Threat or hoax? Schools find it’s harder to weigh the risks
“It was a first for us, in terms of the
breadth of the threat and the specificity,” Conrad said. Last Sunday
evening, after consulting with the police, Conrad did something that, as
far as officials in Nashua knew, had never been done there before: He
ordered that all schools stay closed that Monday because of the fear of
violence.
The previous week, the Los Angeles school
system also shut down for a day, in the face of a threat of terrorist
attacks against multiple schools. Last month, the University of Chicago
canceled classes and activities for a day, after discovering a social
media post that talked of killing “16 white male students and or staff”
and “any number of white policemen”; Western Washington University
suspended classes after a post suggested lynching a student leader; and
Washington College in Maryland closed for several days after a
distraught student disappeared with a gun.
Monica Almeida / The New York Times
But for every such reaction, there have
been decisions not to lock down campuses in the face of a threat. To
name just a few, schools officials in New York City, Houston and Miami
received emails similar to those received in Los Angeles and Nashua, and
two social media users last month wrote that they wanted to kill
African-Americans at the University of Missouri, including one who
stated a plan to “shoot every black person I see.”
None of the threats, it seems, were
serious. Threats of mass violence on campuses have proliferated through
social media, educators say, but most are hoaxes — in fact, most are
never made public.
Yet school officials and campus safety
consultants say they have to take threats more seriously than they did a
decade or two ago, given the history of campus massacres like the one
in October at an Oregon community college and the public’s heightened
fear of terrorist attacks like the one this month in San Bernardino,
California. And they said they could not recall anything like the recent
spate of class cancellations and school closings.
Even when schools do not shut down,
administrators say, they are more likely to order increased security
patrols, or ask people to be on the lookout for a person or vehicle.
After the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, many schools adopted
electronic alert systems, sending text messages to students, parents and
staff members about potential dangers.
“There is a big difference in how we
interpret possible threats today, because of the violence we’ve seen,”
said Will Marling, interim senior director for operations and programs
at the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, a campus safety group created by
relatives of victims of the shootings at Virginia Tech. If a suitcase
was left unattended at an airport 20 years ago, he said, “the reaction
might have been ‘Someone put it in lost and found,’ but now it’s ‘Call
the bomb squad.’”
On campus, deciding how to respond usually
falls to administrators, who lean heavily on the advice of law
enforcement officials, often have little verified information to go on
and only a few hours to make the call, and have a sense that they might
be second-guessed no matter what. An administrator fears not reacting
strongly enough when lives are at stake, but college and school
officials say there are costs to overreacting — in policing expenses,
lost classroom time, frayed nerves and the danger of encouraging copycat
threats.
“It’s a real dilemma, and it puts
university administration and law enforcement, both, in a tough
position, to evaluate those threats,” said R. Douglas Schwandt, chief of
the University of Missouri police. “Most recently, I think there’s
definitely a tendency to err on the side of caution.”
In Missouri’s case, officials learned of
the social media threats from students in the evening, and within hours,
police had determined that neither one had come from the immediate
area. One person was arrested during the night, and another, farther
away, was arrested late the next morning.
Officials decided not to advise people to
change their routines, but some professors canceled classes and many
students stayed in their dorms and apartments. Schwandt said he could
not guess how the university would have reacted if the threats had
originated nearby, or if neither person had been arrested by sunrise.
Both the substance of the threats and
their context influence administrators’ decisions. The threat at the
University of Chicago was similar to those in Missouri, but it was more
specific. The threat was also posted from somewhere in the city amid
angry demonstrations there over the killing of a black youth by police,
and the university was alerted to it by the FBI.
Tannen Maury / EPA
In Los Angeles, when aides awakened the
schools chancellor, Ramon C. Cortines, with news of an anonymous email
threat, he had barely an hour to decide whether to cancel the school day
and did not know that New York had received virtually the same message.
As Cortines noted, the region was already on edge after the shootings
in San Bernardino days earlier, which were said to have been inspired by
jihadi terrorist groups, as the author of the email claimed to be.
In New York, officials did not learn of
the threat until the school day had started. They quickly learned of the
parallels with the Los Angeles threat, and they noted details in the
email that signaled that it was less than credible. By the time similar
threats reached other cities’ schools, they were old news.
The most unusual case may have been that
of Washington College, where a student who brandished a gun was expelled
from his fraternity and his dorm, and faced both possible expulsion and
criminal charges. He took a gun from his parents’ home, and was seen on
surveillance video buying ammunition in a store, then disappeared.
Though he had made no threats, police warned his college and the high
school he attended, in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, that he might pose a
danger. The student was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.
Sheila Bair, the college president, said
that when she shut down the college, she was thinking of shootings on
campus by students in the past, including the one just weeks earlier, at
Umpqua Community College in Oregon. And like other school officials
around the country, she said parents and students want strong reactions;
the criticism comes from outsiders.
“It feeds on itself, because the more you
have incidents that do result in harm, the more sensitive people get,
and the more strongly they react,” she said. “You’ve got to put the
safety of the students first. If someone’s harmed, that’s irreversible.”
Conrad, in Nashua, said, “I’ve received
one concern from a parent saying that we should have been open, but the
overwhelming majority has been people saying they were glad we were
closed for the day.”
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