Scott Pickett, CFI

Senior Program Director | SalCAPA Leadership Team | Homeland Security & Critical Infrastructure

Scott Pickett is a homeland-security strategist, retired federal law-enforcement executive, investigator, instructor, and security professional with nearly four decades of experience protecting people, infrastructure, transportation systems, and public institutions from complex threats.

As a Senior Program Director with Salus Solutions and a prominent member of the SalCAPA leadership team, Scott brings an unusually broad perspective developed across federal law enforcement, aviation security, firearms intelligence, behavioral recognition, investigations, insider threat, active-shooter preparedness, executive protection, critical infrastructure, and emerging chemical and biological threats.

Scott began his law-enforcement career as a police officer before moving into increasingly complex federal assignments. During his career with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, he served in senior positions associated with the National Tracing Center and led the Crime Gun Analysis Branch, helping advance the analysis and investigative use of firearms-tracing information. His work contributed to national initiatives examining crime-gun trafficking, firearms violence, and the use of intelligence and data to support law-enforcement strategy.

His federal career later moved deeply into homeland and aviation security. Scott served in leadership positions with the Federal Air Marshal Service and Transportation Security Administration, including service as an Assistant Special Agent in Charge. His responsibilities brought together aviation security, law enforcement, intelligence, behavioral threat recognition, interagency operations, and the protection of the traveling public within one of the nation’s most complex critical-infrastructure systems.

Recognizing that effective security requires understanding behavior as well as physical vulnerabilities, Scott earned a Master of Arts in Homeland Security and Defense from the Naval Postgraduate School. His graduate research, Enhancing the Layers of Aviation Security Through Effective Behavioral Recognition, examined how observable behavior could be incorporated into a layered aviation-security system to improve the identification of potential threats.

That emphasis on behavior, intelligence, and informed decision-making has remained a consistent theme throughout Scott’s career.

As a Certified Forensic Interviewer (CFI), Scott has extensive experience in investigative interviewing and has trained law-enforcement professionals in modern, legally defensible interview techniques. He has instructed investigators and newly promoted detectives, taught criminal interview and interrogation programs, and provided instruction involving complex and sensitive investigations. His approach emphasizes fact finding, behavioral understanding, professionalism, and the risks associated with improperly conducted or overly confrontational interviews.

Scott is also a licensed peace officer, licensed diplomatic and executive protection officer, and licensed private investigator. These credentials complement his federal law-enforcement and investigative background and reinforce his ability to operate across law-enforcement, protective, investigative, and private-security environments.

Scott’s experience also encompasses national and international stakeholder engagement. Throughout his government career, he worked across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries, communicating with law-enforcement agencies, government executives, operational personnel, and international partners. His assignments have included representing U.S. government interests in international law-enforcement and security environments and engaging senior stakeholders through forums involving organizations such as INTERPOL, the United Nations, and U.S. diplomatic missions.

Protective operations have also been an important part of Scott’s experience. His work has included coordination of protection for senior government officials during sensitive deployments and support to presidential protection activities in conjunction with the U.S. Secret Service. In the private sector, he has applied those lessons to the protection of executives, organizational leaders, faith-based institutions, and other individuals exposed to elevated or evolving threats.

Scott has continued to apply his federal experience to emerging homeland-security problems. His private-sector work has included leadership and customer engagement involving advanced technologies designed to detect and identify airborne chemical and biological threats. That work has included applications within the aviation and critical-infrastructure environment, further expanding his experience at the intersection of emerging technology, threat detection, emergency response, and operational decision-making.

He has also developed and led security and emergency-response programs in complex multi-facility environments. His work has addressed physical security, emergency response, active-shooter preparedness, medical response, executive and personnel protection, coordination with local, state, and federal authorities, training, and the development of teams capable of responding effectively when incidents occur.

At Salus, Scott applies this experience across multiple service areas, including SalCAPA, security and preparedness assessments, insider-threat programs, active-shooter preparedness, intelligence, investigations, aviation security, executive protection, training and exercises, and critical-infrastructure resilience.

His role in SalCAPA is particularly significant.

Salus THIRA is developed and operated through the collective experience of the Salus team rather than through a single discipline or analyst. Scott is one of the prominent leaders helping guide the program’s continued development, client engagement, stakeholder coordination, and practical application.

He brings to the methodology decades of experience asking questions that are fundamental to meaningful risk assessment:

What indicators tell us that a threat may be developing?

What information do we need before making a decision?

How do people actually behave under normal and abnormal conditions?

What vulnerabilities can an adversary exploit?

What capabilities must an organization possess to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from an incident?

And how do we distinguish between security measures that create the appearance of protection and those that actually reduce risk?

Scott works directly with Salus clients, stakeholders, and other subject-matter experts to help turn those questions into meaningful capability targets and practical assessments. His experience is particularly valuable when SalCAPA examines threats involving terrorism, insider activity, workplace violence, active shooters, behavioral indicators, criminal activity, aviation security, executive protection, emerging technologies, and physical-security vulnerabilities.

Just as importantly, Scott helps ensure that SalCAPA remains grounded in operations.

A policy may appear effective on paper. A security technology may appear impressive. An organization may believe it possesses a capability because equipment has been purchased or a plan has been written. SalCAPA goes further by examining whether people, processes, training, information, technology, authorities, resources, and operational systems actually work together to produce the capability leadership expects.

That distinction reflects Scott’s career.

From crime-gun intelligence and investigative analysis to aviation security, behavioral recognition, federal law enforcement, protective operations, forensic interviewing, critical-infrastructure security, and emerging threat detection, his work has repeatedly focused on converting information into action and security concepts into capabilities that perform in the real world.

Today, Scott works alongside Marc Duncan, Bridget Lee-Young, and the broader Salus team to continue developing and operating SalCAPA as the company’s flagship enterprise risk and capability-management methodology.

The objective is not simply to identify deficiencies.

It is to give executives and boards a clearer understanding of what can happen, what their organizations must be capable of doing, where meaningful gaps exist, what changes will actually reduce risk, and where resources should be invested first.

For Scott, that is the practical meaning of preparedness: understanding the threat, recognizing the indicators, developing the right capabilities, and ensuring those capabilities work when they are needed.