The Secret Service’s newly-released report on creating programs for conducting a threat assessment in schools provides a guide for officials to compare to their own systems.

The report was released by the agency’s National Threat Assessment Center, which was created in 1998 to provide guidance and training on threat assessments to criminal justice and public safety professionals.

Threat assessment programs should be one part of a larger campus protection system. Still, when done right, threat assessments can be an extremely powerful tool to protect your campus because, despite popular opinion, there is no reliable profile of student attackers.

As campus security industry professionals have seen, particularly in the last few months, there isn’t just one thing schools can do to keep their students and faculty safe. School safety is a multi-layered approach that involves participation from all members of a school’s community.

Last month, Campus Safety hosted a webinar led by Gary Sigrist, a retired school district safety director and current CEO and president of Safeguard Risk Solutions, to discuss the different layers of security needed in schools to protect students and staff from violence.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2017 was the most expensive year on record for disasters in the U.S., estimating $306 billion in total damage. The FBI also reported 2017 as having the most incidents and the most people killed in any one year by active shooters.

With this rise in crises across the United States, data and technology have an increasingly important role in improving emergency management departments across the country. Approximately 240 million calls are made to 911 in the United States each year, with at least 80 percent coming from wireless devices, yet many emergency management systems still operate on legacy systems made for wireline phones. As a result, people in need are unable to easily share precise locations or send media messages to responders, making emergency communication and resource coordination more costly and difficult.

A Southern California woman’s recent injury by a baseball bat has renewed attention to fan safety at games.

The Sun of San Bernardino reports Saturday that 27-year-old Cloey Heckendorn was hit in the head during the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes’ game on Mother’s Day.

(TNS) — Authorities at all levels have planned six months in advance of April 16, when the 122nd Boston Marathon race will take place. This year commemorates the fifth anniversary of the marathon bombings that left three dead and hundreds injured, and officials say their safety methods have adapted since that devastating day.

"I'm sure everyone can remember where they were, who they were with and what they were doing when the bombs exploded," said MBTA Transit Police Chief Kenneth Green at a security briefing in Boston on Tuesday. "It was that devastating to us."

"However with the passing of time human nature has its way of minimizing events that occur," Green added. "We cannot become complacent."

(TNS) — Doug Reynolds didn't like the feeling of resignation that swept over him as he learned of one horrific mass shooting after another.

Twenty-six people had lost their lives in the house of the Lord in November, gunned down during Sunday services at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

A few weeks prior, 58 others were shot dead and 489 injured at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas.

He thought of the dozens killed at Orlando's Pulse nightclub a year before that, and realized that although he couldn't stop the pace of mass shootings, he might be able to help in another way.

"It was kind of cumulative. The recurring theme always is that people are dying because they’re bleeding to death," said Reynolds, 58, of Farmington.