ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Safety is on the mind of many parents in the community after police say a 14-year-old boy killed two students and two teachers in a mass shooting at a Georgia high school.

The suspect, 14-year-old Colt Gray, had apparently threatened to “shoot up” a school while online last year. Investigators in Georgia say they interviewed him and his father at the time but couldn’t substantiate the threat, so the case was closed.

In Monroe County, a situation like that would be handled differently. The Rochester Threat Advisory Committee, known as ROCTAC, tries to intervene when teens or adults appear to be heading down a violent path.

“We’re all here for the same cause, to prevent the next one. If at all we could, prevent the next one, and we will do anything we can,” says Monroe County Sheriff Todd Baxter.

ROCTAC is made up of nearly 30 different agencies who work together to determine if a person is a threat and what to do about it.

“Our goal is to screen it, intervene holistically, and get the person off ladders of targeted violence. It’s not a goal to make an arrest. That’s actually easy, someone threatening someone else in the community go out and make an arrest but we realize that’s not going to solve the problem,” Baxter said.

Since its inception four years ago, ROCTAC has intervened to help 177 people in the community.

“The science is there to show us the ideation, the research they’re doing, the attempt to get weapons, the research they might’ve done ahead of time to test the waters on their idea, as a solution to this problem because in their mind. The solution to their problem is violence,” Baxter says.

The goal of ROCTAC is to give them other solutions, such as mental health help, school resources, and other interventions.

In Georgia, it was the FBI that initially noticed the threat and referred it to the sheriff’s office for further review. That sheriff’s office found no evidence of a crime. However, Sheriff Baxter says his office wouldn’t have stopped there.

“When they hand it off to us, they’re handing it off to ROCTAC, not just the sheriffs office. The mental health, the law-enforcement, all these other entities that are here to help,” he says.

ROCTAC has become a national model for how to assess and deal with threats of mass violence. After the Tops shooting in Buffalo, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office began a similar program there. The Department of Justice has also released a book on domestic terrorism and how to combat it, which directly references the ROCTAC program as an example of what other communities should consider.

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