Dechefr – Rapid, Digital Assessment of Threatening Communications

Leverage the power of AI and psycholinguistics to rapidly assess the threat level of written or transcribed communications. Created by Mind Intelligence Lab, Dechefr is a structured professional judgment tool that constructs a psychological profile to identify potential risk of targeted violence.

Communicated threats, whether verbal or written, are a pervasive feature of today’s threat landscape. Distinguishing between communications that signal a potential intent to mobilize toward violence and those that reflect disturbing or inflammatory rhetoric can be difficult, time-consuming, and resource-intensive.

Dechefr uses artificial intelligence and large language models to support this assessment process. It analyzes written threatening communications for aggregated risk indicators associated with violence broadly, as well as twelve key indicators specifically associated with targeted violence.

Through psycholinguistic analysis of language associated with mobilization toward violence, Dechefr provides threat assessment professionals with a structured and efficient assessment of threatening communications. The analysis produces multiple data points, including:

General Risk Level: An overall assessment based on the presence and concentration of indicators associated with potentially violent behavior, ranging from no or few indicators to a significant number of indicators.
Twelve Targeted-Violence Risk Indicators: Identification of the presence or absence of twelve specific indicators associated with mobilization toward targeted violence: anger; grievance; othering; leakage; warrior mentality/military terminology; influences from previous offenders; preoccupation; linguistic alignment; preparation activities; last resort and desperation escalation; end-of-life/finality communications; and legacy/martyrdom creation.

Dechefr also identifies additional linguistic information that may assist the assessment process. This includes named entities, such as people, organizations, and locations mentioned in the communication, as well as the Flesch-Kincaid readability level, which may provide tentative insight into the educational level associated with authorship.

Threat assessment professionals can generate a Dechefr Synopsis that consolidates the analysis into a practical assessment document. The Synopsis includes:

the General Risk Level;
indicators of potentially violent behavior identified as present or not present;
sentences selected by the threat assessment professional as notable examples of identified indicators or as particularly relevant to the overall assessment;
entities highlighted by the threat assessment team; and
a Comments section for documenting outstanding questions, observations, professional conclusions, and recommendations for mitigation.

Dechefr is designed to support, not replace, professional judgment within a comprehensive threat assessment and management process. CPW Consulting Group, Inc. exclusively provides Dechefr training and certification, enabling threat assessment teams to incorporate the platform into their broader assessment and management practices.