Colleges in Texas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere were shaken last week by a series of “swatting” incidents in which callers falsely reported active shooters to the police. The calls, similar to fake bomb threats, are designed to provoke an intense law-enforcement response and stoke fear on a college campus.
Callers seize upon the real threat of gun violence on campus to send community members into a panic. Recent mass shootings at Michigan State University and the Covenant School, in Nashville, have left many colleges and K-12 schools on edge.
Last week’s fake calls prompted some students to speak out about what they saw as shortcomings in their campus emergency-response protocols. University of Pittsburgh students held a protest last week criticizing the institution for delaying the campuswide alert about the active-shooter call, even though it was a hoax.
On top of the psychological trauma these attacks can cause, there’s also the possibility of physical harm. At Harvard University this month, campus police officers held four Black students at gunpoint in their dorm after the police received a false report of an armed individual in their suite.
The Chronicle spoke with Robert Evans of Margolis Healy, a campus-security consulting firm, to discuss how colleges should respond to swatting incidents. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Even if an active-shooter call is a hoax, the college must respond as though it’s a real threat. What is the right response?
From the time that the calls are received, whether it’s in dispatch or through the administrative lines, there has to be a quick evaluation of its credibility. The response has to be structured as if this situation is taking place, until the response can determine that it’s not. That in and of itself presents a variety of different challenges for faculty, staff, and students, as well as for the first-response organizations that are responding to these calls for service.
How can colleges improve their responses to potential active-shooter situations, keeping in mind that they could be real?
There has been a common pattern with some of the calls — it involves something happening in a building, or there is background noise that folks are hearing when the calls are coming in, or the calls are computer-generated. Colleges need to make sure that they are staying in touch with the evolving trends. They need to make sure that the alert notification takes place. But very quickly, if they determine that there is no credibility to the call, then the campus needs to be quickly informed of that as well. The risk associated with this is that you’ve got law-enforcement officers and fire and EMS personnel responding to these calls with lights and sirens at times. And there could be unintended consequences associated with that.
Speaking of unintended consequences, how do these swatting calls affect students, faculty and staff?
Just this last weekend, we saw four mass shootings take place across the country. Everybody is on pins and needles about when the next one is going to happen. Anytime that you’ve got law-enforcement officers responding to an active-shooter threat, they are quickly moving to that location. Guns are being gotten out of the trunks of their cars and they’re maybe making entry into buildings, and injuries can happen with that type of response.
There may be faculty, staff, and students with medical-related issues who come into these environments with stress and trauma in their backgrounds and their lived experiences. That can have long-term mental-health impacts as well. So it’s important for colleges across the country to not only respond appropriately, but after the incident takes place, officials must make sure that appropriate mental-health resources for faculty, staff, and students are provided — so that they can mitigate some of those risks of long-term mental-health issues.
Part of the reason that these swatting calls have been so scary is that there is widespread fear about gun violence on campuses. What changes have colleges made to their safety apparatuses in recent years to prepare for the threat of mass shootings?
Law enforcement and our entire first-response community have done a really, really good job in preparing for these incidents. There’s collaboration that takes place between agencies, and then planning and training and exercising. As we saw in some of the most recent incidents, law enforcement has deployed in a really quick fashion that has, in my opinion, significantly reduced the level of casualties associated with these incidents.
Anytime that our agencies can sit with faculty, staff, and students and inform them about what the law-enforcement response is going to look like and what they should be doing when incidents take place — it really is a community-caretaking approach. We all have a role to play. And unfortunately, since a very young age, our kids in the K-12 environment have been doing this kind of preparation for years before they even get into colleges and universities. So we just need to make sure that we continue to stress the collaboration.
Another challenge is the way that these folks are perpetrating these tragic events. They get better at doing what they do. And the threat paradigm changes, and they change the way they do things based upon law-enforcement response. So we’re always going to have to continue to evolve how we prepare and respond and recover from these tragedies.
When swatting calls come in, that often inspires a law-enforcement response, or someone fires a gun, or someone gets injured running out of the building. Is there any way that colleges can lower the risk of consequences by responding units while also treating a threat call very seriously?
The more folks can be familiar with how to respond, the quicker that campus-safety and law-enforcement agencies can evaluate the risks associated with the threats. That’s the key: A well-informed faculty, staff, and student body and community is a group of folks who feel like they can manage and do what they need to do to safely get through a situation. When folks are left to not know, to have to wait for information, then the stress and anxiety only gets escalated.
