MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems

MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems is an American company that devises and administers methods for assessing and screening threats to public figures. It was founded in 1980 by Gavin de Becker & Associates. It has gained wide use by hundreds of law enforcement agencies, universities, schools, and large corporations^{[citation needed]}.

Walt Risler of Indiana University assisted in the development of the company. Robert Martin, the founding commander of the Los Angeles Police Department Threat Management Unit, now a Managing Principal with Gavin de Becker Inc., heads up the MOSAIC Threat Assessment Unit.

In an article on the method, psychologist Hill Walker of the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior told Wired, "There are some serious validity issues here, some reputation-ruining implications." ^[1] Responding to claims that the program amounts to profiling, de Becker replied, "Mosaic-2000 is the opposite of profiling in that it is always applied to an actual known individual, and it always explores actual behavior and circumstance. Mosaic-2000 does not explore age, appearance, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic level, or any other demographic feature; profiling almost always does."^[2]

Professor Laurence Steinberg also questioned the need and use of the software for predicting violence:

In the late 1990's, the number of school-age children who died from homicide averaged around 2,500 a year. But fewer than half of 1 percent of them were killed in or around schools. Let's say, for argument's sake, that each of these incidents involved a student perpetrator. In a nation of 90,000 schools, trying to pick out the dozen or so students a year who might commit murder is like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Kansas.^[3]

De Becker responded, "It is not predictive and doesn't claim to be scientific."^[4]

References

External links

• MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems website

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