A new twist… on swatting and how it impacts your emergency preparedness plans
Here is a new threat sweeping the nation, impacting law enforcement, schools, and businesses. Please share this as appropriate to help control fear from these potential harassment and intimidation schemes. It involves a coordinated effort to call police departments alleging that a school shooting is underway. When police rush to the scene, they soon discover no shooting has occurred.
This crime is often called swatting, because those responding may include Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. Swatting isn’t a new crime and has historically been used to harass an enemy by having the police show up at their door. But this is a new twist.
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension saw a wave of these calls in succession on two separate days in the fall. Investigators discovered calls involving 20 schools in their state. Then they learned that at least 12 states were impacted this fall including 8 schools in Michigan in February.
Struggling with the same challenge, Louisiana Captain Shannon Mack told the Washington Post that she tracked calls made from numbers originating from a single email address and discovered hundreds of calls over two weeks made to schools, police departments, and restaurants in six states; Alaska, Maine, Ohio, California, Texas, and Louisiana. A handful of calls also were made to locations in Canada and Australia.
The calls to Maine came just 20 days after a real shooter killed 18 and injured 13 others in two locations in Lewiston, Maine. A sad demonstration of callousness.
More intriguing, most calls were traced to internet-calling services that allow anyone with an email address to make calls that appear to be coming from inside the United States. Investigative journalists at The Washington Post found many calls coming from a Canadian company that offered free calls using voice over internet protocol (VoIP).
Investigators have discovered advertisements for people willing to place swatting calls in succession, offering callers $100. The Washington Post found a growing network of opportunists just out to make money. Calls were made to send police to a restaurant in Wisconsin. Calls to an Illinois location were traced to an unsecured server in the home of a senior citizen in Texas.
The Louisiana police are working with the Ethiopian Federal Police, seeking to learn whether the same mode of criminal activity is responsible for bomb threats to schools that occurred last year and are continuing.
Will this continue? Very likely.
That means each business and school needs to have in its emergency protocols how people on the scene should respond and who should be notified when police come charging through their doors with guns out only to find there is no threat. I’d take the odds that most organizations don’t have this in their plans.
Know that police protocol will require them to go through the building to be sure, so make sure you determine how you will notify personnel, handle students or employees, and reach out to the leadership team.
As the investigations continue, know that any type of threat could be part of a coordinated terrorism or harassment scheme. We have seen coordinated bomb threats placed similarly throughout the country. And we aren’t alone. Just last month, Lithuania officials reported more than 750 emails that left thousands of students home from school after emails were sent to scores of schools in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Time to pull out your emergency action plan and give it an update.
In the meantime, I’m sending out the latest joint report on school crime from the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education. If you sign up for the newsletter below, I’ll know you’re interested in these things and as a thank you, I’ll send it right out to you.