Emailed threats to NY, LA highlight worries schools face
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When it comes to assessing threats, New York City and Los Angeles schools likely have more experience than most other districts in the country.
But their reactions were dramatically different Tuesday to the same threat of a large-scale jihadi attack with guns and bombs — LA canceled its classes while New York dismissed the warning as a hoax.
The divergent responses from the nation's two biggest K-12 public school systems reflected what many in school security know: That deciding whether or not a threat is credible is hardly a mathematical process and the stakes in staying open or closing are high. It is one that school district officials around the country have weighed heavily in the wake of school shootings and threats.
Across the nation, small and large districts regularly encounter the challenge of deciphering threats, complicated today by more sophisticated technology that can make them harder to trace.
Even when a threat is determined to be a hoax, the consequences can be a severe, with the safety of thousands of children, millions of dollars in school funding, and the message each decision sends on the line.
It's extremely rare for a major U.S. city to close all its schools because of a threat and it reflected the lingering unease in Southern California following the attack that killed 14 people at a holiday luncheon two weeks ago in San Bernardino.
"If this was not ISIS, not a terror organization, they're nonetheless watching," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Meet the Press Daily." "And if they come to the conclusion that they can literally mail it in, call it in and disrupt large cities, they're going to take advantage of that."
A 2014 analysis by National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm, found a 158 percent increase in the number of threats schools received over the previous year. About 37 percent of the threats were sent electronically and nearly a third resulted in schools being evacuated. Nearly 10 percent of the threats closed school for at least one day.
Ken Trump, president of the firm, said schools leaders faced with a threat they don't believe is credible sometimes let community anxiety rule the decision to evacuate or close, even though children might be safer in school than sent home where they could be left unsupervised.
"It's often better to keep them in school," he said.
In LA, the threat came in the form of an email to a school board member. Authorities in New York reported receiving the same "generic" email and decided there was no danger to schoolchildren. Mayor Bill de Blasio concluded the threat contained "nothing credible." New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said that it looked like the sender had watched Emailed threats to NY, LA highlight worries schools face - Yahoo News:
