Florida sheriff shames 2 more kids after school threats. Is it a good idea?

The suspected Georgia high school shooter was investigated for online threats last year, but he was not arrested. Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood is making good on his promise to arrest and publicly shame children who make school shooting threats. Days after he drew national attention for “perp walking” an 11-year-old boy, the Florida sheriff posted photos and videos of two more teenagers accused of making threats. Chitwood said the teens, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, were taken into custody after posting threats to Snapchat on Wednesday. According to the sheriff, the 17-year-old sent a photo that said “Imma shoot up the school” with a picture of her school laptop. “We are wasting time and resources on this,” Chitwood said in a Facebook post. After the mass school shooting that left four people dead at Apalachee High School in Georgia earlier this month, law enforcement agencies all over the country have been responding to an onslaught of school shooting threats. Students have faced charges for such threats elsewhere, but Chitwood’s unusual experiment in public humiliation as deterrence has been met with mixed reactions. Some said the 11-year-old’s age didn’t matter, and he should face consequences consistent with the seriousness of the threat. But Chitwood’s experiment defies norms in the juvenile justice system, prompting some experts to be concerned about unintended consequences. “I can understand the frustration and the need for law enforcement to have some kind of response, but whether that should be a child doing a perp walk, I would question whether that’s going to achieve the goal of preventing further threats,” said Deborah Weisbrot, a child psychiatrist and professor at Stony Brook Medicine who has researched students who make shooting threats. Students, parents put on notice: Threats won’t be tolerated Law enforcement officials in Volusia County have been working “around the clock” to investigate and address dozens of threats against local schools that were found not to be credible. But the response costs thousands, Chitwood said. “Starting Monday, your little cherub, we’re gonna start publishing his face and doing perp walks with him when we take him into custody, and then we’re going to show pictures of you, the parents,” he said. Florida juvenile records are kept confidential, but may be made public if the child is charged with a felony, as in the case of the minors Chitwood has taken into custody. The 11-year-old who was “perp walked” and posted online on Monday was accused of making threats to commit a shooting at Creekside or Silver Sands Middle School in Port Orange, a city just south of Daytona Beach, Florida. He told investigators that the threat was a joke, as did the teens arrested Wednesday, the sheriff’s office said. In recent weeks, local news outlets and police departments have reported that threats prompted lockdowns or cancelled classes in Maryland, Alabama, Tennessee and several other states. “On an emotional level, these threats understandably led to heightened anxiety among students, staff, and parents,” Superintendent of the Southern Boone County R-1 School District Tim Roth said in an emailed statement. Students who make school shooting threats usually have underlying histories of psychiatric problems that require treatment or histories of abuse, according to Weisbrot’s research that looked at students who were referred for threat assessments over a two-decade span. None of those students went on to become school shooters, but the presence of a diagnosis alone concerned Weisbrot much less than whether the child had access to weapons. “The good news is the vast majority of kids who make threats, they’re transient threats,” Weisbrot said. In other words, the threats don’t indicate a potential for actual harm, and may have been made as jokes, figures of speech or expressions of in-the-moment emotions, according to the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines. “Whether posting their pictures online… is in some cases going to actually feed into some kids’ desire for their moment of fame,” she said. “Or even worse, in certain cases where we don’t really understand why the student has made a threat, lead to them being traumatized, humiliated and then further ostracized in school, and that necessarily isn’t going to help either.” Florida State University criminology professor Daniel Mears told the Associated Press that the actions go against the concept of juvenile justice, which usually keeps records confidential so kids can have a “second shot in life.” In response to USA TODAY’s questions about the concerns, Chitwood pointed to a dramatic increase in school shooting threats in Florida. “Unfortunately, threats in Florida are five times higher than they were last year at this time,” Chitwood said in an emailed statement. The sheriff told AP that he doesn’t know if public embarrassment is going to work, but he felt he had to act. “Something has to be done,” Chitwood said. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno paraded a 10-year-old boy in front of cameras last year for allegedly making a threat, and two middle schoolers in 2021 for allegedly planning a school attack, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported. In that case, experts told the News-Journal they’d never heard of a kid so young being perp walked by any law enforcement agency. He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Florida International University criminology professor Suman Kakar said at the time. “To go to that extent with exposing him to the media in handcuffs, putting this picture everywhere – the officer is very proud of himself and wants to be known all over the nation as the one protecting our children, but it has the opposite effect.” If anything to deter the shooting threats comes from this, Weisbrot thinks it may prompt parents to pay closer attention to what their kids are doing and saying online. This is a complex problem that will require a multi-layered approach with involvement from family, the school community, psychiatric help and law enforcement, she said. “The important thing is just not taking it at face value, assessing if the threat is dangerous or not, and then moving on,” Weisbrot said, but “looking below the surface to try to understand what’s going on with this particular individual that would lead them to make this particular choice.” – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/09/19/florida-school-shooting-threats-arrest-perp-walk/75289621007/