Team Approach to Keeping Potential Attackers Off ‘Pathway to Violence’

When a Texas teenager made vague threats on social media in 2022 glorifying the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas—where a young man killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School just months earlier—tips started to come in.

A police department investigator in Texas quickly developed a picture of the subject: a 19-year-old man who idolized the Uvalde offender, posted pictures of himself with weapons, and professed a desire to die in a shootout with police. A search of his home in late 2022 found no weapons. And he told the investigator, who works on a task force with the FBI’s San Antonio Field Office, that he had no plans to carry out a school shooting.

But the incident became a focus of a team of experts who continually assess known and emerging threats in the region. The Behavioral Threat Assessment Group, or BTAG, meets three times a week at the Southwest Texas Fusion Center, a high-tech intelligence hub inside San Antonio’s Public Safety Headquarters. There, assembled around a large conference table, police detectives, fire investigators, mental health experts, federal agents, and others discuss and evaluate cases they believe could—if ignored—devolve into acts of mass violence.

Read ore: FBI