RooT37 – CUTA’s TRA Tool in Response to a Changing Threat Landscape

In this chapter the authors discuss the establishment of the Belgian ‘Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis’ (CUTA), its remits and fields of competence and how its scope was widened in the last few years because of changes in the threat landscape of problematic radicalization, extremism and terrorism and the changing tactics of the Belgian government to tackle them. In the second part of this chapter the authors elaborate on ‘RooT37’, a risk assessment tool that was tailor-made by CUTA to address its newly assigned tasks in the framework of the revised Belgian Action Plan on Radicalism. The tool takes several risk indicators into account to aid CUTA’s experts in making structured professional judgments about threats and risks posed by monitored individuals, and semi-automatically produces a threat level. Furthermore, it provides CUTA’s support agencies with clues for further investigation based on discovered information gaps through the assessment. Finally, it also points out opportunities for coordinated intervention by partner services to reduce the risk posed by monitored individuals. Certain characteristics of the methodology of the tool are described in more detail, as well as its advantages and some challenges for the future.