Nobody Has to Die Today: How Professionals Prevent Targeted and Mass Violence

Nobody Has to Die Today: How Professionals Prevent Targeted and Mass Violence examines the work of professionals who intervene before a threatened act of violence becomes a tragedy. Through interviews with experienced threat assessment and management practitioners, John Tsukayama is gathering accounts of how they recognize concerning behavior, assess incomplete information, and work with others to prevent harm. The book asks a practical question: How do professionals help change the course of a situation in which someone may be moving toward violence?

Each chapter is planned around a practitioner’s experience, connecting the cases they have handled with the lessons they have learned. Interviews explore their early work, difficult decisions, and changes in their thinking over time. Attention goes beyond assessing a threat to the sustained work of managing a situation: building trust, coordinating assistance, setting boundaries, and adapting as circumstances change. These accounts will examine uncertainty and setbacks alongside successful interventions, with appropriate care for confidentiality.

John brings to the project twenty-six years of investigative experience, his own work in threat assessment and management, and years of teaching the subject. His approach combines careful interviewing with close examination of how practitioners reached their judgments and what followed from their decisions. By bringing together experiences from different professional settings and countries, the book seeks to make practical knowledge more accessible while recognizing the research, training, and established methods on which the field rests.

The book is intended for both practitioners and the wider public. For those entering or already working in the field, it will offer cases that encourage reflection and inform professional judgment. For other readers, it will explain a discipline whose accomplishments often receive little attention because the feared violence never occurs. At its heart is the work of protecting people while helping those in crisis find a way forward—a demanding effort grounded in the possibility that nobody has to die today.