School shooting threats are part of a cycle. Most are jokes and hoaxes.
A Florida sheriff thinks 'perp walking' kids is a deterrent. Research shows juvenile justice involvement is the strongest correlate to being a habitual offender and incarcerated as an adult.
High-profile school shootings and subsequent public attention to threats comes in cycles. Below are links to Op Eds about school shooting threats that I co-wrote in 2021 when thousands of threats shut down schools after the Oxford, MI shooting. I also conducted a study of why police are so inconsistent in how they assess an obvious jokes or hoaxes.
Schools across the country are dealing with school shooting threats in the aftermath of the planned attack at Apalachee High. A Florida sheriff (elected official) made national news this week by “perp walking” and sharing the mug shot of an 11-year-old student who made a threat that he had no capability to carry out.
"Since parents, you don't want to raise your kids, I'm gonna start raising them," Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said at a news conference Friday. "Every time we make an arrest, your kids' photo is going to be put out there and if I can do it, I'm gonna perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid's up to."
"We’re gonna have a poster out, I’m gonna show you every kid that’s been arrested and where they go to school. And from there on out, we’re going to publicly shame them and their parents," the sheriff told reporters. "So parents, do your job. Don’t let Sheriff Chitwood raise our kids. This is absolutely ridiculous."
While this looks like a serious picture, these are toy airsoft guns (which is another issue that needs attention because toy replicas of real guns are being sold online to kids).
The most common way that a student is caught with a gun on campus is a tip from another student. I strongly believe this Florida sheriff's policy is extremely shortsighted and misguided because this treatment may deter other students or parents from reporting a classmate.
There is no evidence that public shame is a deterrent to an 11-year-old child who probably doesn't even understand the impact of their actions. A formal arrest, legal fees, and expulsion from public school all create a huge financial burden for a family. In criminology research, being arrested as a juvenile has the strongest correlation to being a lifelong criminal offender as an adult so taking this harsh and public action against children is probably creating future criminals.
If an 11-year-old kid is making hoax school shooting threats, there is a need for child services, family services, counseling, and an even more supportive academic environment. When schools and police focus on arrests and zero tolerance policies, the outcome can be completely innocent students having their lives upended by mistake (see: After a Lewisville ISD student overheard a boy say, “Don’t come to school tomorrow,” she ended up threatened with suspension).
The biggest reason that an elected sheriff jumps on an opportunity to make national news is because there is a lack of understanding and standardization about how to assess with school shooting threats. I’ve written extensively about this problem (see below). In my interview with Stephen Dubner for Freakonomics Radio, we discussed why there’s no playbook for assessing threats and no common system to report them.
Education Week Op Ed (2021): Assessing Shooting Threats Is a Matter of Life or Death.
Threats of school violence, credible or not, can result in serious consequences for the students making them. And this year, students are making them more and more. After the shooting at Oxford High School, scores of Michigan schools were closed because of threats, causing further despair and disruption to families still trying to process why a local child would ever kill their classmates.
With each threat investigation, school officials must weigh one student’s future against the health and safety of an entire school community. A wrong decision either way could change lives forever. Most school personnel do this without any formal training or standardized guidance. And the Oxford school shooting may set a precedent for criminally charging school staff for making the wrong decision.
Rather than criminally charge school officials, we must recognize how under resourced schools and communities are to both assess and respond to threats and provide the training, guidance, and resources necessary to keep students safe. At a time when the pandemic has exacerbated many risk factors for violence, schools need all the help they can get to hear students’ cries for help and take the right actions before the next, sadly predictable, tragedy occurs.
Full article on Education Week.
K-12 Dive (2023): Real or hoax? Intention of 40% of school shooting threats unknown
Although there has been research about school shootings and behavioral threat assessments, this publicly available study is the first empirical review of school shooting threats, said co-author David Riedman, an independent researcher and founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.
The researchers examined 1,000 school shooting threats over four school years from 2018 through 2022. There is no government agency that collects, reviews and reports on school shooting threats, so the study’s researchers used Google News alerts to find news reports about shooting threats to K-12 schools in the U.S. over that four-year period.
One finding from the study that stood out to Riedman was that the most common outcome when a person made a threat was that the individual was arrested and charged with a felony. For nearly 80% of cases with known outcome data, 63.7% of the cases showed the person making the threat was arrested. When arrests were made, in 87% of the cases, the person was charged with a felony.
Riedman said when those outcomes are compared to data showing that most threats were jokes or of unknown intentions, there needs to be more consideration about the consequences of arrests and formal charges. He said research shows correlations among a young person’s formal justice involvement and potential for becoming a lifelong offender.
“When we’re talking about teenagers, and something that’s a very strong correlate to their success across their entire life course, we should be erring with lots of caution,” Riedman said.
My peer-reviewed study. Peterson, J., Densley, J., Riedman, D., Spaulding, J., & Malicky, H. (2024). An exploration of K–12 school shooting threats in the United States. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 11(2), 106–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000215
LA Times Op Ed (2021): The rise in school shooting threats is alarming — and a cry for help
School leaders found themselves asking: Is it better to overreact than not react at all? This is the impossible situation they are facing with increasing regularity. Closing schools for a hoax unnecessarily spreads fear and curtails valuable instructional time. Not closing risks the deadly consequences of ignoring the warning signs of danger, which law enforcement has done all too frequently in the past. Out of an abundance of caution, some schools did close. Many ramped up police patrols. Parents also chose to keep their children home.
Weighing how to respond to threats is getting harder because threats of violence are rising at the same time schools are dealing with an unprecedented number of shootings — 205 so far this year.
In September 2021, a record 151 school shooting threats were made, up from a three-year average of 29 for the month. This means a staggering 63% of all shooting threats made at the start of the school year since 2018 were made this year. Half of those threats came via social media and 28% were made by someone who had access to a gun.
Faced with an unprecedented volume of threats, schools need resources to do more than simply train students to run, hide and fight for survival, while law enforcement and community partners need tools to effectively assess social media threats and respond appropriately. Threats of violence are a critical moment for interceding in the lives of students who need help. By funding school-based mental health services and systems for crisis response, we can prevent next September from becoming another record year for school shooting threats.
School Shooting Threats Study
Noise is the unwanted variability in decisions made by experts who are looking at the same information. Translation: Two people see the exact same thing differently.
While we expect police officers to consistently assess school shooting threats, our study found there is a significant amount of noise—or unwanted variability—in their decisions. We surveyed 245 police officers directly involved in school threat assessments to rate the severity of six fictional scenarios and select how they would respond.
For five of the six scenarios, threat severity scores ranged from 1 to 10 with averages between 3.5 and 7.5. This means that some officers assessed a scenario as “10” (high threat) while the entire group of 245 officers collectively rated it as 3.5. Inversely, some officers rated a scenario as “1” (no threat) while the aggregate group score was 7.5.
Part 1: Impact of 'noise' on assessing school shooting threats
Part 2: Measuring 'noise' when assessing school shooting threats
Part 3: Results from 'noise audit' when assessing school shooting threats
Part 4: Ways to reduce noise when assessing school shooting threats
Podcast Summary: Noise audit for assessing school shooting threats
How does OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o assess school shooting threats compared to human police officers?
Most Important Finding on Assessing Threats
Individual police officers made wildly inconsistent assessments when deciding the severity of school shooting threats. This has real world consequences because missing a threat can be deadly while overreacting unnecessarily shuts down a school.
Having multiple officers evaluate a threat individually and then using an aggregate of their scores yields more consistent results. This process has the potential to be augmented by artificial intelligence to further standardize assessment criteria.
Our most important finding is that no single person should be tasked with assessing the severity of a threat on their own. Along those same lines, an elected sheriff shouldn’t get to decide if an obvious joke or hoax will ruin the rest of an 11-year-old student’s life.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.