KNOWN TO THE FBI

What's behind this common trope, and what, if anything, is the federal government doing to prevent mass shootings?

“The shooter was known to the FBI.”

This phrase, uttered countless times, has become a meme among those with enough independent thought to question the government’s complicity, or even their responsibility, for the barrage of mass shootings and other acts of violent extremism that have terrorized the American people in recent years. Most recently, on Wednesday, September 4, Americans reeled in the wake of another senseless tragedy at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. This mass shooting, which claimed 4 lives, was perpetrated by a boy who was only 14 years old.

The FBI was relatively quick to report that the alleged shooter was “on their radar” for making online threats to commit a school shooting in 2023. Several online tips were submitted to the FBI in response to the threats. The FBI opened an investigation and within 24 hours had located the suspect, 13-year-old Colt Gray, and interviewed both him and his father on the matter.  The father claimed that Colt did not have unsupervised access to any weapons, and Colt denied the allegations that he had made any threats at all. Because the threshold for probable cause had not been met, neither state nor local law enforcement were able to make an arrest in the matter. Instead, the school was alerted for continued monitoring of the suspect, a mitigation measure that clearly failed in a catastrophic fashion.  

FBI Press Release made shortly after the shooting at Apalachee High School on September 4, 2024.

This is where the DHS “Local Prevention Framework” comes into the picture. Part of the DHS Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), the Local Prevention Framework “seeks to prevent acts of targeted violence and terrorism by working with the whole of society to establish and expand local prevention frameworks. Through technical, financial, and educational assistance, CP3 supports local efforts that prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence and intervene with individuals who may be radicalizing, or have radicalized, to violence.” The programs that make up this framework are funded by the heavily criticized DHS Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Grant. (You can learn more about the DHS CP3 and TVTP Grant programs and why they are so heavily criticized in my Substack article here.) The overall goal of the prevention framework is to connect state and community resources with federal resources in order to identify problematic individuals and conduct interventions prior to that person committing an act of violence. When these systems fail, the outcome is often an immeasurable tragedy surrounded by a media circus. When these systems succeed (and they do succeed more often than you’d expect) no one ever knows.

Let’s take a look at a success story that you probably never heard about.

In January of 2024, I ran across a self-proclaimed “incel” who was threatening a specific girl who had rejected him along with her college campus in Alabama. His threats were so imminent that I decided to call a DHS Fusion Center, which takes tips from the public and routes them to the appropriate law enforcement channels. The next day I got a call from the FBI in Alabama. They had arrested Kenneth Hoover, age 26, less than 12 hours after I made my tip. Hoover was indicted by a grand jury in March and is currently being held pending trial. As the only known witness, my tip almost certainly prevented a violent action against a young woman, and possibly a mass shooting as well.

But I got lucky. The statements made by Hoover were specific enough to constitute illegal threats, which is a really high bar. He was also already “known to law enforcement” which helped them locate him and arrest him quickly. Finally, I got lucky because I knew about the Fusion Centers and how they operate. Frankly, at the time I decided to make that tip, I was not a fan of the DHS-managed Fusion Centers or the Countering Violent Extremism community as a whole. I believed at the time, and still do, that Fusion Centers represent an opportunity for the federal government to overstep their boundaries and expand their authority into state matters. I also strongly believe that the CVE community is thoroughly soiled with partisan bias, representing, at best, a waste of tax dollars, and at worst, a financially-incentivized complex with the end goal of censorship and an erosion of constitutional rights. It’s incredibly tempting to focus on the downsides and throw the baby out with the bath water, and yet, in the case of Hoover we were afforded a rare glimpse at the potential of such systems in preventing horrific acts of violence, and even mass shootings, when they function properly.

Unless you follow me on X/Twitter (and you should, do so here), you probably never heard about this situation because it did not end in violence. But if I hadn’t made that tip, people may have applied the same “known to the FBI”  trope to Kenneth Hoover in the same way they apply it to the Georgia school shooter today. Unfortunately, success stories don’t usually get picked up by mainstream accounts. This results in a sort of frequency bias, because people only hear about the cases that do result in violence and not about the ones that were stopped.

Far be it from me to praise the DHS Prevention Framework program as a success. In my opinion, the amount of overhaul needed to fix such programs and enable them to succeed more times than they fail is daunting. As they currently exist within the TVTP grant program, academic researchers and counter-terrorism experts abuse these programs to push out partisan narratives and to justify the expansion of surveillance and censorship capabilities of the US government. This end goal is prioritized over the end goal that most Americans would envision of such a program, which is simply stopping mass shootings and other acts of terrorist violence before they happen.

Are these programs worth saving? I guess it depends on the importance we assign to preventing just one mass shooting.  In my opinion, preventing even one is a major success that shouldn’t be trivialized or downplayed as a fluke. The fact of the matter is that these systems do have the potential to succeed, if only our law enforcement agencies would prioritize enforcing laws and preserving rights over furthering greedy political agendas.