Earlier this month, the Claremont Police Department received a sober 911 report. The caller said he was taking someone prisoner in the Claremont McKenna College toilet and preparing to carry a bomb and shoot anyone he saw on campus.
The call sparked a massive deployment of law enforcement and SWAT team members, sending waves of panic throughout campus as students scrambled to find cover.
However, the crisis is fake and a report on Hoax 911, which was made in the hopes of creating a massive law enforcement response as a result of the “swatting” call. The incident came a day after a similar threat prompted the lockdown of Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital.
Swatting is a growing issue across states and countries. But California law can challenge people to hold them accountable for the disruptions that their threats cause.
While falsely reporting an emergency to 911 is a misdemeanor crime, lawmakers are calling for harsher penalties for threats that cause massive amounts of confusion and target vulnerable people, such as school children and hospital patients.
Under current law, threats are considered crimes only when committed against an individual, not against an institution such as a school or hospital. Now, state lawmakers support new laws to close that loophole.
“Now there’s a shortage of California law,” Sen. Susan Rubio (D. Bardwin Park) said in a statement. “Unless the threat names a particular individual, officials have limited options, even if the risk is clear.”
Rubio is the author of Senate Bill 19, known as the Safe Schools and Places of Worship Act, allowing prosecutors to claim individuals who pose credible threats to large-scale violence against schools and places of worship without having to name a particular person. The goal is to hold people responsible for creating intentional threats, and to recognize that even hoax threats can lead to massive amounts of panic, school closures and expensive law enforcement responses.
Parliamentary lawmaker Darshana R. Patel (D-San Diego) proposed a similar law, Parliamentary Bill 237. This also applies to threats placed on day care centers, hospitals and workplaces, closing the same loopholes.
“AB 237 makes clear that threats to schools, religious institutions, hospitals and other places are not underestimated and there are consequences,” Chula Vista Police Chief Roxana Kennedy said at a recent press conference to promote the law. “This bill forces law enforcement agencies to waste valuable resources and hold them accountable for instilling fear in schools and our communities.”
The main motivation for both proposed bills was an incident involving Shawl Creek Elementary School in San Diego.
The 38-year-old sent hundreds of emails threatening mass shootings at school, but the judge dismissed the case against him as the threat did not target a particular person, even if a gun and a school map were found at his home. Since then, prosecutors have reconsidered the case and named the school’s principal as a threat target.
“The claim that an entity cannot be threatened is not false,” Shawl Creek parent Jenny Bager testified on behalf of AB 237.
Rubio said they concentrated the bills on schools and places of worship because these are the most frequently threatened institutions. The senator said she also supported Patel’s vast bill. If both bills pass, she said legislators will work together to combine them into a single law.
In January 2024, the FBI reported that agents had launched over 100 threat investigations in over 1,000 agencies in 42 states over a one-month period.
The synagogue and Jewish Community Centre formed the largest category of target institutions, with over 400 people saying they were threatened during that period. The second most frequent target was schools and school districts, followed by a hospital-hospital network.
“These cases create fear and potentially dangerous interactions with law enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a 2024 bulletin. “The threat of summons and hoaxes is a daily occurrence, often in clusters across the United States, and is usually created to harass, intimidate, and/or retaliate against the intended target.”
Last month, the Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after detonating bombs, mass shootings and making more than 375 false calls, including the threat of “killing everyone he saw,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. However, many cases have been difficult to prosecute under current state law.
Claremont City spokesman Bevin Handel said the city police department’s goal is to file charges against the perpetrators of Claremont McKenna College Call, but there are several challenges.
“The biggest hurdle to retaining the perpetrators of taking responsibility for swatting calls is determining their identity,” she said. “As technology advances, callers will either mask their voice, phone number, or IP address (“spoofing”) or make false 911 calls more reliable. ”
He also said current state law makes it difficult to file a ferocious charge that “truly reflects the magnitude of the reaction and the fear and trauma they may cause.”
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