The two Fairfax County police units that help look into threats to public officials and community members investigated or were consulted on over 800 threat cases in 2025, Police Chief Kevin Davis told WTOP.
The agency in the Northern Virginia suburb has a full-time Threat Assessment Management Team, a squad of detectives solely responsible for investigating threats. The group, Davis said, partners with the Criminal Intelligence Unit.
“Our society now, whether we like it or not, demands that law enforcement have a full-time dedication to threat assessment, and that’s something that’s very new,” Davis said.
The threats are typically not crimes, Davis said. Instead, they’re First Amendment-protected speech aimed at an elected official, community leader, someone in the business or health care communities.
The messages most commonly are sent via email, Davis said, but sometimes are delivered in written form.
“We know based on what the threat looks like that it’s not a criminal threat, but it’s a threatening correspondence,” Davis said.
In response to such cases, officers knock on doors with the help of mental health clinicians and officers who are trained in crisis intervention. During the interaction, Davis said officers can determine “if that person either wants or is in … need of mental or behavioral health assistance.”
“Law enforcement can’t afford to ignore it anymore and say, ‘Well, a crime hasn’t been committed yet,’” Davis said. “That’s the old-school way police across the country would deal with some of these First Amendment-protected threatening communication efforts. And we would say, I’m paraphrasing, ‘Call us when a crime occurs.’ Well, we’re better than that. We’re bigger than that, and we need to position ourselves in a way to mitigate threats.”
Separately, Davis said Virginia implemented a policy in 2020 that allows police departments in the state to temporarily recover guns that are in the homes where someone is experiencing a mental or behavioral health crisis, or where “aggravated assaults or worse are likely to occur.”
In the past five-odd years, Fairfax County police have been involved in 463 such emergency substantial risk order cases.
“The crisis may or may not be criminal in nature, and a lot of times it’s not a criminal threat, but it’s a threat — that there’s someone who’s unstable in this home who has access to firearms,” Davis said.