Should I stay or should I go? Combined shooting and bombing threats at schools.

Shooting...lockdown. Bombing...evacuate. What should a school do when both happen at the same time? When it's swatting, doing nothing is the best plan.

May 17, 2024

West Harrison High School and West Harrison Middle School in Lyman, MS received a 911 call on May 16 from a person claiming to be inside the school with guns and a bomb.

“My first thought is it’s an end-of-the-school-year prank, but you can’t treat it like that,” explained Sheriff Haley. “You have to treat these things serious.”

Actually, there are hundreds of swatting calls and thousands of school shooting hoax threats every school year. Most of them should not be taken seriously.

Lyman is a small town of 1,277 at the edge of the Gulfport-Biloxi metro area. When the chief of a small police department makes the decision about a school shooting threat being real versus a hoax, this can be a wildly inconsistent assessment process.

I just published a four part series about measuring noise (variability) during the school shooting threat assessments:

Noise is the unwanted variability in decisions made by experts who are looking at exactly the same information.

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.

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.

In Lyman, MS, the police chief assessed the 911 call as a 10 (high threat) based on the response to the school. Up the road in Richville, MS, the police chief might assess the same phone call as a 1 (no threat).

Bomb Threat Procedures

When there is a shooting threat, most schools respond by locking down (note: I believe that schools should be planning for evacuations during all types of emergencies including shootings).

Guidance from the Department of Homeland Security on bomb threats suggests that the credibility of a bomb threat should be assessed before taking action.

Based on the comments from the police chief and the multi-agency police response to the school, the 911 call was considered to be a “high threat”.

When police believe there is a high threat of a bomb, the school should be evacuated immediately to get students as far away from the bomb as possible. If a school has lockdown procedures for a shooting and evacuation procedures for a bombing, these two actions are in direct conflict when there is a threat of both (and like Columbine, many school shootings are planned as both shootings and bombings).

Outcome in Lyman

Students locked down for multiple hours, dozens of police officers responded from across the Gulf Coast, and parents left work to wait outside the school. Police searched the school room by room and moved students outside to the football field as they cleared the building. Those actions are the standard response for an “active shooter” but are not the appropriate response to a bomb threat.

The collective cost of this response in lost learning, lost wages for parents, and police resources is hundreds of thousands of dollars. On top of the economic costs, the students inside the school endured hours of emotional trauma.

Dealing with swatting

I’ve been tracking swatting since a project with The Economist last year.

Police departments have gotten much better at dealing with swatting since the problem peaked last January. Just this week, the FBI indicted a teenager for serial swatting of locations across the country. In February, a teen was arrested for hundreds of swatting calls to schools.

There is an established pattern and profile for these swatting hoaxes. Each instance that generates +100 officers responding to a school is perpetuating the cycle of letting a prankster elicit hugely disruptive action.

We don’t have the power to stop someone from making hoax 911 calls over the internet. We do have the power to decide how we respond to them.

Most important finding from noise study

Based on my study of noise, 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. Our most important finding is that no single person should be tasked with assessing the severity of a threat on their own.

David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and an internationally recognized expert. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Wisconsin Public Radio after the Mount Horeb Middle school shooting.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports

Discussion about this post