Investigating school threats; arming law enforcement with more information - WKTV
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Rome School Superintendent, Peter Blake, got a disturbing text message from a staff member, recently.
ROME, N.Y. -- Rome School Superintendent, Peter Blake, got a disturbing text message from a staff member, recently.
"A student posted something to Facebook, which was a picture that a friend of theirs sent to them privately. It was a picture of an empty hallway at our middle school with a caption that said 'I'm gonna shoot this place up tomorrow'," says Blake.
Rome Police Department's Juvenile Aid Division charged a 13-year-old who is not a Strough Middle School Student, with making a terroristic threat. Superintendent Blake says threats happen more frequently than many may realize.
"I would say schools on average investigate one of these claims a week," says Blake.
Oneida County Sheriff, Robert Maciol, has pretty much all local school superintendents' cell phone numbers, and, a sergeant and investigator dedicated to school issues. The Sheriff's Department has officers in 11 school districts. The Sheriff says "Raise the Age", which became fully operational two years ago, has made it difficult to charge teens in these scenarios.
"The consequences for saying something like that for someone who's 16 or 17, the consequences are not what they used to be and that doesn't help us, either," says Maciol. "If it's a violation, like harassment or disorderly conduct, short of us counseling them, that's about all we can do. We can't charge them anymore with anything."
The Sheriff says it's always difficult to say the words, "the threat was deemed unfounded."
"I'm always reluctant to say it's unfounded and we won't say that unless we're certain that it's unfounded because the last thing I wanna do is say something prematurely and have something occur," says Maciol. "It's not an easy call to make."
Soon, though, law enforcement might have access to more information, that would enable them to even more confidently make that assessment.
"We are currently working with some of the districts, you'll be hearing about this in the future, we're signing agreements with some of the districts so that basically they're confidentiality agreements so that we can have access to as much as we can about the student when we're determining if there is something for us to do here or not, so, we want to part of those threat assessment teams."
source: https://www.wktv.com/content/news/Investigating-school-threats-arming-law-enforcement-with-more-information-575925111.html
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