Colorado school leaders and officers react to string of "swatting" incidents that caused chaos
After a week marred by threats to schools, law enforcement and schools are thinking about the effect of a wave of apparent "swatting" calls sending police to schools all over Colorado.
"They're trying to cause chaos. They're trying to take away the essential time that we have with kids in schools. And just provide an environment where we're not safe anymore," said Jeff Pierson, executive director of Jefferson County's Department of School Safety.
He added, "the key I think is timing. The timing piece being, how can we vet it? How do we know if it is accurate or not while we're responding? Which really relies on the intel that we have of the incident itself."
At least several of the calls included faked gunfire. It put law enforcement in the position of rapid response.
At Littleton High School on Wednesday additional police arrived at the locked-down school in three minutes after contacting the school resource officer at the school to begin checking for problems.
"We still have to treat it as though it is a true and active threat. So we're not going in there with training dummy guns. We're going in there ready to address any threat," said patrol sergeant, Krista Dimock.
Many times, phony threats come in as a singular call she noted, while a real active shooter call would likely bring many calls in quickly. But in this state, the threats are unnerving.
"Colorado that's something that we've had to see time and again. You know, these active shooters in our schools and threats against our children," she said.
"Our job is to figure out how much of that are we going to let it impact what we do?" Pierson said.
In Jefferson County, with an extensive school camera network, the call center will bring up cameras right away.
"If you're not seeing aggression, if you're not seeing a lot of quick movement, you're just seeing everything going on as normal, begin to think, 'is this true, is it not? Is it happening in other areas of the building?'" asked Pierson.
After prior threats this week, four school threats made to Denver schools Friday did not result in lockdowns. Denver Public Schools said the calls were identical.
The question is what is the level of coordination of the plague of calls throughout the week?
"Individual calls or were those all built in some kind of a computerized system or a software that sent it out?" posed Pierson. "We're hoping the FBI and the task force are able to track that down and hopefully go after and figure out who these people are and set a good strong example or send a message that we're not going to tolerate it."
"There are other questions he noted that should be asked, like what if it is a distraction? Schools and law enforcement are in a difficult spot. "What do we do if this continues to happen? But the resounding response is that we have to continue to respond to it as though it's day one and it's never happened before," Dimock said.