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Center for Personal Protection & Safety - CPPS The Center for Personal Protection & Safety (CPPS) is a leading developer and provider of customized training and consultation solutions.

Partnering with our clients, we empower individuals to be stakeholders in their personal safety.

10/05/2026

If you're detained by a foreign government, there's one thing worth saying, and one thing worth repeating: I need to speak with my embassy.

Say it, repeat it, and keep saying it until it happens.

The reality is that the questions will keep coming, and then it's likely that the accusations will start. Every instinct will push you to explain, to argue, to prove you've done nothing wrong. That instinct is wrong. Every extra sentence gives someone another thread to pull, and the people across the table are trained to pull them.

Stay calm. Stay polite. Being difficult won't help, and being rude can hurt. Just keep returning to the same request until your embassy is in the room.

It's simple advice, but under real pressure, with adrenaline running and no idea how long you'll be held, it's one of the hardest things to actually do.

Knowing what to do and actually doing it is exactly why our Foreign Detention & Captivity Management Workshop was built. One day of facilitated discussion, real case studies, and scenario-based exercises on recognizing surveillance, navigating questioning and detention, managing information under coercion, and making sound decisions when the stakes are high and the information is thin.

Learn more here: https://www.cpps.com/advanced-high-risk-travel-workshop/

09/29/2026

A door ripped off its hinges was just one of the early warning signs.

Early indicators rarely announce themselves as warning signs. They look like intensity, or jealousy, or a bad day. The reality only becomes clear later, when you can see the pattern.

This incident started when Jessica Weber went to the gym in her apartment complex. Her husband was at work, and she didn't tell him where she was going or that she didn't have her phone.

He called and texted her, but she didn't respond.

By the time she came back from the gym, the front door to the apartment was off the hinges. He'd broken it down, convinced she was hiding something, trying to catch her at whatever he imagined she was doing.

Jessica, our Operations and Training Manager, is sharing her story so others can recognize concerning behavior before a major violent incident.

09/28/2026

Most of the case studies we point to belong to other organizations. This one belongs to one of our team members, and she chose to share it so that others might recognize sooner what she couldn't name at the time.

Jessica Weber, our Operations and Training Manager, was 19 when she met her ex-husband. They were friends for about a year, married 30 days after they started dating, and Jessica was pregnant three months after that.

The beginning felt like a fairytale. He was hilarious and her best friend. There were expensive gifts, vacations, a beautiful house, brand-new cars. She didn't have a word for it in 2005, but she experienced what we now refer to as love bombing.

Four months into the marriage, the first violent incident happened. Jessica took the blame and apologized. She told herself that next time would be different. Next time she wouldn't be the problem.

Years and several other documented incidents later, her ex-husband was the perpetrator in an active shooter event.

This is the first in a series of conversations with Jessica as she tells her own story. She works through what the warning signs looked like from inside the relationship, how the pathway to violence unfolds, and where an employer fits into any of it.

09/25/2026

What do poisoned water, the pathway to violence, and insider threat have in common? They all start with a grievance.

At a utility company, an insider with authorized access began threatening to poison the water system. It wasn't random. It was the end of a journey that included a grievance, escalating behavior, and a decision to cause harm. The warning signs existed. What didn't exist was a single team with visibility across all of them.

That's the gap most organizations still have.

September is National Insider Threat Awareness Month, and the picture most people carry of insider threat is too narrow. It isn't just a government contractor stealing classified files. An insider is anyone with authorized access to your people, systems, or information, and the harm can be physical, operational, or reputational, not only digital.

Here's the part that gets missed. Insider threat is behavioral before it's operational. A grievance forms. Behavior escalates. Boundaries get tested. The split toward one outcome or another comes late, long after the window for intervention first opened.

That's the case for a multidisciplinary threat management team. Not more surveillance. Just making sure that when the pieces of a concerning pattern already exist inside an organization, someone can connect them.

This blog breaks down what NITAM gets right, what it misses, and where organizations can start.

https://www.cpps.com/what-is-national-insider-threat-awareness-month/

09/23/2026

Our next Centerfold is going to be different.

This one will feature the first of several conversations with Jessica Weber, our Operations and Training Manager. She tells her own domestic violence story, a story that led to an active shooter situation.

Alongside Jameson Ritter, CTM, CPP, PSP, PCI, and Josh King, she works through what the warning signs looked like from inside the relationship, how the pathway to violence unfolds, and where an employer fits into any of it.

The beginning of her relationship with her ex-husband felt like a fairytale. Expensive gifts, vacations, a beautiful house, brand-new cars. She didn't have language for it in 2005, but the term she'd learn years later was "love bombing."

Four months into the marriage, the first violent incident happened. Jessica took the blame and apologized. She told herself that next time would be different. Next time she wouldn't be the problem.

Years later, her ex-husband was the perpetrator in an active shooter event.

It's on the way in tomorrow's Centerfold. If you're not subscribed yet, follow this link: https://www.cpps.com/newsletter-subscribe/

09/18/2026

September is National Insider Threat Awareness Month, and we're talking about the part of insider threat that gets overlooked.

Ask most people to picture an insider threat, and they'll describe someone stealing data on their way out the door. Actions like cyber activity, unusual logins, and access to restricted files. Those are real insider threats, but they don't illustrate the whole picture.

The other risks are behavioral, and they look a lot like the pathway to violence.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that the first 75% to 80% of an insider's journey mirrors the same escalation we see on the workplace violence side. The progression starts when a grievance forms. The behavior then escalates and boundaries get tested. Then, at some point, the person reaches a decision. One path leads to stealing data or sabotage. Another leads to violence. The warning signs leading up to that fork are nearly identical.

We've watched it play out. A utility whose water systems were being poisoned by someone on the inside. A manufacturing employee who ruined multi-million-dollar machines with intentionally wrong code, resulting in weeks of lost production. In each case, the concerning behavior showed up long before the act, often in more than one place at once.

Here's what this means in practice. If your insider threat program lives entirely inside IT and your workplace violence process lives entirely inside HR or security, each team works without all the facts. Security sees the probing. HR sees the disciplinary pattern. Cyber sees the leakage. Nobody connects the behaviors unless someone builds a table where they all sit down together.

That's the case for a multidisciplinary threat management team. All under one roof with a wider set of stakeholders looking at the same behavior from different angles.

CISA released the 2026 edition of its Insider Threat Mitigation Guide on September 9th, and it makes the same point. Insider risk sits at the intersection of security, HR, legal, and the business, not solely in the SOC. It's a strong, free resource for any organization building or maturing a program.

Read it here: www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-09/cisa-insider-threat-mitigation-guide-2026.pdf

09/09/2026

Some employment separations are harder than they need to be. Three mistakes are usually why.

In the final video of our safe termination series, Jameson Ritter breaks down the missteps that turn a difficult termination into a dangerous one.

Waiting too long to involve the threat management team, so the people who each hold one piece of the picture never connect the dots.

Treating security like theater, when its real job is to support the plan quietly and preserve dignity.

Ending the plan when the meeting ends, even though the risk window often opens right after.

The better approach is simple. Share information with the right people, plan based on behavior, protect dignity, and keep watching long enough to know what happens next.

It's part of a free Safe Termination Resource Center with videos, checklists, case studies, and planning tools for the teams who handle these decisions: https://www.cpps.com/safe-termination-resources/

09/08/2026

Violence is preventable.

Not all of it, and nobody can promise a perfect record. But the FBI's 2018 active shooter study put it plainly: predicting violence may be impossible, but preventing some attacks through threat assessment is not.

That same study found the average active shooter faced more than three separate stressors in the year before attacking, and showed four to five concerning behaviors people around them could see. Nobody just snaps. There's almost always a trail. BTAM is how you pick it up.

BTAM is a team-based process for spotting concerning behavior early, assessing the risk it carries, and stepping in. The goal is to de-escalate in a non-punitive way and reach someone in crisis before violence ever looks like a solution.

Building that capability takes ten pieces, but a few are worth digging into.

A multidisciplinary team matters because no one person sees the whole picture. Run every case through a security lens alone, or an HR lens alone, and you'll miss something.

Centralized reporting matters because early reporting saves lives. One clear way to raise a concern, and people who know what's worth reporting.

Active case management matters because assessment only identifies risk. Management is what changes the outcome. Match the intervention to the person, document it, and revisit it, because people change and so does the risk they carry.

If your organization has three or four of these in place, that's a starting line, not a failure.

https://www.cpps.com/building-blocks-effective-btam-program/

09/04/2026

When it comes to training, people remember the stories.

Anytime a trainer can tell a story, especially one that's relatable, the audience is more likely to retain that knowledge.

Retention leads to implementation.

As instructors focused on effectiveness, our team strives to engage audiences beyond lecturing. We tell stories and get people practicing concepts in hands-on environments.

Ultimately, we want people to be safe at work, and to do that, we need them to remember what we've taught... and be able to put it to use if necessary.

08/27/2026

Effective training begins the moment a person realizes the material is applicable... when the training clicks.

Before that click, they probably aren't engaged or interested in the training. But after the click? They're paying attention. The shift is where real learning begins, and the sooner you get there as a trainer, the greater the impact.

For response training, the mechanism behind that impact is exposure.

The first time someone goes through a real-world scenario can be rough. The topic is uncomfortable. Even a boardroom tabletop exercise feels like a lot. They're processing the discomfort as much as the content.

The next time someone goes through exposure training, a weapon doesn't rattle them the way it did. They tend to be calmer and less uncomfortable, and to start seeing the scenario through a broader lens.

Each repetition widens the lens a little more. What felt overwhelming becomes familiar, and that familiarity is what frees a person to actually think and respond rather than freeze.

Exposure training should be built to be repeated, not checked off once a year. Exposure is what turns knowledge into the kind of response that holds up under pressure.

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