Common terror attack threat closes down schools in Los Angeles but declared a hoax by New York City authorities
The same attack threat to two of United States’ biggest school systems yielded opposite reactions. While the schools in Los Angeles were shut down immediately on receiving the threat, the New York City dismissed the threat as another “hoax” after reviewing it.
The threats were sent to school officials on both coasts via emails that resembled closely to the kind of words used and spoke of extremists attacking public schools with guns, bombs and nerve gas. According to officials, the emails to schools in Los Angeles and NYC were sent from a server in Frankfurt, Germany, and possibly by the same person.
The school authorities in Los Angeles, which is only 60 miles away from San Bernardino where gunmen shot down 14 people only a fortnight ago, acted even before the school hours started on Tuesday, but the NYC authorities did not issue its comments before midday.
According to David Katz, a former special agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency, the decision taken by NYC school authorities was absolutely on the line.
"You do not under any circumstance take action unless the threat is corroborated," Katz told the CNN. "For example, if a high-rise office building gets a bomb threat in New York City, the police department is not going to come over and evacuate your building absent some credible information."
But what Ramon Cortines, the district superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School, did was a “big mistake,” according to Katz. Cortines reviewed the threat, which was emailed to a number of board members around 10 p.m. on Monday and which closed down around 1,100 schools on Tuesday. He urged parents to keep their children at home until he is absolutely sure that everything is safe.
“You do not under any circumstance take action unless the threat is corroborated," he said. "For example, if a high-rise office building gets a bomb threat in New York City, the police department is not going to come over and evacuate your building absent some credible information."
The New York version of the threat was reviewed by the Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, who decided that it was a “hoax.”
Later on Tuesday, authorities announced that the threat received by it the previous day was also most likely a hoax and that the schools would reopen on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.
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