RECAP: NCITE Webinar with John Picarelli

On May 3, NCITE hosted a webinar with John Picarelli, Ph.D., director for targeted violence and terrorism prevention for the Counterterrorism Directorate of the National Security Council.

Watch the full discussion below.

Key Takeaways

• People in the government like Picarelli and his colleagues are working to further incorporate the public health approach to prevention into policy. He advocated for following the four-stage model that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses. “I think we’ve done a really good job with the first three steps, not to say we’re done because it’s an enduring issue ... and I think where we really need to work right now is the fourth step,” he said.
  • Step 1: Define the problem by asking questions such as, What is targeted violence and what is terrorism? What are we looking at? And what is the process that brings people to this form of violence?
  • Step 2: Understand the why, in this case, by looking at risk and protective factors. “What we’ve seen for year after year after year is the research continues to march forward, which is enheartening,” Picarelli said.
  • Step 3: Understand how to approach the problem now that we can understand it. “We’ve seen a ramping up of a variety of initiatives ... We’re talking constantly with homeland security advisors at state levels and with others, and they are preventing targeted violence and terrorism,” he said.
  • Step 4: Scale the initiatives. This should be a priority moving forward, Picarelli said. But it's challenging to do so “with limited resources and with a mental health crisis ongoing in this country and with a lot of competing issues facing state and local mayors and governors and law enforcement.”

• Privacy and civil rights have been incorporated into every step of the public health approach. “Privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties really have to be, not part of the prevention mission. They have to be what drives the prevention mission,” he said.
  
  
• The importance of this approach is highlighted by a complex threat landscape: hate-fueled narratives driving terrorism and targeted violence, perpetrators motivated to violence for a variety of ideological and non-ideological reasons, the use of social media and the internet to disseminate threats, and continuing international concerns.
  
  
• Counterterrorism resources aren’t increasing, which makes prevention all the more important. Picarelli said, “Really, what we’re dealing with aligns very well for advocation to say, ‘Prevention really needs to be looked at as a serious toolkit to deal with all this,’” as prevention can lessen the burden on law enforcement and others tasked with responding to threats and attacks.
  
  
• Picarelli’s office relies on academia to create better policy. “I’ve viewed my role as trying to help sharpen the policy recommendations of really good research and help policymakers better articulate research questions that can be then interrogated by academics,” he said.