While school safety experts say school violence and shootings are on the rise, they also noted a pattern of false alarms in 2023.
There have been approximately 30 incidents per week nationwide since at least the start of this academic year, according to news reports compiled by the National Association of School Resource Officers. Around this time last year, there were 34 incidents counted by NASRO during the week of Dec. 5, 2022, Jay Farlow, a spokesperson for the organization, said.
Different kinds of false alarms are generally referred to as "swatting" or "hoax threats."
While a generally accepted definition doesn't yet exist, NASRO refers to swatting as a false report of an existing situation so dangerous that it requires a large emergency response. That would include false reports of a shooting, for example.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been some 728 swatting incidents in 2023, with a peak of 210 in March.
"Swatting is an enormous waste of resources," said David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and co-founder of the Homeland Security Advanced Thinking Program. Riedman said he also noticed swatting appear on more headlines in 2023. "They create a huge amount of danger, a huge amount of disruption."
For example, police officers accidentally fired their weapons inside schools in swatting cases this past spring, said Riedman — such as in one May incident at St. John's Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts.
On the other hand, hoax calls occur when someone falsely threatens future violence, such as school shootings or bombings. These generally do not require the same kind of large emergency response.
NASRO said that motives behind false alarms can vary from a student wanting to delay an exam to creating chaos.
"Hoax bomb threats, shooting threats and other empty threats of future school violence are far from harmless," the organization said in guidance released Dec. 21.
Law enforcement involvement and disruptions
While they have separate definitions, both hoaxes and swatting can cause disruptions in school activities to different degrees, including evacuations, police response, school cancellations and early dismissals.
For example, in the spring, districts nationwide grappled with serial swatting that Riedman said was likely coordinated and "created mass chaos."
Hoax threats also lead to lost instructional time, emotional trauma and overtime expenses.
However, the best way to combat hoax threats is to prevent them from disrupting schools as much as possible, according to NASRO's guidance released Thursday.
“When schools close or evacuate for a communicated threat that isn’t credible, the perpetrators get exactly what they want,” said Mo Canady, executive director of NASRO. Canady also warned against evacuations because students may be safer in their classrooms than outside the building.
"Regardless of motive, the less disruption a school allows, the less perpetrators will be encouraged to send hoax threats.”
NASRO wrote in its guidance that schools with trained school resource officers can help determine if a threat is a hoax, and that administrators should consult with law enforcement agencies — including FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — when developing response plans.
Riedman said police should also respond differently than they sometimes do.
"With swatting, a lot of police departments will say, 'Well, we got this 911 call. We have to be better safe than sorry,'" he said. Instead, police departments should verify with the school if there's a credible threat "before sending dozens of officers at 100 miles an hour all racing there.”
