How schools and law enforcement are navigating a spike in violent threats

This fall, the big question facing educators and law enforcement officials is how to best deal with a wave of threats of violence, shootings and bombings, and the fears, evacuations and temporary shutdowns they cause. Ali Rogin speaks with school safety consultant Kenneth Trump and Dr. Deborah Weisbrot, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University, to learn more.
John Yang:
Earlier this week, a possible school shooting in Wisconsin may have been averted when a 13-year-old was arrested after he tried to enter an elementary school with a bag containing a rifle. It’s a reminder of the wave of false threats facing schools nationwide and the fears, evacuations and temporary shutdowns they cause. Ali Rogin explores how these threats are being addressed.
Ali Rogin:
The big question facing educators and law enforcement officials this fall is how to best deal with the latest series of threats of violence, shootings and bombings. Some schools have resorted to using metal detectors and arming teachers. Most threats turn out to be fake. Many come from young people, and investigating them can be an expensive and tedious process. In some places, these threats lead to hundreds of children being arrested and detained.
Kenneth Trump is a school safety consultant and heads the National School Safety and Security Services. And Dr. Deborah Weisbrot is a professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University. Thank you both for being here. Ken, let’s start with you. What sort of threats are you seeing these days? How are they being communicated? And how does this wave of threats differ from what you’ve seen in previous years?
Kenneth Trump, National School Safety and Security Services: Well, having 40 years in this field, we see a contagion effect after every mass school shooting. Typically, it peaks over a two or three week period, and those threats tend to come in one of two forms. They’re either threats that originate locally with students, former students, someone with a grievance against the school, or they turn to swatting threats.
Oftentimes computer generated threats that target multiple schools, multiple districts, sometimes multiple states, and originate from across state and international borders in some cases. The vast majority of threats turn out not to be credible. Every threat has to be treated seriously. And schools need to have threat assessment teams, training and protocols in place, procedures for heightened security so that they can continue on when threats are not credible during the investigation, and strong communication procedures so that they can dispel the rumors, misinformation that tends to spread and become bigger than the threat itself.
Ali Rogin:
In terms of motivation, Deborah, you have worked with young people who have made some of these threats. You’ve counseled educators and students who have been the subject of them. Why is this happening more now?
Dr. Deborah Weisbrot, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Stony Brook Medicine: What we have is the contagion that spreads through social media. It spreads from one parent to another, from one student to another, and has taken on a whole new dimension of intensity in terms of the frequency that we’re seeing.
Nonetheless, several weeks after there has been a shooting or a threat that’s been highly publicized, you can see that these things sort of fade down to some degree. But threats are a fact of life now in schools, and they have a profound impact on the students that are there, to the teachers, to the functioning of schools.
As a psychiatrist, I’ve been involved with threat assessment way back since the years of Columbine. And that meant not just assessing the threat, but trying to understand who are these kids that are making threats, from the most benign threats to the most serious ones.
And the good news is that, as you were just hearing, the vast amount of threats are not serious. Nonetheless, they’re very disruptive, can be very frightening. And in fact, a number of students who make even what look like not serious threats or call them jokes or just passing moments of anger have in fact, in our studies and clinical work, significant concerns psychiatrically.
They may have depression, anxiety, attention problems, impulse problems. They may have been bullied. So the threat itself actually can at times be a signal to other problems, which is why you’re hearing that every threat needs to be still investigated and why that’s such a challenge when we have so many of them.
Ali Rogin:
Ken, how are schools and how are law enforcement officials dealing with these threats?
Kenneth Trump:
Well, we have to realize that the threats do disrupt the entire school community. We’re in a state of high ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety. Parents are on pins and needles. Educators and even law enforcement are very hypersensitive in some case, not just sensitive to these types of threats.
What we want to do is strike a balance of not overreacting, over arresting. That drains law enforcement resources from the community where there are valid, credible, active, violent threats and concerns, and puts those resources into schools. So a lot of times what we see is that schools are investigating.
And then when those cases do go to court, they’re calling not only for the proceedings to move forward, as they do for kids, but they’re also proceeding with restitution calls for paying back the cost of increased security, increased policing, the police time involved.
And the key thing is that parents and students need to understand and educators need to be a part of the conversation that once you press send, you can’t put the threat back into the smartphone. And our young people, who may initially interpret these as spontaneous actions and see them as a hoax or a joke, need to know that they’re going to face a ton of bricks, unfortunately today.
But we have to have those conversations with kids ahead of time to let them know that there are serious consequences and that you just can’t make these types of threats because it disrupts the entire school community. The other point is that we’re concerned that schools don’t overreact. We stress assess and then react, don’t react and then assess.
We constantly see schools closing unnecessarily, prematurely, prior to assessment, or even school leaders saying publicly, we determined the threat’s not credible, but we’re closing schools anyway. They’re not closing because of the threat. They’re closing because of a school community relations and communication anxiety type of issues. And that’s not justification to close your schools.
So we have to find a better way to communicate proactively to avoid overreacting. Assess and then react and not react and then assess.
Ali Rogin:
That is Kenneth Trump, school safety consultant and Dr. Deborah Weisbrot, professor of psychiatry. Thank you both so much.
Dr. Deborah Weisbrot:
Thank you.
Kenneth Trump:
Thank you.