Law enforcement agencies, school safety, and corporate security teams alike have embraced physical security as their recourse against unforeseen threats. Camera coverage (and analysis), metal detectors, and other stringent access measures have become all but ubiquitous, but are all predicated on attackers who don’t evolve with the evolution of security measures, who conform to precedent, and don’t exploit the countless vulnerabilities that static countermeasures produce. More, they’re all based on one objectionable falsehood: that the best we can do is just-in-time mitigation .

As the frequency of these attacks has grown, our society has grown acquainted with their nature. And they’ve learned that long before someone has stoop foot on a school premise or picked up a firearm, they’ve shared their intentions (and more often than not, with a handful of people, if not more).

Behavioral threat assessment as a discipline was pioneered to address this, but the truth is this: when you’re dealing with hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals, each with unique signatures, evolving psyches, and obscured communication, you’re bound to overlook something, often with tragic consequences.

Box-ticking exercises and brute forced measures are a means to an end, not the end themselves.

If the perpetrators of these acts exist on some radar, that radar should function like one, not a piece of paper or Excel spreadsheet with their name on it and nothing more.

If the perpetrators of these acts leave digital breadcrumbs and online spaces becomes their chosen medium, we should be the first to know, not the last to know.

If the perpetrators of these acts exhibit divergent behaviors and other signs of escalation, we should be able to quantify that, not leave it to ad-hoc process.

This isn’t work that can be done faithfully and scalable within the existing behavioral threat assessment or even investigative architecture.

It requires something new. It requires Aslan.