The movement to implement threat assessment (TA) units first requires the implementation of evidence-based assessment. This study examined the initial psychometric data for the North Carolina BeTA Investigation Overview (NCBIO-25), a multidisciplinary teamadministered structured professional judgment measure for Behavioral Threat Assessment in a law enforcement setting. The measure was used with a sample of 64 persons of concern for whom a TA was requested and performed. The results indicated that high interrater reliability could be achieved in raters trained in TA. In addition, initial factorial validity indicated a five-factor model with correlated latent variables appeared to be the best representation of the observed data. These results suggest that the NCBIO-25 is a promising new tool to aid law enforcement TA teams in conducting TA investigations and developing plans for risk management. Public Significance StatementOperational decision-making in the threat assessment process is enhanced by the use of reliable and valid measures. This study provides initial psychometric information on a structured professional judgment tool that can aid case decision-making in law enforcement settings that work threat cases across multiple settings and with multiple potential targets of interest. The findings of this study will directly benefit threat assessment units within law enforcement settings in public sector settings who wish to have a free for use, empirically based, systematic structure for capturing behavioral evidence to conduct a threat assessment.

Threat assessment is increasingly being recognized by law enforcement agencies as a research-based, proactive solution in the prevention of targeted mass attacks. The application of threat assessment principles and models in real world settings offers unique opportunities as well as ethical and legal challenges for the threat assessment team when making case decisions. This article examines some of the ethical and legal issues one law enforcement threat assessment team confronted when working a threat assessment case. Ethical codes and legal duties are explained and illustrated through case study. Public Significance StatementThis study reveals that ethical and legal issues arise in almost every decision that must be made when engaging in the practice of threat assessment. This article describes the ethical and legal challenges that arose in one applied threat assessment and management case within a law enforcement setting and how those ethical and legal issues impacted case decisions. Continued research on ethical and legal issues using real world case examples can assist threat assessment teams think through how to best protect individual rights within the context of their own to threat assessment management process.