Threat Management in a Municipal Setting

Please join the City of Bellevue and special guest speakers, Melissa Muir and Dr. Kate Schoeneman, for a presentation and discussion on Behavioral Threat Assessment.

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river, We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in” – Desmond Tutu

Every year, 2 million Americans are assaulted or threatened with injury at work. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, the cost of workplace toxicity in turnover alone is $223 billion. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can turn our people practices into prevention. There are ways for HR and risk professionals to go upstream to prevent and minimize these risks to our organizations – through behavioral threat assessment.

Behavioral threat assessment is a science-backed way to identify threats of targeted violence, to assess these threats, and to develop strategies to manage the risk. In this fast-paced, interactive session, Dr. Kate Schoeneman will first provide an overview of the psychological factors that play a role in workplace violence. She will then introduce core threat assessment and management concepts. Building on this, Melissa Muir will talk about ways to apply some of these concepts in practice in a municipal setting. Together they will use case studies to demonstrate the power of multidisciplinary teams to minimize the risks and improve the safety of our workplaces. You will gain helpful information and tools to apply in your own settings.

Guest Speakers

Kate Schoeneman, Ph.D., Chief Operational Psychologist

Dr. Kate Schoeneman is an operational psychologist with over 20 years of experience in clinical and forensic psychology, threat assessment and management, workplace violence prevention program development, case consultation, training, and research. She has worked in, created, and led behavioral analysis units and psychological consultation units within federal law enforcement agencies, to include the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Marshals Service. She has also designed and participated in multidisciplinary threat assessment and threat management teams at all levels of law enforcement and in the public, private, academic, and healthcare sectors.

Dr. Kate earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a specialization in forensic psychology from the University of Nebraska -- Lincoln. She has served on the Boards for the NW and DC Chapters of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals and has been involved in ATAP membership for 20 years.

Melissa Muir, Senior Threat Management Consultant

Melissa has been an HR professional for more than 25 years, in the U.S. Courts and most recently as the HR Director of her hometown of Shoreline. As an HR practitioner informed by threat assessment and management principles, she offers unique insight into strategies to bring safety and prevention upstream into our labor and employment practices. She is passionately committed to the health and safety of our organizations.

Through her work over the last decade with the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP), Melissa has trained thousands of people worldwide on bridging the gap between security and human resources and building meaningful multidisciplinary partnerships. She holds an MBA from the University of Washington and her law degree, with a focus on employment law and mediation, from the Seattle University School of Law.