The need for such efforts is acute: “Well over half of the people at Rikers right now are suffering from some mental health issue that could be addressed,” said one speaker, Richard Alborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of NYC, referring to New York City’s Rikers Island prison.  

Of 6,700 inmates, an estimated 1,400 have severe mental illness, and 1,500 and 1,800 suffer from opioid and alcohol abuse, respectively, he said.

“Shame on us if we don’t address that,” he said.

Academics, experts in crime and healthcare, and elected officials—including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—spoke at the Jan. 16 Mental Health & Crime event, sponsored by Fordham, Northwell Health, and the Citizens Crime Commission.

Speakers focused on one of today’s most vexing challenges: the inordinate number of crimes committed by people who suffer from mental illness or substance abuse.

“Not everyone who has a mental health issue or confronts a mental health challenge commits a crime, and not every single person who commits a crime has a mental health challenge,” Aborn said. “Our job, if we’re going to be true to the goal of prevention, is to identify those intersections.”

A Case Study

The program was arranged to highlight a typical case as it winds its way through the system, from the first 911 call to the prosecution and sentencing of the accused. 

Speakers included members of the New York Police Department, such as Monica Brooker, Ph.D., assistant commissioner of the department’s Behavioral Health Division, as well as members of the judiciary, such as Matthew D’Emic, FCRH ’74, presiding judge for the Brooklyn Mental Health Court.

In a fireside chat with Fordham Law School professor Deborah Denno, Bragg touted the proposal of a new law, known as the SUPPORT Act, which will mandate crisis intervention for mentally ill offenders who are accused of misdemeanor crimes but are deemed too unfit to stand trial. Currently, intervention is only mandated for those accused of felonies.

He praised New York Assemblyman Tony Simone and New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal for proposing the new law.

He also touted the success of programs designed to help stop the downward spiral of people suffering from mental illness. The Neighborhood Navigator program launched last year by the Manhattan D.A.’s Office and The Bridge employs outreach workers who approach people on the street who are in obvious distress and offer them everything from a cup of coffee to help with housing.

Bragg said Court Navigator, a similar program that connects criminal defendants with nonprofits such as the Fortune Society, is even more potentially transformative because of the way it helps address underlying causes of crime.

“My Spidey sense tells me this is going to be one that we’re going to want to double down on,” he said. “Just being in the courtroom, seeing workers interact with defendants, and seeing the results—this has real promise,” he said.

The Mental and the Physical 

Michael Dowling, GSS ’74, president and CEO of Northwell Health, lamented the traditional separation of mental and physical health. 

The lack of parity between the two raises financial issues, he said, and, more importantly, moral issues. Northwell and other providers are impacted monetarily because many insurers, including Medicaid, don’t cover mental health treatment in the same way they cover physical ailments, he said.

There’s also a moral imperative to take mental health issues more seriously, he said, noting that adolescents, in particular, have shown increases in depression and anxiety since 2012. 

Dowling said the shortage of psychiatrists is also a problem. He said Northwell has partnered with New York City to open a new high school dedicated to careers in mental health, radiation medicine, nursing, and physical health.

“There is no health without mental health. People need to talk about it differently,” he said. “It’s changing, but it needs to change much, much quicker.”

The Hollywood version of a hacker who infiltrates a computer system may look like someone hunched over a laptop in a dark remote location.

In fact, according to the FBI, between a quarter and half of all daily cyberthreats come from “insider threats.”

On March 16, law enforcement, private industry, and academic leaders convened at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus for a day devoted exclusively to the challenges of stopping those threats.

The conference, “The Insider Threat: Before, During, and After an Incident,” featured three panel discussions and a “fireside chat” on bringing lawless “dark web” sites to justice.

The half-day event was jointly sponsored by Fordham and the FBI and served as a complement to the larger International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), held every 18 months at Fordham. The University also runs a Center for Cybersecurity and offers a master’s program in the subject.

In her welcoming address, Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham, noted that because universities are frequent targets of cyberattacks, they have a vested interest in working to stop them.

“We do it in that way that we’re so proud of in higher ed, and in particular, as a Jesuit institution, by being open to the answers, by constantly trying to challenge ourselves to think differently, to be one step ahead of those very creative enemies that we’re up against,” she said.

The Before

Testing and trust came up repeatedly in the first panel, which featured Dave Fitzgibbons, acting assistant director of the FBI’s Insider Threat Office; Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City; and Chris Farr; executive director of commercial strategy for the strategic intelligence firm Strider.

Aborn said in large organizations, programs that train employees to spot threats are only effective if they’re practiced zealously.

“I think it’s an oxymoron to say you train too much. You have to refresh, you have to train over and over and over again,” he said, noting that his organization had recently sent out test phishing e-mails to its own members.

“We had about a 35% failure rate, and I was pretty shocked at that. We train a lot.”

Behavioral Indicators

Farr said a common misconception is that the first place to start is in the technical realm. In fact, it’s far more important to focus on individuals and have in place a dedicated team to assess behavioral indicators and raise red flags about potential workplace violence, espionage, or fraud. Those indicators might include visits to websites that promote violence, unusual travel patterns, and inexplicable income increases.

The trick is to cultivate a culture of respect where it’s okay to alert a supervisor to a co-worker’s worrisome behavior. It’s tricky, given Americans’ expectations of privacy, but it can be done.

“Employees have to trust your process though,” he said. Programs that have anonymous reporting and policies of no retaliation are super important.”

In the Mix

A key lesson from the second panel, which featured Harold Chun, director of security legal at Google; Darron Smith, insider threat program manager at Bloomberg L.P., and Bill Claycomb, principal researcher at CERT Division’s National Insider Threat Center, was that any insider threat team should also have clear parameters about how to respond.

Is the threat from a full-time employee or a contract one? Is it a one-time issue or an ongoing problem? Is there a threat of physical violence? The response should be commensurate with the problem, said Smith.

“You may not want to raise the fire alarm immediately. It’s really important when you’re thinking about things like duty of care to the employee or privacy,” he said.

Learning from the Past

The final panel featured FBI supervisory special agents Scott Norwell, John Reynolds, and Paul F. Roberts Jr., who specialize in employee, state-sponsored, and white-collar insider threats, respectively. They shared the lessons that have been learned from past cases, such as the 2017 conviction of Kun Shan Chun, a longtime member of the bureau, of passing sensitive information to a Chinese government official.

In that case, Norwell said the bureau had learned that there is a long-term, concerted effort by the Chinese government to identify and recruit people, like Chun, who appear to be vulnerable to flattery, cajoling, or intimidation.

Lessons From the Dark Web

Ed Stroz, GABELLI ’79, co-founder and president of Stroz Friedberg and Fordham trustee, closed the day out with a discussion with Andy Greenberg, senior editor of Wired Magazine and the author of Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency (Penguin RandomHouse, 2022).

Greenberg’s book shows how agents were able to track down the founders of dark web marketplaces such as Silk Road by analyzing Blockchain, the technology that underlies the cryptocurrency that was being used to facilitate the sale of drugs, child pornography, and weapons.

Blockchain was thought by the site administrators to grant them anonymity, but it did not. The path to Silk Road’s demise also included the apprehension of two federal agents who were using the site to commit crimes. One of them was initially accused by an anonymous tipster.

“When people ask about insider programs, it’s easy to think ‘Oh, we’re going to get somebody in trouble,” said Stroz.

“But in many instances, it gets someone out of trouble, or it makes it easier … for people to have a way to raise something so that it can be pursued responsibly. ”

Students Learn from the Pros

Among those in attendance was Jakub Czaplicki, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center working on a five-year, accelerated master’s degree in cybersecurity. He became interested in cybersecurity when he was in middle school, and hopes to join law enforcement after graduation.

He said he enjoyed the case studies in the third panel as well as Greenberg’s talk.

“When the FBI agent was talking about how there is this risk of China and different nation-state actors, it really got me thinking, yeah, we have to secure this. Even though it’s a low percentage, it is a genuine problem for large organizations and the FBI,” he said.

“I learned a lot about cryptocurrency, nation-state actors, and what to look out for.”

Czaplicki was one of six Fordham students who attended, said Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., university professor and founder and director of Fordham’s Center for Cybersecurity. Grants that the center won in 2019 from the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense made it possible for them to attend.

“We really want to expose them to the real world and also excite them to work with the executive branches of the federal government,” he said.

“Here, they saw the real cases, and they got to connect the theoretical, the technical, and the practical aspects of cybersecurity.”