A coordinated “swatting” effort may be behind hundreds of school shooting hoaxes that sent police rushing to quiet schools, where they smashed doors open and stalked the hallways armed with rifles, only to find terrified teachers and students.
Over the past year, more than 500 schools in the U.S. have been targeted in a coordinated campaign of fear, according to media reports and dozens of public records requests obtained by Washington Post.
A Miami SWAT team member (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The newspaper examined police reports, emergency call recordings, body-camera footage, and call logs connected to these types of incidents in 24 states, adding that the calls are now under investigation by the FBI.
In one example from February 7, police officers arrived at Nouvel Catholic Central High School Saginaw, Michigan, where they rammed the school’s double doors with a cruiser, smashing them open, and entered the school with rifles after having received an alert that an active shooting was in progress.
“Move, let’s move, let’s move!” one officer can be heard yelling at his colleagues in body camera footage from that day.
But when the officers checked the classrooms, they never found a schools shooter — only terrified teachers and students.
A hoax 911 call led police to the school. And that wasn’t the only school shooting hoax that transpired that day, Washington Post reports. At least eight other schools in Michigan were subjected to similar hoax calls that morning.
The question as to who was behind these calls has been troubling police departments across the country.
During these hoaxes, students have hidden in restrooms, closets, and nurse’s offices. They have barricaded doors with desks and refrigerators. Meanwhile, medical helicopters have waited on standby while trauma centers paused surgeries, as they anticipated receiving victims of a school shooting, and horrified parents have rushed to schools in search of their children.
These hoaxes are part of a larger issue known as “swatting.” This is when an anonymous caller places a call to authorities to alert them of a nonexistent crime, sending police or a SWAT team rushing to the scene, where nothing out of the ordinary is actually happening.
“This is a really serious crime,” Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said. “It places everybody in a situation of potential danger to have police officers rushing into a school.”
Police reports and recordings reviewed by Washington Post reveal that many of these calls have followed a pattern.
The call usually involves a male voice claiming to be a teacher who is inside the school, informing authorities that multiple people have been shot. He says he is in a particular classroom or a restroom, and begs the police to hurry.
When police try to track where these fake school shooting calls are coming from, they run into obstacles, as the caller has used a free internet-calling service that allows anyone with an email address to make calls that appear to be coming from a U.S. phone number, Washington Post reports.
The report added that in at least 12 states, these hoax callers have used TextNow, a free-calling resource in Canada that says it tries to prevent bad actors from using its service.
TextNow’s co-founder, Derek Ting, said in a blog post in August that the company “does not condone the use of our platform for harassment, fraud or other illegal activity that jeopardizes public safety.”
“However, when serving millions of people of various backgrounds and needs, you cannot solve every challenge with the biggest hammer you can find,” he added.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.