What we know: Are threats of school shootings taken seriously?
The suspected high school shooter in Georgia was investigated for making online threats last year, but he was not arrested. Here’s what we know about the threats.
Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood is making good on his promise to arrest and publicly shame children who threaten school shootings. Days after he garnered national attention for “sending” an 11-year-old boy on a shooting spree, the Florida sheriff released photos and videos of two more teenagers accused of making threats.
Chitwood said the teens, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, were taken into custody after posting threatening messages on Snapchat on Wednesday. USA TODAY is not naming the teens because they are minors.
According to the sheriff, the 17-year-old sent a photo with the caption “I’m going to raid the school” and a picture of her school laptop. The 16-year-old replied “Same,” Chitwood said.
“We are wasting time and resources,” Chitwood said in a Facebook post.
“It’s not fair to the 99% of kids who do the right thing.”
Following the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia that left four people dead earlier this month, law enforcement agencies across the country responded to a flood of school shooting threats. Experts say heightened threats are common after any school shooting. While most turn out to be hoaxes, they can still bring school communities to a standstill.
Elsewhere, students have been charged with such threats, but Chitwood’s unusual experiment in using public humiliation as a deterrent met with mixed reactions.
Social media was filled with comments from fellow Floridians supporting the sheriff. Some said the 11-year-old’s age was irrelevant and he should face consequences commensurate with the severity of the threat. Others said his parents should also be held accountable.
But Chitwood’s experiment violates juvenile justice standards and has some experts concerned about unintended consequences.
“I understand the frustration and the need for law enforcement to respond in some way, but if this is a child doing a perpetrator walk, I would question whether that will achieve the goal of preventing further threats,” says Deborah Weisbrot, a child psychiatrist and professor at Stony Brook Medicine who has researched students who threaten to commit shootings.
Warning to students and parents: Threats will not be tolerated
Law enforcement in Volusia County is working “around the clock” to investigate and combat dozens of threats against local schools that have proven to be implausible. But the response costs thousands, Chitwood said.
“Starting Monday, we will publish your little angel’s face and take him on perp walks when we take him into custody. And then we will show pictures of you, the parents,” he said.
Florida’s juvenile criminal records are kept confidential but can be made public if the child is charged with a crime, as in the case of the minors Chitwood took into custody.
The 11-year-old, who was “walked” and posted online on Monday, was accused of threatening a shooting at Creekside or Silver Sands Middle School in Port Orange, a city south of Daytona Beach, Florida. The sheriff’s office said he bragged about guns in a video chat and wrote a list of names and targets. He told investigators the threat was a hoax, as did the teens arrested Wednesday, according to the sheriff’s office.
In recent weeks, local news outlets and police departments have reported that threats have led to curfews or cancellations of classes in Maryland, Alabama, Tennessee and several other states. A school district in Missouri told USA TODAY that it canceled classes and postponed school events after threats were made. Local police said two students were arrested in the last week for separate threats.
“On an emotional level, these threats understandably caused heightened anxiety among students, staff and parents,” said Tim Roth, superintendent of the Southern Boone County R-1 School District, in an emailed statement. “We recognize that such incidents can create a sense of uncertainty and fear, and we remain committed to creating an environment where everyone feels safe, supported and heard.”
Name and Shame: Can this tactic prevent threats of school shootings?
Students who threaten to go on school shootings typically have a history of mental health issues that require treatment or of abuse, according to Weisbrot’s research, which examined students referred for threat assessments over a two-decade period. None of those students went on to become school shooters, but the presence of a diagnosis alone worried Weisbrot much less than whether the child had access to weapons.
“The good news is that the vast majority of children who make threats are making only passing threats,” Weisbrot said. In other words, the threats do not indicate an actual potential for harm and may be intended as a joke, figure of speech or an expression of spontaneous emotion, according to the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines.
So does public exposure deter children from making such threats? That remains to be seen, and Weisbrot says there is no evidence to support this tactic. But Weisbrot has serious concerns that the perpetrator going around posting the kids’ mugshots could have the opposite effect.
“Posting their pictures online … will actually, in some cases, fuel some kids’ desire for a moment of fame,” she said. “Or worse, in some cases where we don’t really understand why the student made a threat, it will lead to them being traumatized, humiliated and then further ostracized at school, and that’s not necessarily going to help either.”
Daniel Mears, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, told the Associated Press that these measures violate the concept of juvenile justice, which typically ensures the confidentiality of records so that children can get a “second chance at life.”
In response to USA TODAY’s questions about these concerns, Chitwood pointed to a dramatic increase in school shooting threats in Florida.
“Unfortunately, threats in Florida are five times higher than they were this time last year,” Chitwood said in an emailed statement.
The sheriff told AP he didn’t know if public exposure would help, but he felt he had to act. “Something has to be done,” Chitwood said. “Where are the parents?”
And it’s not the first time a sheriff in Florida has tried this.
Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno brought a 10-year-old boy before cameras last year for allegedly making a threat and two middle school students in 2021 for allegedly planning an attack on the school, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.
In this case, experts told the News-Journal that they had never heard of such a young child being convicted as a perpetrator by a police department.
“He’s 10 years old. He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Suman Kakar, a criminology professor at Florida International University, said at the time. “To go as far as showing him in handcuffs to the media and showing that picture everywhere – the officer is very proud of himself and wants to be known across the country as the one who protects our children, but it has the opposite effect.”
If this can help at all to curb the shooting threats, it could prompt parents to pay closer attention to what their children are doing and saying online, Weisbrot believes. This is a complex problem that requires a multifaceted approach involving the family, the school community, mental health services and law enforcement, she said.
“The most important thing is not to take it at face value, but to assess whether the threat is dangerous or not and then move on,” Weisbrot said, but to “look beneath the surface and try to understand what is going on with this particular person that led them to this particular decision.”
Contributors: Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY; Mary Ellen Ritter and Patricio G. Balona, Daytona Beach News-Journal
