Colleges Still Dealing With Wave of Hoaxes About Violent Threats on Campus
“And so you can’t just blow it off because there has been a bunch of hoaxes.”
This has been going on for over a month now, and although the FBI is investigating, no arrests have been made.
ABC News reports:
Waves of fake threats to colleges are putting students on edge and testing dispatchers
Around 50 college campuses across the country have been deluged in recent weeks with hoax calls about armed gunmen and other violence, laying bare the challenges of detecting fake threats quickly to prevent mass panic.
Students at some schools spent hours hiding under desks, only to find out later it was someone’s idea of a entertainment. On Thursday, several historically Black colleges locked down or canceled classes after receiving threats, at a time when the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college had campuses newly on edge.
In other cases, schools figured out early that something was amiss, but even then it took time and resources.
The FBI is investigating, but so far there have been no arrests.
Dispatch call centers often are the last lines of defense to swatters, a burden in an era of mass shootings, including one this week at a suburban Denver high school and another two weeks ago at a Catholic church in Minneapolis that killed two schoolchildren and injured 21 people.
“We have so many mass shootings in this country and so many young people die,” said Wendy Via, co-founder and CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “And so you can’t just blow it off because there has been a bunch of hoaxes.”
The goal of swatting is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to respond to an address and has roots in fake bomb threats that have been around for decades.
Some of the earliest swats stemmed from online gaming disputes. But gradually they became connected to nihilistic groups, which often conduct the calls in mass batches, trading tips in online forums on how to avoid detection.
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Comments
No, we don’t, actually. We have more than we would like, which is zero, but the numbers are nothing even remotely like what gun-grabbing groups like hers make them out to be. Actual mass shootings, as most people think of them, are relatively rare, for a country this size. And school shootings, as most people of them, are even rarer.
The logical way to handle these is for more people to be armed and trained. Then you don’t have to shut things down when a call comes in. Someone wants to shoot up a school? They’re gonna die. And almost certainly well before the cops arrive.