Updated
The Bergen County Prosecutor, with the cooperation of the originator of the suspicious Facebook site, has determined no threats were made. The content of the site, combined with comments posted, gave a false impression of the intent.
Original Story
Columbine, Colorado 1999
News reports covering the cyberspace incident where students from Indian Hills and Ramapo were allegedly being elicited to partake in “violent activities” at the schools on December 1st is still under investigation. There has been a lack of specifics available to the public as Facebook.com removed the offending page promptly from it’s site, but police and county officials are working to determine the origins.
Terrorist threats to schools are often the result of moronic behavior by students, but too often they come from disturbed minds intent on bringing death and destruction to a peaceful community. The Columbine incident in 1999 is one which is seared into American conscious along with the Virginia Tech shootings, but the first major mass murder attack in school occurred in 1927 in Bath, Michigan when bombs killed 45 people, mostly children, in an attack on a grammar school. In the Michigan incident, it was a school board member and not a student who committed the crime.
Although there is nothing to indicate there is any danger, the act of disturbing the school community’s mission of education in the described manner can fall under the definition of a terrorist threat. In a different era, such behavior may have been looked upon through the prism of youthful mischief. The last decade of violent acts in schools no longer allows society to assume a charitable disposition, and law enforcement is responding seriously.
Bath, Michigan 1927
In the last week alone, schools across the nation have dealt with similar disruptions to their educational systems. New York, Wisconsin, Florida, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California, West Virginia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, and now New Jersey have all been in the news regarding their need to respond to threats.
Many schools, like those in the FLOW area, begin preparing students in the lower grades for situations that might require a lock-down. Students and teachers conduct drills, and plans are in place should the school grounds be subject to a hostile attack. It is now becoming as common as a fire drill in terms of being a part of the safety requirements of a school. Lock-down procedures were recently implemented in Leonia High School after a 45 caliber bullet was found.
Although the Ramapo/Indian Hills incident may have only been an idiotic effort to extend the Thanksgiving weekend by an additional day, school and police officials need to respond. The law on terrorist threats in NJ is described as “..threatens to commit any crime of violence with the purpose to terrorize another or to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly, or facility of public transportation, or otherwise to cause serious public inconvenience, or in reckless disregard of the risk of causing such terror or inconvenience.”