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How schools are dealing with threats
Officials from left, Chief Charlie Beck, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, Sheriff Jim McDonnell, Los Angeles Unified School Police District Chief Steven Zipperman, Mayor Eric Garcetti, and LAUSD Board President Steve Zimmer discuss today’s LAUSD schools closures at LAUSD headquarters in Los Angeles Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015.
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On Tuesday, when a bomb threat shut Los Angeles public schools, and many private schools like the one my son attends, one of the moms I know said she hoped the threat wasn’t an actual warning but was just a dumb student trying to delay finals – a scenario that, if we’re honest, many parents can too easily imagine.
NY had also received a similar threat on Monday and made a decision to keep schools open after deciding the threat was not credible.
It allows for a process of securitisation to take place, wherein security concerns always come before anything else; especially before democratic values and principles as we have witnessed in Western societies since 9/11.
The message threatened that “138 comrades” would join the writer, who claimed to be a bullied high school student. Districts regularly encounter the challenge of deciphering threats, complicated today by more sophisticated technology that can make them harder to trace.
“As you know, L.A. Unified always puts student safety first”, LAUSD Chief Deputy Superintendent Michelle King said in a statement after the schools reopened.
Supt. Ramon Cortines said the closure in the nation’s second-largest school district – which serves 640,000 students – was out of “an abundance of caution”.
James Conway, ex-FBI agent and head of Global Intel Strategies said that unlike Los Angeles law enforcement, New York City police are better equipped to analyze different types of threats and determine their credibility. “And to disrupt the daily schedules of half a million schoolchildren, their parents, daycare, buses based on an anonymous email without consultation – if in fact consultation did not occur with law enforcement authorities – I think it was a significant overreaction, yes”, Commissioner Bratton said.
Authorities said they had ordered all public transport in Los Angeles to be free of charge for students on Tuesday to enable them to get home or move about the sprawling West Coast city.
They wrote in part: “We have bombs hidden in backpacks and in lockers at several schools and they are strategically placed to crumble the foundations of the very buildings that monger so much hate”.
“I was literally in shock”, said Virgil Middle School teacher Claudia Castaneda.
New York City officials say they received the same threat but quickly concluded that it was a hoax.
It’s not uncommon for school districts to receive threats. In LA, the threat came in the form of an email to a school board member that raised fears of another attack like the recent deadly shooting in nearby San Bernardino.
A spokesman for the New York Police Department said the emails to both LA and NY officials “Were the exact same with the exception of putting in the cities’ names and changing the number of people who were supposed to be participating in it”. She’s concerned about her daughter feeling secure in class.
“This is going to be more a deterrent for the copycat, the person who sees some big event somewhere and then says, ‘I’m going to call a school, ‘” he said.
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“It was not to one school, two schools or three schools”, he said at a news conference.