ExpertPOV

Greg McCray, Behavioral Criminology International

Mr. McCrary entered duty as a Special Agent with the FBI on December 1, 1969. As an FBI Agent, he served in various investigative capacities throughout the United States. He has been associated with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) since its inception in 1985. At the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Agent McCrary analyzed crimes and crime scenes, constructed behavioral profiles of unknown offenders and provided threat analysis and dangerousness assessments. He conducted research regarding violent offenders and their crimes and continues to provide training in these matters throughout the world.

Now McCrary is with Behavioral Criminology International—an organization that provides consultation, training and expert opinions on violent crime, premise liability, deterrability, assessments of dangerousness and related issues. In an interview with David Holtzman, McCrary shares his thoughts on the link between data and violence risk assessment.

So do you consult to government or private or individual or what?

Actually everybody…anyone that has an issue that we think we can be helpful with. We do some work with the government, but probably more with private industries. The work is mostly with violence-related issues, like workplace violence. And we work with corporations to help them predict who might be a problem and what they can do to prevent the violence.

You mean from a legal or a psycho-dynamic standpoint?

Well, both. You can never completely stop the legal aspect. If someone wants to sue you, they can always sue, and sometimes successfully. But if you handle the troubled employees or the troubled situations in the right manner, you can avoid the violence. Sometimes we tell corporations that from a legal standpoint, you sort of have to pick which lawsuits you want to defend. Do you want to defend a lawsuit for an unlawful termination or an unlawful death?

You have a masters degree in psychological services. Given the profession that you’re in, is an academic background like that particularly useful?

It’s useful to a degree. The experience is more important than anything else. In other words, people with degrees in psychology really don’t necessarily understand violence or predicting dangers—these are sort of a sub-specialty. I run seminars and workshops on this very issue, and I teach psychologists and psychiatrists how to do this. You don’t automatically get this knowledge simply by having a degree or a Phd or an MD. That said, there’s certainly basis for this in the field of psychology or psychiatry—say when you’re dealing with personality disorders or mental illness issues. Of all the paranoid schitzophrenics, how do you know which ones are more dangerous than the other ones.

So it sounds like with the kind of work you’re doing now, you actually have the luxury of interviewing the people and making an assessment.

Actually, rarely do we get a chance to interview the person who is the focus. It depends on who we’re dealing with. Some larger corporations have a very good framework in place of good investigators—HR people or security people who do very good work. Sometimes we suggest that they do interviews, because getting the right information is critical. Sometimes the situations aren’t as bad as you think—sometimes they’re worse than you think. But you have to drill down and get that information.

One quick war story—I got a call from a corporate client. They were going to fire this guy because he threatened to shoot his supervisor. Well, threatening to shoot your supervisor is obviously not a good thing to do. So I said tell me about the guy, what’s his background. They told me that he’d been a perfectly good employee with no problems. Well that’s very unusual. Usually there’s a long, troubled history. One of the myths we’ve dispelled is the myth that someone just shows up and shoots up the place. There’s usually a long period of devolution and warning signs. Well anyhow, the more they told me about this guy, the more I thought that it didn’t sound right. They were bringing in extra security guys with guns, and they were going to fire this guy.

So it turned out that the person who they’d thought had made the threat was a Vietnamese guy working a menial level job of the company. He went to his supervisor and what he said was “give me work, I’ll show you I can do a good job.” Through his broken Vietnamese, when he said show you, his supervisor thought he said, “I’ll shoot you.” And really all this guy wanted was to do a good job.

So it’s a matter of getting the right information and then making the right decision.

What types of factors do you look at?

There are sort of four basic domains that we look at. This is something that developed from this McArthur violence risk assessment study by Dr. John Monahan from the University of Virginia. It’s a study that’s really been validated through the voluminous research that they’ve done. This is probably the best study out there on assessing risks and the risk for violence. It’s a longitudinal study that’s been going on for years—and they’ve evaluated thousands of people in situations, and this is sort of what’s emerged from that. It’s a conceptual way to approach the problem and begin to filter it through these domains and develop a pretty reasonable prediction as to what you’re dealing with.

First are the personal factors. That would be personality issues, especially if there’s some personality disorder—such as an antisocial personality. This also includes issues like impulsiveness and anger and that sort of stuff—cognitive issues. Here we look at the IQ, or signs of neurological problems or impairment. All of that would be under personal factors.

Under historical factors, we would certainly look at the individual’s history, but we would look at social history, work history and family history as well. Obviously within that we’d have an interest towards any of violence or criminal activity—such as arrests or incarcerations or self-reported violence, or even violence towards themselves.

Those two factors of the four are generally static. In other words, they’re not amenable to change…or the change is so slow that it doesn’t really affect an assessment. For example, people change with age so slowly, that if we’re doing an assessment at the moment, age really won’t make a lot of difference. History is history, and personality features are very different to change. So generally the factors in these domains are considered static.

Now in the next two domains, they’re considered dynamic—and that is, they’re changeable or amenable to change.

One if the contextual factors. There we would get into what’s going on in a person’s life at the time—living arrangements, any sources of stress or perceived stress, social networks. This basically answers the question of what is the context of that individual’s life at that time. That would also include means for violence—means of access to weapons and that sort of thing. Is there some reason they might be reason to use weapons, and is there some reason that they might be motivated to use them?

The fourth are the clinical factors, which would be any signs of mental illness or substance abuse. If we find those things, then we want to find out as much as we can, such as the symptoms of the mental illness, or the delusions or mental illness—and the sincerity of those elements. Are they really sincere and profound or minimal? Any violent fantasies or violent ideations? The other component would be alcohol or substance abuse. We’d be looking at how severe that might be. We’d also look at if this individual were under treatment for any of these things, and the context of the treatment. Is it voluntary, or are they being forced into treatment. There are usually some pretty significant distinctions there. If the person has volunteered to go with the therapy or rehabilitation program, there’s a greater chance of success than if they’re being forced into it or being required to go into it in some way.

What types of data do you look at—records, email, phone, employee records?

Yes, that will give us an indication of what the individual is doing, what he’s thinking, and all of those things that will give us a picture of this guy and give us a determination of how we want to proceed. One of the things we want to get is either a premature or a provocative interview with the individual. There are certain things that you look at and a methodology. Some things are kind of static and unattainable…such as actions. Sure, the best prediction of future behavior is past behavior. A violent past or history of being violent is some indication. If he has no history of that, well that’s something that should be taken into consideration as well. Personality disorders are pretty static. But there are a couple of other areas that are dynamic and changeable, and you have to look at those very carefully—situation stress, going through a divorce, alcohol or substance abuse, etc. There’s quite a bit of information that you have to get a hold of to make a correct assessment.

In the digital age, is there more information available?

Yeah, there is. There is a wide range of data that’s out there—background information and so forth. To me, the trajectory that this is all on is what we refer to as data mining. There’s lots of data out there to be mined, and it’s just pulling it all together. Certainly the computer and the Internet are going to play a huge role in being able to go through all that information. It’s just a matter of being able to develop programs to filter out the information that you’re looking for. That’s the new wave…the future of criminal investigations. It’s playing a role now, and just going to play a bigger role as we go on.

You’re looking largely at retrospective information and trying to build some sort of predictive analysis of what this individual might do in the future. It seems like for some people, looking at the past and trying to predict the future would give a pretty accurate model. Are there exceptions that completely act out of the norm?

With severe violence—like mass murders—that is always true. Now you can have episodes of explosive rage, based on severe contextual problems that can happen. You can have a pretty rapid deterioration that can happen—with suicides, for example. One of the issues that we deal with is the relationship of mental disorder to crime. One of the issues that I talk about when I teach this is that crime or criminal behavior can actually cause mental illness or cause one to become suicidal. This is kind of a contextual factor.

For example, you can have someone who gets arrested or charged with a crime who up to that point had been perfectly normal. There was a guy named Jimmy Roland, for example. He was a manager at Tyson’s food. He was an up and coming young executive—married and had everything going for him. He got arrested with some others and charged federally for conspiring to smuggle illegal immigrants to work in the company plants in nine states. He was free on $100,000 bond, and he ended up committing suicide—because he was looking at a possibility of life in prison for this if he convicted on all these counts. So what can happen is you’ve got a guy who’s functioning pretty normally and then suddenly becomes violent. And that devolutionary process can happen pretty quickly.

Another example, is you can have someone who gets drunk at a party and drives home and inadvertently kills someone on the drive home and they’re charged with vehicular homicide and then they end up killing themselves because they can’t deal with the situation. So you can have people who deteriorate very quickly and can become violent or have explosive rage. But those are isolated cases. What I was talking about before is someone coming in and committing mass murder. That sort of sudden snapping and breaking just really doesn’t happen. But even in the other, there’s generally some sort of precipitating stress where we’re back looking at these contextual factors.

When you talk about the difference between predicting someone’s future behavior, vs. a case where maybe you don’t know who the person is, but are looking at all the evidence and trying to build a profile of who they might be—what are the differences in the processes and levels of accuracy for each of those approaches?

Obviously, the more information we have, the more valid the prediction can be, and the less evidence we have, the less valid it can be. There’s certainly lots of room for error when you begin to have not too much information. But there’s certain things that we know and begin to rely more on actuarial predictions or things we know based on empirical data.

For example, say with anonymous letter writers—in general, even though they may be very angry and the threat is there, the vast majority of anonymous letter writers don’t act on this. The letter itself is sort of venting and they feel better when they write it. If we just have an anonymous letter by itself, that doesn’t really bother us too much.

You have to just evaluate the evidence that you have and filter it through all those things you know and make the best call you can.