Hoax school shootings: inside America's epidemic

This is so sick.. False callers should be treated as terrorists in these particular situations..

You pretty much have to go into sim and phone registration to stop this; The caller has to be identified somehow every time they dial into 911 or any other emergency line. What's scary is the tactical value of this to criminals. Imagine calling in a hoax-shooting as a prelude to an actual crime to pull cops to an entirely different part of the city.

This reminds me of my college days in the 1970s with bomb threats. That was big. Entire buildings would have to be evacuated. At my college, there were a lot of bomb threats. They finally figured out who it was based on exams certain teachers had scheduled. This dope didn’t want to take the test so he would call in a bomb threat

This happened to my high school. Around the end of lunch, suddenly we went into lockdown. Swat storming through the school, everyone brought group by group into the gym to be metal detectored & accounted for. We were all stuck there till fairly late on the evening. When all is said and done, turns out some kids angry ex gf called swat and said he had a weapon in school. Its such a sad and disgusting waste of resources, waste of kids and teachers time, and shock and trauma that nobody needed.

A whole nation growing up with PTSD.

This is truly terrible, especially because if it happens in large enough numbers, true shootings may eventually be doubted.

How someone could do something so awful confounds me

Any SWATing call must be a felony with mandatory jail time.

Youtubers and Twitch streamers get SWATted all the time and I haven't heard of ONE SINGLE PERSON being charged for making those false reports.

It might be a game of wearing the police down, so that during a real attack they hesitate in sending in the heavy squads. I hope the police always remain prepared.

There was a hoax call at my HS back in the late 2000s and I remember just thinking this is how it ends, the teacher unplugged the landline from the wall in case any noise from it gave us away. I remember a student struggling with how to shut down their new Motorola Razor. All we could hear was silence broken by the helicopter and police dogs as they passed near us. I hope whoever it was paid for the hours of terror we passed. Sports Med class was never the same after that😮

I went through this several times in middle school in The 90’s….my mom still works in the school system and they get at least several threats a year…

On one hand, I would consider this training and an assessment of readiness. When training for situations like this, false calls are just part of the process. You don't realize what you're missing in your response until you experience it, and you don't want to experience it for the first time when it's a real situation with lives on the line. My working dogs, teammates and I have been through so many false alarms that when the time finally came for it to be real, my entire team was like a well-oiled machine, rather than dozing cats woken up with a bucket of cold water. But yeah, after it gets to a point, it gets exhausting and you start getting slower and sloppier in your response, and you don't want that lazy day to be the day when it's a real situation that requires your full attention.

This is intimately connected with the robo-calling problem. Phone providers have been doing everything in their power to avoid accountability. Concealing the identity of a caller is key for the success of robocall marketing as well as swatting. The same solutions for robocalling will go a long way to solving this problem as well. When the FCC stops turning a blind eye to the problem, we will finally see some actual progress on this.

False callers should be treated as terrorists in these particular situations.

Not only is this domestic terrorism and should be charged as so, but they should also get charged with every single crime that occurs, every live lost from medical being relocated and any damage that firefighters would have been tasked with within the affected departments from the moment the call is made until the forces are back to their posts. Moves like this would cause deaths and destruction from pulling people away from their important jobs, not to mention allow for crimes that otherwise would have been interupted by police,

I think I should just give up on videos related to the USA

This is a very uniquely American problem

My high school in the 80’s in Australia had at least a half a dozen hoax bomb threats in the three years I was there.

Criminalizing this will bring it down. Kids doing this have no consequences, and everything is a joke to them. This is a soical media trend, teens only care about what their peers think about them