My One Hour in Lockdown
Dear Leading Ladies,
As I was sitting in my doctor’s office at Lahey in Danvers two days ago, finishing up a discussion about the state of my thyroid gland, she and I paused to listen to an announcement on the PA system. “There is an external situation. Everyone is advised to shelter in place. No one should leave the building until clearance is given.”
Clearly, neither my doctor nor I knew what to do with this information, so we just continued talking about my gland. She advised me that I could check out and make my appointment to see her in six months. I wished her well with the birth of her first child in September. She added that I should stay in the waiting room after I checked out. But we were both incredibly nonchalant about what we had just heard.
Entering the waiting room, I heard another patient speaking very loudly on her phone, telling a friend or relative that there was an active shooter at St. John’s Prep down the street and that the police were hunting for him. I asked the check out receptionist what she knew but she said she’d only heard the same, and then added, “What is our world coming to?”
The situation was still surreal to me as I walked toward the front lobby where nursing staff and security were locking the front doors and advising patients to stay inside for their own safety, while also telling them they could leave if they wanted. Many left. I was tempted. After all, St. John’s was a couple of miles down the street, we hadn’t heard of any injuries or deaths, my car was close by. But then I heard the voices in my head. They were the voices of my three grown kids saying, “You did what? Do you know what you would say to us if we took that kind of risk? Promise us you will never do that again!”
So I stayed. I’d left my phone in my car, so I relied on the others who were waiting to give me updates they gleaned from news reports and social media. The lockdown lasted only an hour and, as we know now, there was no active shooter. The threat of an active shooter was a hoax, also known as a “swatting call.”
Students rush out of St. John’s Prep after hoax call about active shooter last week.
For me, the aftershock was very real. I had never been in a lockdown, shelter in place situation before. While my first reaction was to carry on with what I had been doing, my second reaction was to find out as much as I could about what was going on. Only my third reaction was to register confusion, fear, powerlessness, and the need to speak to my loved ones.
And I was never in any real danger. That fact is not lost on me. Trust me. What I experienced is a microcosm of what children experience who are in an active shooter situation where the shooter is in front of them and actually shooting. I’m sure they bypass my first and second reactions and go straight to my third. And, for them, that third is magnified infinitely.
I got to go home after an hour or so, albeit feeling a little wobbly and surprised by that. But also angry. Angry at whomever felt compelled to call in the threat of an active shooter so that another school full of students can know what it feels like to be locked down and shelter in place. Angry that seemingly anybody can pick up the phone and make a threatening call. Stir the pot. Create more fear. Destroy security and trust.
St John’s students were running out of buildings, seeking safety in nearby homes. They thought they were running for their lives. Though they had been through practice drills, this experience had to be a new kind of frightening.
What makes people do something like this? Is it the same kind of disconnectedness and anger that pushes a person to shoot people? Authorities say that swat callers are often gamers, and certainly people who know their way around the world of hacking and secrecy. An FBI official said in November that they believe the wave of false threats focused on schools may be coming from outside of the country. Whoever the perpetrators are, their intentions are not good.
“Swatting is a form of harassment to deceive an emergency service provider into sending a police and emergency service response team to another person’s address due to the false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency,” according to the FBI in Las Vegas. “The individuals who engage in this activity use technology, such as caller ID spoofing, social engineering, TTY, and prank calls… Increasingly, the FBI sees swatters targeting public places such as airports, schools, and businesses” rather than individuals.
“Overall, swatting is made possible through a combination of technological and social factors, and is often carried out by individuals with malicious intent and a desire to cause harm or disruption,” according to MalwareBytes. Swatting costs municipalities thousands of dollars, pulls law enforcement workers away from other sites where they might be needed, and interrupts the learning at schools. Most important, though, swatting adds to the sense of terror and insecurity that is already so prevalent among our young people in our schools because of the real shooting incidents.
“A spate of threats and false reports of shooters have been pouring into schools and colleges across the country for months, raising concerns among law enforcement and elected leaders,” according to an AP report in March. On one day in March of this year, nearly 30 schools in Massachusetts received fake threats. Both Boston College High School and St. John’s in Shrewsbury have been targets of such hoaxes in recent days. NPR reported that 182 schools in 28 states received false calls about threats between Sept. 13 and Oct. 21, 2022. “Hundreds of cases of swatting occur annually, with some using caller ID spoofing to disguise their number. The goal is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to respond to an address.”
Swatting in schools has become so common that Education Week has created a template for a letter to send parents after such an event: “While this threat was a likely hoax, we understand the anxiety a situation like this can cause for our families, students, staff, and community,” that letter says. “Please know that our top priority is the safety and wellbeing of our students and staff. We take any and all reports of potential threats seriously, and we are making every effort to maintain an environment where students and staff feel safe.”
That’s great, but what is really needed is a way to prevent swatting of schools. Just as we need more extensive gun control laws to prevent mass shootings, our children’s mental health depends on finding ways to stop hoaxes. We must possess the technology to do it. And while gun control laws remain a partisan issue, this should not be.
We found a company online that “builds a suite of school surveillance tools that are primarily meant to mitigate false reports of threats at schools.” We don’t have the skills to evaluate this technology, but we are sure there are other companies with products that schools should consider purchasing as soon as possible, if they have not already. Find out what your school system is doing about swatting.
For the sake of the children.
Be safe,
Judy (she, her, hers)
Therese (she, her, hers)
Didi (she, her, hers)
Leading Ladies Executive Team