NCJ Number
217407
Journal
FBI: Law Enforcement Bulletin Volume: 76 Issue: 2 Dated: February 2007 Pages: 6-9
Date Published
February 2007
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This article describes the development, design, and implementation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Communicated Threat Assessment Database (CTAD).
Abstract
The CTAD was developed as the primary repository for all communicated threats and other criminally oriented communications (COCs) received by the FBI. The CTAD was implemented by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit-1 (BAU-1) of the Critical Incident Response Group, which is a component of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy. The BAU-1 focuses on counterterrorism, threat assessment, and other forensic linguistic services. All the communicated threats and COCs received at the FBI are entered into CTAD and analyzed for their threat potential and authorship. CTAD was developed in the early 2000s as a way of effectively dealing with the large increase in threatening communications and COCs received by the BAU-1 unit since the mid-1990s. The BAU-1 developed the CTAD to serve as an extensive search engine capable of categorizing and classifying communications as well as providing report-writing capabilities. The database is linguistically and behaviorally oriented in order to allow for the cross-checking of behavioral markers within the text and to enable the assessment of the potential threat. The CTAD works by dividing the communications, which range from several sentences to 20 or more pages each, into 24 categories with the overall theme of the communication denoting the primary and secondary categories selected. The CTAD has four different sections - Administrative, Case Facts, Linguistic Profile, and Case Facts Confirmed – and an important search component. Future plans for the CTAD include continual upgrades to improve its effectiveness. Examples of specific cases aided by the CTAD are offered along with a glossary of terms used in the article. Endnotes