Rhode Island’s Warning: Decades of Collapse Inside the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU)
Republished with permission from AbleChild.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) was created so that law enforcement could explain violent behavior and hopefully prevent violence in American cities, yet as mass shootings multiply and more Americans, especially children, are prescribed powerful psychiatric mind-altering drug cocktails, things aren’t getting better and the public might begin to wonder about the competency of the BAU.
The public almost never is made aware of what the BAU actually does and almost no one has dared to ask a simple question: is this “behavioral science” system utilized by the BAU operating on rules frozen in the Janet Reno era and quietly steered by the pharmaceutical and behavioral health industries? If so, why? The fact that the BAU’s core doctrine has not been modified in decades in order to deal with today’s increased psychiatric challenges, where psychotropic drugs, pharma-funded advocacy, and mass shootings now overlap, is the warning light. The training is steered to work to obtain more clients for big pharma and manage their failed treatments.
The core playbook that guides the BAU work was built in the 1980s and 1990s, then hardened into manuals and training materials when Janet Reno was Attorney General, after crises like Ruby Ridge and Waco. Those reforms focused on how to handle sieges, standoffs, serial offenders, and how to blend negotiation with tactical decisions, but the manual never squarely addressed the rise of the psycho-pharmaceutical industry, the explosion of psychotropic prescribing, or how “treatment” decisions and drug cocktails might intersect with later acts of extreme violence.
As a result, the BAU is still operating from a Reno-era point of view. The BAU needs to address a country where mass shootings and complex psychiatric regimens overlap, and where no serious doctrinal update has forced the unit to map connections between prescribers, medications, and killers. The nation can no longer hide the fact that too many of today’s killers have been prescribed psychiatric drugs – and too often are on cocktails of prescribed mind-altering drugs at the time of committing the crime.
The Brown University attack made the cracks in the way the FBI handles mass shootings impossible to ignore. It’s ironic that the federal response was led by FBI Boston’s Special Agent in Charge, Ted E. Docks, a former pharmaceutical salesman, who now is responsible for working with the BAU attached to the Boston Field Office, which covers both Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Days after the attack, officials were still offering only a vague description of a “masked individual in dark clothing,” even though multiple students saw the gunman at close range and media reports captured more detailed observations.
And the same Boston leadership has been the public face on the separate killing of an MIT fusion scientist in nearby Brookline, yet rather than confront the fact that a major fusion research university and a leading fusion scientist in the same region were both shot, law enforcement leaned on a homeless man’s theory and the tip the homeless witness later posted on Reddit, a crime investigation that does not seem to emphasize the strategic importance of Brown and MIT’s fusion work, nor its importance to the nation’s energy needs and goals.
It is insulting to the public to suggest that a homeless witness and a social media tip can neatly explain away the need to connect these two seemingly unrelated events, and it invites international bad actors to test how easily crime scenes and narratives can be manipulated when those in charge refuse to see past the most convenient story.
In Tennessee, after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, law enforcement admitted the attacker was under a doctor’s care for an emotional disorder, yet it also explained that it knew almost nothing about that care, no list of drugs, no prescriber’s name, no clear timeline of drug treatment changes. Public debate swung quickly to guns and identity, while detailed questions about the psychiatrist and the exact medications involved remained in the shadows.
This is what makes Tennessee’s new law so important. In a landmark move, lawmakers there passed a statute requiring the state to investigate psychiatric drug use in mass shooters, including testing for therapeutic levels of psychiatric drugs after death so the role medication may play can be studied. The Rhode Island failures draw our attention to the dangers of a failed BAU within the FBI.
AbleChild, a long-standing child-advocacy organization that has spent decades exposing over-prescribing of psychiatric drugs and data failures, took the lead on this legislative reform and is now pressing for similar legislation in Wyoming and other states, forcing open the door that federal behavioral systems, like the BAU, have kept closed.
When AbleChild pushed to keep the pharmaceutical and behavioral health industry, especially the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), from controlling how first responders are trained in Tennessee, the response showed how tightly those industries are persuaded by the behavioral health system. Language that would have blocked NAMI and large behavioral health providers from dominating law enforcement training was stripped from the proposed legislation, with officials arguing that officers need guidance from the psycho/pharma industry and that cutting out these special interest organizations would deny law enforcement the support it needs. The result is that the same industry whose products and practices should be under the microscope remains in charge of educating law enforcement about the role of behavioral health in mass violence.. It literally is the Fox watching the hen house.
Tennessee’s own documents make the structure plain. Its Crisis Intervention Team program (CIT), the flagship model for police response to people in crisis, explicitly partners with NAMI Tennessee and state mental health agencies to shape curricula. NAMI, which has a long history of heavy pharmaceutical funding, presents medication as the standard, necessary solution, while downplaying serious side effects and the dangers of aggressive polypharmacy.
Officers are taught to view treatment as an incontrovertible necessity and to funnel those in crisis into drug-heavy systems, while no one in law enforcement are instructed by these behavioral health advisors to inquire about whether the known psychiatric drugs of the perpetrator may have played a role in the violent behavior. At a minimum one would expect law enforcement to document the psychiatric drugs, but if it is not part of the education program how would law enforcement even know to ask?
Maine’s worst mass shooting completes the picture. Months before Robert Card killed 18 people in Lewiston, the Army Sargent was removed from his military base and ordered by command to undergo a mental health evaluation. Card was reportedly exhibiting threatening behavior and reports of hearing voices. Yet during the manhunt and its aftermath, the details of Card’s psychiatric treatment, the doctor’s name, what drugs were prescribed, what warnings were given, were never given the consideration that was required in Card’s case, as it was later revealed that Card suffered brain damage from his military service.
In one of the most revealing moments, the commissioner of public safety, Michael Sauschuck proclaimed in defense of psychiatry in the Saturday, October 28, 2023 press conference:
“This is incredible important for us to say, I find myself saying this on a regular basis, just because there appears to be a mental health nexus to this scenario, the vast, vast, vast majority of people, the vast majority of people with a mental health diagnosis will never hurt anybody, they won’t hurt themselves, and are not a danger to the community. Based on percentages alone, there are a bunch of folks in here that have a mental health diagnosis. I know law enforcement officers, that have a mental health diagnosis that doesn’t mean they are a danger to their community. We certainly have people who reach that crisis level where that does occur and we deal with those folks on a regular basis sometimes through involuntary, forcible commitments…right, and sometimes not, sometimes there are different levels of that mental health system, that’s a whole different conversation that can be quite lengthy, and I can tell you that law enforcement has been involved at this point for decades, and heavily involved the last 15 years or so.”
The FBI’s BAU unit and law enforcement agencies throughout the United States need to be educated about the role of mental illness and prescription drugging in all mass shootings. Law enforcement needs to be able to ask the appropriate questions like what psychiatrists and other medical practitioners treated the perpetrator in the months and years leading up to the crime, which specific psychiatric drugs and doses were prescribed, raised, lowered, or stopped, and why, which warnings about agitation, suicidality, violence, or withdrawal were ignored or minimized, which clinicians or programs had financial or institutional ties to drug makers or advocacy groups that might shape its choices.
Yet the same NAMI-style organizations, with documented pharmaceutical backing, are tasked with and paid well to train many of the police and task forces that feed information to federal behavioral units, so by the time a case reaches the BAU the assumption is that medication-heavy treatment is good and questioning that model leads to stigma or misinformation.
The core argument is stark. The FBI’s behavioral rules were written for another era and have not been updated for a world soaked in psychotropic drugs and pharma funded advocacy, corporations and behavioral health interests sit inside the training rooms and advisory circles that shape what local law enforcement and federal agents know about mental health, psychiatric drugs and violence.
When mass shootings occur, officials dissect politics, guns, identity, online activity, ideology, but rarely provide the public with a complete, honest account of the psychiatrists, the prescriptions, and the toxicology that might show how drug treatment contributed to the violent behavior.
Until the Reno-era manuals are updated to address a world where pharmaceutical and behavioral health power brokers reach deep into policing and violence prevention, and until reforms like Tennessee’s drug-testing law is treated as the model rather than an outlier, no one should mistake the BAU’s silence on these questions for science, or its comfort with the psych/pharma industry for public safety. In fact, it’s a scandal that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency still isn’t taking the role of psychiatric drugs in violence seriously. The nation deserves better.
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AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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