Thursday, December 12, 2024
An otherwise ordinary morning in late September was upended at Willow Road School after staff received a chilling call — a person was outside toting a gun. The school went into immediate lockdown and triggered lockout procedures for the district’s other three schools — Howell Road, James A. Dever, and Wheeler Avenue.
At Willow Road, teachers sealed their doors. Students piped down and stayed out of sight. Nassau County police rushed in, hunting for evidence of the alleged gunman, but it soon became clear to investigators that neither the person nor his weapon could be found inside or outside the school — because he or she did not exist.
Shortly after school returned to normal, Superintendent Judith LaRocca informed parents that the district had likely been a target of swatting — a growing trend of hoax emergency calls intended to provoke a heavily armed police response toward unsuspecting individuals or locations.
The gun scare was likely part of a troubling wave of bogus emergency calls at Nassau County schools that has vexed police and shaken entire communities around it. That same day, the police department’s alert system confirmed responses to “multiple shooting threats,” all later deemed false.
All told, from August 1 to early October, the department received 114 unfounded school threats, according to Nassau County Police Department spokesperson Scott Skrynecki.
“This is a significant increase from last year,” he said, but did not disclose last year’s total. People may be tempted to view swatting on the same level as a cruel prank, noted Lauren Shapiro, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But “it’s a serious crime,” she said. “And it can have this domino effect of harm where it can, in the case of schools, upset parents, children, and faculty, police can shut down the neighborhood, block off traffic, and nearby businesses can lose revenue.”
Top county police officials warn these phony situations orchestrated by swatters are competing for the police’s resources, time, and attention with genuine emergencies.
“Police officers, medics, emergency services officers, and bureau of special operations officers all must respond to these threats,” said Skyrnecki. “And that makes them temporarily unavailable to respond to legitimate calls for service.”
When presented with a call that falsely claims the lives of students and staff are in jeopardy, police can’t help but respond even if it means being roped into an illegally dangerous game. There is simply no time to distinguish the false from the real.
“We respond to all school threats assuming they are real,” said Skyrnecki. “We cannot take the risk that we become complacent and fail to respond to an actual emergency.”
There is also another major obstacle, noted Shapiro: “Very few of these swatting calls actually result in finding who these perpetrators are and who might be doing it multiple times.”
With some forethought and ingenuity, swatters can exploit any number of cyber technologies — a Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP, a virtual private network or VPN, or AI voice technology — to mask their identity and erase their digital footprint from police.
Tony Sabaj, an executive at Check Point, an international cyber security provider, says with “the rise of voice and texting apps” it has never been easier for individuals to anonymously play these dangerous tricks on police.
Using these apps requires only a basic account setup with an untraceable email, he explained, and by adding a VPN—a service that hides the user’s location and IP address—the caller becomes nearly impossible to track.
“There are also services out there in the dark web that will do swatting for you for a very low fee,” said Sabaj.
Whether it’s a VPN or some more nefarious provider, “it’s easy for digital users to use these services without a lot of money or having a whole lot of technical background themselves.”
And even when police identify possible swatting culprits, their ability to investigate or make arrests is often severely restricted, according to Shapiro.
“Detectives, for example, could request the usage and connection logs from whatever VPN company is being used by these swatters which will require them to issue a warrant,” said Shapiro. “But the problem is not all virtual private networks keep track of activities that are used by their users, so that makes it even more difficult.”
To stand a fighting chance against swatting, Shapiro points to the long-standing struggle to make “swatting” a specific crime under federal law.
“If you don’t have a particular law, you are not keeping track of how often swatting occurs or prosecuting cases under a swatting law as you would for rape,” said Shapiro. While the FBI created a national database to track swatting, it’s up to individual departments to file that information. There is also a glaring lack of funding to train 9-1-1 operators to distinguish fake from real emergency calls, cyber security infrastructure for law enforcement, and support for those affected.
“We don’t have funds for the victims, even though people who are swatted are innocent and that’s traumatic,” she said.
Have an opinion on this article? Send an email to jlasso@liherald.com.
