Good training can be hard to find. Before investing in a training program, organizations have to be sure that it will be an effective and efficient use of resources. This is especially true when agencies oftentimes have to budget for multiple costs – paying instructors, trainees, and insurance coverage. IADLEST’s National Certification Program can serve as a vehicle to identify good training. We recently renewed the certification for our online Threat Awareness for Law Enforcement Program, and we wanted to tell you more about what this means for you.

An updated guide to threat assessment approaches for law enforcement, this guide is meant to define, provide resources, and also help you identify threat assessment training and resources that might help you, your officers, or your community.

An updated guide to threat and risk assessment approaches for security professionals, this guide is meant to define, provide resources, and help you identify threat assessment training and resources that might help you and your personnel.

In the pursuit of women's self-defense, the power of situational awareness cannot be overstated. By identifying risky situations and learning how to reduce appeal to potential offenders, women can empower themselves to navigate their surroundings confidently. With situational awareness, you can learn to recognize the warning signs of a potential threat, which allows you to take preventive measures to keep yourself safe. Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, this concept is a cornerstone of women’s self-defense strategies. This post offers practical guidance on how to leverage situational awareness to reduce your vulnerability to potential offenders and keep yourself safe.

In this post, we wanted to share the feedback from attendees at a series of instructor-led deliveries conducted by the Second Sight Team to employees of Benton County, Oregon, in April 2023. We also describe the benefits and ways of getting situational awareness training in the workplace.

Effective communication plays a pivotal role in navigating complex interactions in law enforcement or in any investigatory setting. While there is no universal formula for communicating with people, becoming a better listener is an essential communication skill that applies to nearly every interaction. In this post, we discuss what active listening is and how it can help you be more effective in your job.

Second Sight will be holding its first webinar on August 2, 2023 at 12pm Eastern. You can meet the Second Sight Team at this event and learn about recent updates to our 1-hour Situational Awareness for Safety class, ILT, and online course logistics.

While you can never 100% prevent a victimization from happening, there are things you can do to reduce your victimization risk. You can make it harder for someone to target you. Situational awareness can help you anticipate potential threats in your environment, determine when something doesn’t look right, and make informed decisions about how to respond. In this post, we will explain the four benefits of situational awareness and introduce you to Situational Awareness for Safety, our updated course on the topic.

Picking out the right training is very important to protect yourself from liability and ensure that you are actually proficient at the skills that you are trained on. When it comes to developing effective training, using a formalized instructional design process is critical to ensure that training delivery methods are appropriate and make sense. At Second Sight, all of our advanced online training classes follow this process. In this post, we discuss the instructional design process and what it means for you when choosing courses for your personnel.

During an interview, the way an investigator communicates is essential to helping meet interview goals. Other than establishing rapport and treating people with respect and decency, there is no single "best" interview technique. In this post, we share some information and resources on 12 key interview techniques that can help anyone improve their communication skills and collect more information inside and outside of the booth.

Police tactical units are increasingly being used to address violent crime and homicides, particularly in major cities. Many police tactical units use place-based policing strategies, such as hot spot policing and third-party policing, that focus on proactively targeting places where crime is highly concentrated. These strategies are data-driven and use information from past crimes to predict and prepare for potential future incidents.

Here at Second Sight, we enjoy giving back to our community. As part of this effort, we partner with the Zone 5 Police Training Academy in upstate New York to provide free training on active threat assessment. Our program is now a permanent part of their curriculum, and we’d like to share it with you too. In this post, we will discuss a bit more about the training and introduce you to our online version of the course.

Violent acts on school property pose serious risks to our nation’s most vulnerable, presenting very real concerns for those tasked with keeping our schools safe. Many of these attacks are pre-planned and are often preceded by multiple warning signs. School behavioral threat assessment can help identify these warning signs so that necessary action can be taken to prevent tragedies from occurring. In this post, we describe the benefits of school behavioral threat assessment and will introduce you to an evidence-based model program that you can adapt for your jurisdiction.

Lethal and non-lethal violent acts on school property are becoming more and more common, ranging from the most horrific shooting events to schoolyard fights. In this post, we will describe school threat assessment and the challenges associated with school safety. Also included are resources on critical topics. Lastly, we describe how active threat assessment and situational awareness training can help school personnel prevent violence.

The type of threat assessment you need may vary based on the type of problem you are trying to solve. In this post, we share various research and resources related to threat assessment training and our own active threat assessment methodology.

Over the years, we have thoroughly appreciated the helpful feedback received from our trainees. We take this feedback seriously and have made critical updates to enhance our online courses. These updates focus on improving course delivery and quality of course content to make the material more engaging and to improve learning outcomes. These updates include 1) More videos to cater to different learning styles, 2) Upgrades to the course interface and navigation, and 3) Improved audio and video quality.

Active threat assessment is an observation methodology that can help you identify threatening individuals or groups who require immediate attention while dismissing people who don’t present a true threat. This method involves systematic observations, recognizing people who deviate from the pattern of consistent behavior, and identifying persons of interest (POI) who warrant further investigation. This methodology can also help you assess threat indicators, which can help you conduct safe and effective interdictions with POIs when necessary.

As the prevalence of active shooter incidents continues to increase, the need for active shooter prevention and preparedness is becoming more relevant. There are a number of things that organizations can do to prepare for and respond to these types of incidents. Some are proactive and focus on active shooter prevention, while others are short-term and help officers better respond to these incidents. For example, threat assessment can be used to identify different threats that come up at different points in time. In this post, we explain some of these options and help you find resources that might help you.