—What I’m watching in BTAM
According to Giffords, a number of U.S. states now have laws restricting the use of 3D printers to make firearms. As these printers become cheaper and easier to access, this is becoming more and more of a thing in BTAM. The states with some form of legal restriction include California, Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Virginia.
Bad news for those of you who conduct informal attribution analyses of communicated threats and rely on your ability to tell AI-written text from the human stuff. The Wall Street Journal reports that we’re all starting to talk like AI chatbots. 😱 To wit: A Swedish professional realized she’d started fawning over how brilliant others are—the opposite of the typical Swedish habit of quietly listening. A boss keeps a something like “swear jar” except it’s a whiteboard for “prompt speak.” Your talk like a bot, you get a tally mark. Saying genuinely, load-bearing, smoking gun, X is the new Y, and any “crazy hyphenated contractions that one one would normally use” all get you on the board and the high scorer pays for happy hour. And that style of prompting your AI assistant with as few words as possible? A group of business founders call it caveman speak and they noticed it creeping into their everyday speech, like “why no bullets?” While I get a good chuckle of that, I’m sure I’m not alone in editing my own language because I’m worried it sounds like Chat. Sigh. Bottom line, think twice about assuming you can tell AI from human, because we are influencing each other. There are tools for AI detection out there, some of which are backed by study data.
And with that, I sign off for this issue. Comments? Just reply to this email or comment online. I read everything. Take care, everyone.
