Whether it manifests as physical assaults, verbal abuse, harassment, or acts of aggression, workplace violence poses a significant threat that transcends industry boundaries. While certain industries, such as healthcare, law enforcement, and retail, may face higher risks due to the nature of their work, no sector is immune to the potential for violence in the workplace.

Listen to Second Sight’s very own Nathan Meehan on the Law Enforcement Analysis Podcasts Channel. LEAPodcasts aims to promote the law enforcement analysis profession by releasing episodes and resources that help people better understand the world of law enforcement analysis and expand their careers. In the podcast, his story is told in three parts: how he became an analyst, what he did as an analyst, and what he did afterwards that led to his work at Second Sight.

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.

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.

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.

Are there training programs that focus on proactive safety and threat recognition for law enforcement and security professionals? We built our training around a structured, four-step observation process, not intuition or guesswork, that equips law enforcement, security, and safety professionals to recognize meaningful behavioral deviations and make defensible decisions before situations escalate.

Preventing a mass attack is an achievable goal. The FBI's 2025 data shows nearly 68% of active shooter incidents involved identifiable planning and preparation beforehand, and for the first time, the Bureau documented cases where observation and reporting likely prevented an attack. We explain "left of boom," and why structured, prevention-focused observation, not tactical response training, is what gives law enforcement, security, and workplace personnel the chance to intervene before an incident begins.

There are a number of police responses to persons with mental illness (PMI) that are designed to make encounters with them less dangerous for everyone involved. These include police and mental health collaborations and police-specific responses. In this post, we will describe these approaches as well as provide additional resources on the various approaches. We will also introduce active threat assessment, integration of this approach into police training can teach officers how to differentiate between threatening and non-threatening individuals and situations

Police tactical units are being increasingly used to address violent crime and homicides in the United States. There are a variety of police tactical units that target specific places and people, ideally so that officers can focus on the most dangerous individuals. Some strategies are proactive and can enhance an officer’s awareness regarding a certain place or person in advance, while other strategies help an officer assess a situation in real-time. Active threat assessment training is one way to enhance police tactical units, as it can be integrated as an additional layer of officer decision-making in terms of focusing on the most dangerous offenders.

The concept of ‘de-escalation’ is becoming more prominent among law enforcement professionals, but the term still means different things to different people. Generally, de-escalation techniques focus on reducing the immediacy of threat in potentially volatile encounters, ideally so that officers can resolve incidents without using force. However, it can sometimes be difficult to know when it is appropriate to de-escalate versus when doing so might be unsafe. Thankfully, threat assessment and other techniques can be utilized to help an officer estimate the risk to his safety. This post outlines the common de-escalation techniques used in law enforcement today and what we know about them.

One of our trainees, monitoring a camera feed at a protest of 300 to 400 people, picked out a single individual whose posture, clothing, and movement didn't fit the crowd around him, and it led to a confirmed handgun. We walk through exactly how that cluster of behaviors was read in real time, and why the same skill applies just as directly to a hospital security desk, a school hallway camera, or a corporate operations center.

There are a number of training approaches recommended to heal police-community tensions, including procedural justice, implicit bias, de-escalation, and CIT. These approaches involve assessment, decision-making, and communication. In the second of this two-part series, we focus on de-escalation and crisis intervention training.

Second Sight Training Systems is excited to announce that we have been approved as a Preferred Provider by ASIS International. ASIS certified security professionals can to use our courses to meet continuing education requirements for the APP, CPP, PCI, and PSP Security Certifications.