College campuses across the country saw a terrifying start to the new school year with a rash of swatting and fake threats that has caused students to barricade themselves in classrooms and dozens of police officers to rush to the schools.
From Arizona to Pennsylvania, universities are experiencing hoax calls that include reports that students were shot and killed with the sounds of gunfire in the background, only for officials to show up and find no real threat was ever present.
The stakes of such emergency responses were driven home on Wednesday, when a real shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis took the lives of two children and left 17 other people wounded.
Fake threats against schools are not a new phenomenon but have been rising in recent years, fueled, experts say, by the notoriety and attention the hoaxes get combined with the difficulty in bringing perpetrators to justice.
“This is, unfortunately, not anything new. It’s primarily been happening the past few years in K-12 schools, and now it’s kind of found its way to campuses, it would appear. I mean, the overarching thing is that people do it because it works,” said Amy Klinger, founder and director of programs at the Educator’s School Safety Network.
“What is it they’re trying to accomplish? They want chaos, anxiety, disruption, panic, all that stuff. And it works, which is why they do it,” Klinger added.
Villanova University, Kansas State University and the Northern University of Arizona are among the more than a dozen colleges that have seen active shooter hoaxes in the past week.
Some of the fake calls included gunshot noises in the background, with a person saying students were dying. At the University of South Carolina, a viral social media post showed a student carrying an umbrella that was mistaken by many for a rifle.
After such calls, the colleges in question sent out campus wide alerts telling students to “run, hide, fight,” while dozens of officers raced to the scene.
Administrators are haunted by past massacres, such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that left 33 people dead, and the Michigan State University shooting in 2023 that killed three.
“Law enforcement has no choice but to respond and respond immediately, and same with the schools, so they have to send out the alerts to the students. They don’t have time to investigate if this is a hoax, where is this call coming from, whatever, because time is absolutely of the essence, and they don’t have any time to waste, so they can’t be busy trying to investigate everything,” said Elizabeth Jaffe, an associate professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School.
The barrage of swatting incidents on campuses is causing the FBI to step in and investigate, saying the fake calls cost thousands of dollars, take up resources and put people at risk.
“The FBI is seeing an increase in swatting events across the country, and we take potential hoax threats very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” the agency said in a statement.
While punishments for swatting calls are serious, it is often difficult to find the person responsible.
“[I]t becomes sort of an interesting process to sort through, because depending on where that person is located, the person communicating the threat, if they’re found and arrested, then the prosecutors have to come together, both at the state and/or local level and then at the federal level, to see, OK, what charges potentially can stick in terms of building a case,” said Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
If the person behind the call knows how to cover their tracks, however, they can be extremely difficult to find. In some cases, the caller hasn’t even been located in the United States.
In February, a California teenage pleaded guilty to hoax shooting and bomb threats against schools and other institutions and was sentenced to four years in federal prison on four counts of making interstate threats.
And whether the person is caught or not, these incidents are leaving a lasting impact on students and educators who see these messages and believe, even for a few moments, their life is in danger at their school.
“There is the trauma of you have now reinforced the idea that this is an unsafe place, even though nothing actually happened. You believe now that it has the potential, that there could be another one of these attacks. There could be an actual shooting. There could be, so you’ve undermined people’s trust and sense of security,” Klinger said.
An “equally dangerous” result of these calls is the danger of people falling into the “boy that cried wolf idea where there’s so many of these that one of these times there will be an active shooter” and people won’t believe it, she added.
