Officer aims to improve student safety
When former USC graduate student David Jonathan Brown was charged with fatally stabbing neuroscience professor Bosco Tjan in the Seeley G. Mudd Building in December 2016, the availability of safety resources on campus came into question.
In response to this incident, the University established the Office of Campus Wellness and Crisis Intervention and then hired its first ever Chief Threat Assessment Officer, Patrick Prince, to increase safety resources for USC students and staff in Fall 2017.
Prince’s department in the office helps with the creation of the cardinal folder, a document containing all of the emergency response information that will be disclosed to faculty, students and staff before the end of the year. Creating the cardinal folder forces the University to review all of the emergency response team contact information for accuracy.
“We are gathering our data, putting it in one place and making it accessible to everybody in the University,” Prince said.
Once it is updated, the information will be placed in an official document for the USC community.
According Varun Soni, vice provost of campus wellness and crisis intervention, Prince has been playing a critical role in assessing threats outside of the University and is a significant addition to the Office of Campus Wellness and Crisis Intervention.
“[Prince] was hired because he is a national leader in threat assessment and has worked nearly 2,000 cases of workplace violence in his career,” Soni said. “He also helped build the threat assessment protocols for the California State University system, the largest university system in the United States.”
Working at USC is like returning home for Prince. Born and raised in California, Prince comes from a long legacy at USC — both his parents attended the school, and his son is a recent graduate.
Prince said his job here at USC is to identify potential violence before it occurs. By identifying sources of harm, Prince said it is easier to intervene into these incidents in a meaningful way.
“We know that violence, especially lethal violence in university or workplace venues, is never sudden,” Prince said. “It’s never unexpected. There are always opportunities to identify.”
Prince determines these targets of violence by working with different units within the University to identify behaviors of concern and then provide ways that reduce the risk of the concerned behavior. Prince said he collaborates with representatives from human resources and legal counsel, and professionals from the USC Center for Work and Family Life.
One of Prince’s goals as a chief threat assessment officer for the Office of Campus Wellness and Crisis Intervention is to leave behind a self-sustaining office. By establishing relationships with the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Rossier School of Education, Prince has been training graduate students interested in threat assessment to think like him and his peers when dealing with threatening situations.
One such graduate student is Benjamin Kallin, an intern at the Office of Campus Wellness and Crisis Intervention. Working alongside Prince has provided Kallin with the opportunity to track case management data and behavioral threat assessments.
Additionally, Kallin is developing a training curriculum for the office to identify “high risk areas” on the internet when establishing a presence on social media. This program will have people comb through and reduce the information and data on the internet.
“[The curriculum is a] way to coach people on going through all of their information and data that’s out there, and ways to reduce it going forward,” Kallin said.
Kallin said that working with Prince has inspired him to continue pursuing his graduate degree in public administration and social work.
“It has completely changed my trajectory, and I can’t see myself doing anything else,” Kallin said. “It just speaks to Patrick and his ability to get people interested in this field.”