John Matthews
WMAL.com
PALMER PARK, MD — (WMAL) Prince George’s County Police Chief Hank Stawinski says more arrests are expected in a rash of social media threats of violence against several schools – not only in Prince George’s, but across the area.
County police arrested one student at Parkdale High School in Riverdale on Monday.
“We are currently working with the FBI to track down a few more leads,” Stawinski told News Channel 8 Tuesday. “We made an arrest yesterday, and we anticipate being able to make additional arrests in the next 72 hours,” he added.
There have been threats in recent days to schools in several jurisdictions, including Fairfax, Montgomery and Arlington Counties, among others. Police in most places have stepped up visible security as a precaution, though Fairfax County police dismissed the threats there on Monday, saying they were not credible.
Stawinski says social media has changed the game in terms of how quickly rumors and threats can spread.
“If you go back to my day, someone would pull the fire alarm in the school, and you’d evacuate the school and that would be localized. But now, they believe making these threats through social media will get them to the same place. They’ll be out of school for a day, but what they don’t realize is that they’re creating actual national chaos,” he says.
As a result, police are asking anyone who sees a threat come across Facebook or Twitter or other forms of social media, to NOT forward it, but instead call police and allow them to take care of it.
“When we have to go back through several iterations of that threat, that delays the time we have between becoming aware of it, assessing it and being able to make an apprehension,” said Stawinski.
People who make threats foolishly believe they can do so anonymously without fear of being caught, said Stawinski. He says that may be true for civilians, but with the resources of police and the FBI investigating, so-called “anonymous” apps cannot protect the guilty for very long.
Copyright 2016 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: KPTV via CNN)
