In today's NYT: Focusing on violence before it happens

By ERICA GOODE

 LOS ANGELES — In the days after the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Tony Beliz and his staff at the county’s mental health department here made a series of calls.

They checked in with a 16-year-old boy with a fondness for bomb-making chemicals who, two years before, told them, “I have to get rid of the bad people in this world,” and described a “special plan” he said he would put into action in a few years. 

They called the mother of another teenager — they have nicknamed him “Jared Loughner,” after the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011 — who was obsessed with weapons and killing, had access to firearms and had extensively researched school shootings. 

They contacted a 20-year-old who in 2010 was fantasizing about killing members of his family and carrying out a shooting at school. 

The young men had been brought to the attention of the School Threat Assessment Response Team program overseen by Dr. Beliz, one of the most intensive efforts in the nation to identify the potential for school violence and take steps to prevent it. The program, an unusual collaboration involving county mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies and schools, was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, after the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University, and was taken countywide in 2009 by Dr. Beliz, a deputy director of the mental health department. 

In the national debate that has followed the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, much of the focus has been on regulating firearms. But many law enforcement and mental health experts believe that developing comprehensive approaches to prevention is equally important. In many cases, they note, the perpetrators of such violence are troubled young people who have signaled their distress to others and who might have been stopped had they received appropriate help. 

“When we looked at kids who had committed attacks, the vast majority had come to the attention of an adult for a behavior that was concerning but would not necessarily cause someone to conclude they were planning an attack,” said Bryan M. Vossekuil, former executive director of the National Threat Assessment Center, part of the Secret Service, and a co-author of a 2002 guide to threat assessment in schools published by the service and the federal Education Department. 

Many secondary schools and universities around the country have protocols for dealing with students who threaten violence. And cities besides Los Angeles have started programs intended to identify students at risk. But criminal justice experts say that the program in Los Angeles, financed under California’s Mental Health Services Act, is noteworthy for the sharing of information among agencies and for the degree of follow-up in keeping track of worrisome students over time. 

“I think L.A. really is a shining star and a standard in relation to how a big city can actually collaborate,” said J. Kevin Cameron, an expert on school shootings and executive director of the Canadian Center for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response, who has consulted with the program. 

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