Students are heading back to class a day after an emailed threat triggered a shutdown of the vast Los Angeles Unified School District.
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The threat came in emails to several people on the district’s school board, after which police became “very concerned”, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said.
LAUSD enrolls more than 640,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade at more than 900 schools.
It is unlikely that a single approach will ever apply to any logistical or procedural plans regarding threats to schools and children.
GARCETTI: Well, I think that the average New Yorker can appreciate, as it was after 9/11 and, you know, Bostonians after the marathon terrorist incident, that here in Southern California in the wake of San Bernardino we are especially cautious and want to be especially careful.
“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.
As hundreds of thousands of families in LA scrambled to make alternative care arrangements, there was news that NY had received a similar threat. “It was not to one school, two schools or three schools – it was many schools, not specifically identified”, Cortines said, according to The New York Times.
In Los Angeles, city leaders rallied behind Cortines’ decision to call off school because of the threat.
‘It is very easy in hindsight to criticize the decision based on results that the decider could never have known, ‘ he said. He said the email seemed to have been routed through Germany, but the origin hasn’t been determined. Though the threat was addressed to major schools in both areas, the respective officials had different ways of handling the situation.
Congressman Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California, told the New York Times that the writer of the email threat claimed to be a devout Muslim prepared to launch an attack using bombs, nerve gas and rifles with “32 jihadist friends” because he had been bullied at a Los Angeles high school.
Cortines says the San Bernardino shooting that left 14 people dead on December 2 influenced the decision to shut down the district’s more than 900 schools and 187 public charter schools.
By contrast, NY officials did not immediately view Tuesday’s threat as credible.
School district officials announced the system-wide closure of more than 1,000 campuses around 5 a.m. on Tuesday.
An hour later, NY students began arriving at school with no knowledge of the threat.
Amid some criticism, the police chief later defended the decision to close down schools, a move that potentially cost the district $29 million.
Superintendent Ramon Cortines said at a news conference Tuesday that an electronic threat in the form of a message was made against students at numerous district’s schools.
An nearly identical email was sent to school officials in New York City, but the Mayor and NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton declined to take the same action. New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said that it looked like the sender of the threat had watched a lot of the Showtime terrorism drama “Homeland”.
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“There are a variety of tools used by schools and law enforcement ranging from checklists to gather information about the threat to in-depth review of the available facts done at the top level of the organization”, Dorn wrote.
