The phrase struck me as perfect when a Tucson police sergeant mentioned it Tuesday.
“Report it — don’t repost it.”
That’s what Sgt. Richard Gradillas recommended in response to the wave of online threats that have hit schools in the Tucson area and across the country.
The threats thrive on and are amplified by our anxious forwarding to friends and acquaintances. As a result, thousands of kids have stayed home, or have headed to school with heavy anxiety that in almost every case was undue.
“In reality, this is kids who are creating these posts because they don’t want to go to school,” Gradillas said. “I don’t think these kids are understanding what they’re doing, the hysteria they’re creating.”
Many have used the same photo of a gun used in threats elsewhere in the country but they are adapted to each new area where the photo is used. So, for example, a threat investigated by Tucson police listed nine area schools — some district schools, some charters — as being targeted “tmr (tomorrow) at 11 to 2.”
Schools all over town have been affected by young people using the same template to make new threats.
Reacting to these, day after day, is no way to live, study and work, but it doesn’t have to be this way — at least not for long.
On Saturday, Oro Valley police arrested a 15-year-old who was behind a threat directed at Cañada del Oro High School. Tucson police have arrested three different youths accused of posting threats — one 11, one 13, and the other 15.
Not one of these kids actually planned to carry out an attack on the schools they threatened. In that sense, they’re commonly spoken of as “hoaxes.”
But that’s probably the wrong word for these threats, because they cause real-life disorder and fear.
TUSD parent Milta Ortiz told me she learned about the threats being shared among text groups that included her 11-year-old daughter. In sharing the threat, the kids were saying things like, “It was nice to have known you, in case we don’t see each other again,” Ortiz said.
Of course, it sounds overly dramatic — and it was in this case — but these kids know mass shootings have happened at schools all around the country.
“It’s happened in a lot of communities, so it could potentially happen. It’s something that we live with now,” Ortiz said.
As to her daughter, “Before this, it was not in her forefront. It was not something she actively thought about. Now I think it’s going to be something she thinks about, more than in the past.”
So, sharing an internet threat is robbing some kids of innocence, introducing them to a new form of anxiety. Of course, it wouldn’t have that effect except for the conditions of the country we live in. Our violence is real, and public conflict is heightened as we head into a presidential election.
“We don’t want to take this lightly, but by the same token, we don’t want to disrupt the flow of schools,” said Dustin Williams, the Pima County Superintendent of Public Schools. “They’re just massive distractions, especially when we’re already in a vulnerable area when it comes to gun violence.”
It’s hard for parents not to take the threats seriously. I know that last year, when I had a child at Tucson High, I was happy to see Tucson police respond overwhelmingly to a report of a student with a gun that turned out to be false.
At the Vail School District, Superintendent John Carruth has spent the last couple of weekends chasing down threats. They were vague threats that didn’t mention a Vail school, he said, but still led to absenteeism and disruption.
“I’m completely sensitive to the disruptive nature of these posts and the way it makes staff, parents and kids feel,” Carruth said. “It’s also critical to remember that schools, statistically are among the safest places to be, in large part because so many adults are there monitoring.”
While attacks on schools have occurred, we have to take some responsibility for being internet literate and proportional in our own responses. The threat I saw, which named nine different middle and high schools, makes no sense at all when you think about it. Nine different schools attacked on the same day between 11 and 2? Come on.
The same is true of the unrealistic alternative-intelligence-generated photos that older people pass all over the internet, thinking they’re real. The same is true of allegations that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating pets.
The people making the ridiculous posts shouldn’t have done so, but we should be smarter and more skeptical than to repost them. We shouldn’t believe, we shouldn’t share.
The same is true of these threats: We should report them to police or the schools, not repost them, not pass them on to all our friends.
Reporting is having an effect: Students have been arrested all over the country for making these threats. That could well become a deterrent. But we also need not to overreact ourselves in order to keep our community’s children focused.
“These things just hold us down like an anchor,” Williams noted. “Once you have a distracted mind, you don’t have a learning mind.”
