RICHMOND, Va. -- An active shooter threat targeting multiple Virginia school districts Monday turned out to be a hoax, according to the FBI's Richmond branch.
In Greensville, the county's high school was notified of the threat by the Sheriff's office, which checked all classrooms and school grounds Monday. Similar situations panned out in Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Suffolk and several Northern Virginia counties.
Despite the threats turning out to be a hoax, law enforcement officials said every threat, regardless of when it comes or where it comes from, is taken seriously and will elicit a response.
"Initially going out of the gate, we're sending everybody," said Jonathan Miller, Caption of Community Services with Chesterfield County's Police Department.
Though Chesterfield schools were not a target, Miller said no school is immune to this kind of problem.
"There's always something happening within the schools this day and age," Miller said. "The swatting thing, I could see that coming to Chesterfield because we tend to follow some of these national trends sometimes."
Each word of a threat, whether it be online or called in, requires law enforcement to respond. In some cases, a law enforcement agency will notify a school district, while in other cases, a school district may notify law enforcement.
Officials must work with school administration to determine the threat's validity and next steps, as Virginia law requires schools have an emergency plan in place.
Miller said while there's no specific reason why swatting threats are happening, frequently the intention is to dry up officer resources.
"Within our community, a lot of this is generated by students, and they view it as more of like a harmless prank thing. Like, 'Haha, the police responded with all these resources,' but I don't think what they realize is that every time we do this, it ties up a lot of our police officers, and when these officers are tied up on these swatting calls, unnecessarily, that means that it doesn't allow them, give them, that freedom and latitude to respond to other members of our community who may have legitimate emergencies," Miller said.
A "harmless" prank like that has serious consequences. Per Virginia code 18.2-461, the punishment for falsely summoning or giving false reports to law enforcement can be punishable and could range from a Class 1 misdemeanor, all the way up to a Class 6 felony. Additional punishment, particularly if a juvenile makes the threat while at school, may vary based on the severity of the threat.
"It does raise a lot of anxiety when we have these swatting type calls, and it creates a lot of unnecessary fervor within our schools, a lot of unnecessary anxiety in the schools," Miller said.
In a statement to CBS6, Henrico County Police say it works to notify families in a timely fashion, but, "sometimes that communication does take time while [our] officers investigate the potential threat."
If parents receive notice of a potential threat from their student or receive an alert from the school system, Miller encourages them to remain calm and not make a dash to their student's school without proper permission.
"It doesn't help when we have parents self-deploying to these scenes and we've got officers that are armed, looking for these threats, and we have parents that we know aren't students, responding. It just adds to more of the confusion and we have to treat each one of these parents as a possible threat, right? We don't know, is a parent looking for a student, s this person part of the problem, the reason we're here? Then we're tying up resources with that."
Chesterfield Police say they will respond to school-based threats over weekends in order to determine the validity of a threat. Officials say anyone should still contact authorities if they are suspicious of any threat.
