System seeks to help prevent violence
The report came at 10 p.m., an hour when many teenagers are scrolling through social media posts, texting or calling friends and playing video games.
But for one Putnam County student on Sept. 6, the late-night activity consisted of emailing threats to Green Chimneys, the Brewster school for special-needs children where the 13-year-old was enrolled.
Five days later, after interviewing the teen and the parents and searching a computer, Putnam deputies arrested and charged the minor with one count of making a terroristic threat, a felony, and referred the student to the probation department.
Police learned of the emails through Putnam County’s year-old Threat Assessment Management system (TAM), an online portal that schools, residents and businesses can use to report threats made against them or someone else, along with concerns about people harming themselves.
TAM was adopted in response to the racially motivated shooting deaths, in May 2022, of 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo. The system, online at pctam.net, has two goals: to prevent troubled people from committing similar crimes and to connect them with counseling, drug treatment and other services.
Nearly all the 40 or so reports received over the last year have come from schools and ranged from students indirectly threatening each other on the school bus to far more significant threats, said Sara Servadio, the county’s mental health and social services commissioner.
Acting on those reports is a multi-agency team that, in addition to Servadio’s department and the Sheriff’s Office, includes the Bureau of Emergency Services, district attorney’s office, probation department and Putnam-Northern Westchester Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).
Servadio said she is not surprised by the number of reports. New York schools outside of New York City reported 95 bomb threats and 1,395 other types of threats during the 2022-23 school year, as well as 1,088 incidents of weapons possession, according to the most recent state data. Haldane reported three weapons possession incidents and one threat in 2022-23 and Beacon had two weapons incidents and three threats in 2021-22, the most recent figures available.
“I’m confident that we have prevented something from happening, whether it was someone toward themselves or others,” said Servadio.
Reporting a Threat
Putnam County’s Threat Assessment Management system at pctam.net requires that anyone reporting a concern give the name, address and other information about the person making the threat and describe the nature of the threat.
They will also be asked to answer six questions that have been identified by the FBI as indicators of violence, said Capt. Michael Knox of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office. It’s a similar experience to calling 911, he said.
The questions include:
- Has the person “directly threatened others or stated their intention of conducting an act of violence against others?”
- Have they “demonstrated behaviors, including direct or indirect threats, or movement from thought to action, indicating violence is necessary and justified to resolve personal grievances and/or to affect social or political change?”
- Has the person “exhibited changes to their normal life, such as stopping medications and/or substance use, withdrawal from life pattern, including social media, and/or increase in activity?”
Residents can also upload images, such as ones showing threatening social media posts. The system asks for the name and contact information of the person reporting a threat but gives them the option to decline being contacted.
Putnam County had been working with schools on identifying and reporting threats when Gov. Kathy Hochul in May 2022 issued an executive order requiring counties to develop plans to prevent domestic terrorism, said Putnam County Sheriff Kevin McConville.
In August 2022, Hochul authorized $10 million to help counties create threat-management teams, with police, mental health professionals and school officials among their members. In May, she committed an additional $10 million.
Dutchess County announced the formation of its threat-assessment team in August 2022. Among the 57 counties in New York, 43 had teams in place by May.
The teams are meant to close gaps in information-sharing. As with the Buffalo shooter, some of the people behind violent incidents have been investigated by police or ignited concerns from school officials and mental health professionals but without those concerns being shared.
“If you look at school shootings or incidents at businesses or other entities, there’s always some indicator that people overlooked,” said McConville.
A submission to TAM triggers an alert to the response team, whose members quickly assemble by telephone or video conference, said McConville. The agencies decide “what actions they’re going to take” and reconvene later that day, he said.
Some of the reports concern only “impromptu and spontaneous” acts by a student in a classroom or on a school bus but having a team allows county officials to quickly assess the credibility of reports, said McConville.
Police interview the subject of the report and family members. Corinne Pitt, a senior investigator with the Sheriff’s Office, said minors are not questioned without parents or guardians present. For some parents, the report will be the first time they learn about a child’s behavior, she said.
“It’s difficult for families to understand the complexities of social media and what can go on there, because their children know how to use the tools better than they do,” said Pitt.
A study released in 2023 by Dr. Deborah Weisbrot and other researchers at Stony Brook University, based on 20 years of interviews with 157 school-age children who made threats in school, found that most had one or more psychiatric diagnoses, such as attention-deficit disorder, depression and/or autism. In addition, 90 percent reported “significant traumatic life experiences”; 50 percent had been treated with psychiatric medicines; and 43 percent experienced bullying.
Eighty percent of the students had made a verbal threat and 29 percent had brought a weapon to school, according to the study.
The Putnam County Family Court oversees the cases of students who are arrested. Servadio’s department facilitates mental health treatment and assesses whether their families need financial, food or housing assistance, or other services. “We’ve had some unsheltered children and adults come through the threat-assessment management system,” she said.
For sheriff’s investigators, assessing a threat can be time-consuming. They recently investigated a social media post with a vague threat about blowing up schools. The post originated in California and, through reposting, hopscotched around the country, said Capt. John Alfano.
If a local resident alerts police to such a post, “we can’t not take it seriously,” he said. Several investigators spent eight hours tracing the post to California, where police had identified a suspect.
