A Florida sheriff is tired of “bogus” school shooting hoaxes plaguing his county – so tired, he’s got a slew of strong words and actions ready for students and parents alike: if you make a threat, “we’re coming after you.”
“You don’t stand up on an airplane and yell, ‘Hijack.’ You don’t walk into a movie theater and yell, ‘Fire.’ And you don’t get online and post that you’re going to shoot up a school,” Volusia County Sheriff Michael Chitwood said in a video on social media. “It’s going to get your ass sent to jail.”
Chitwood’s remarks follow the arrest of an 11-year-old middle school student in Port Orange, Florida, on Monday, who is being charged with a felony after making a bogus threat to commit a mass shooting at a middle school, authorities said. CNN is not naming the 11-year-old, who has been charged as a juvenile.
Beyond his striking words, Chitwood is turning heads for his approach of putting students’ – and their parents’ – names, mugshots and “perp walk videos” on social media for all to bear witness.
“Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire,” he told CNN Wednesday. “Under Florida law, I have every right to release your kid’s photo, the video of them being arrested and the police report, and I’m able to come after you, either criminally or civilly, for the cost of the investigation for endangering the child or endangering the welfare of a child.”
“And then we’re going to show pictures of you, the parents,” he said. “Because you don’t want to raise your kid, Sheriff Chitwood is going to raise them.”
Some parents of teens who killed people in school shootings are being held accountable. This includes the Georgia father facing second-degree murder charges in the Apalachee High School shooting and the parents of the teenager who killed four students in the 2021 Oxford, Michigan, school shooting, who were each sentenced to prison after being convicted of manslaughter – charges that in both cases, push the legal limits of parental responsibility for a child’s alleged gun crime.
On Wednesday evening Chitwood released two more videos online showing two teens in handcuffs being walked into jail for making school threats.
“This was RIGHT AFTER their school played our message about how serious we take these ‘jokes,’” he wrote on X. “Just unbelievable.”
School shooting threats have increased across the country and in frequency in the days following the fatal shooting at a high school in Winder, Georgia, the deadliest US school shooting since the March 2023 rampage at the Covenant School in Nashville, and the 49th this year.
For the 2022-2023 school year in Volusia County, Chitwood said the department had seen 357 written threats to kill or shoot up a school. As of Wednesday, they already had 282 and school has only been in session for three weeks this school year. In a 12-hour period from last Thursday night to Friday morning, the department had 54 threats come in, which were all found to be “bogus,” Chitwood said. The department has arrested 12 juveniles and confiscated 11 weapons so far, he said.
Some authorities are going beyond investigating school shooting threats – they’re holding students accountable. Students are facing charges this week in Kentucky, California, New Mexico, New Jersey, Missouri and South Carolina, in addition to the 11-year-old in Florida.
What students are “doing online could make them a victim of a crime or worse and on the flip side of that, you can end up with a police department officer knocking on your front door arresting your child,” he said, urging parents to be aware of what their child is saying online.
“(The 11-year-old) had written a list of names and targets,” Chitwood said in a social media post announcing the arrest. “He says it was all a joke.”
But after last Friday’s incident, Chitwood told CNN, he’s tired of the jokes.
“Go talk to the families who have lost a loved one in a school shooting,” Chitwood said during a news conference last Friday. “These little knuckleheads think it’s funny, go talk to those parents and see how funny this is. It’s not. We’re going to come and get you and we’re going to put you out for public embarrassment.”
Public shaming youth will ‘impact their lives’
Chitwood has not followed through on his promise to show students arrested for these threats in at least one case: On Sunday, the sheriff announced his office had arrested another teenager for making a “hoax threat” but said he chose not to film the “perp walk” because the student has autism.
The student was playing Fortnite when he allegedly threatened to “get some explosives and blow up” a Deltona high school, Chitwood wrote in a post on X.
“Here’s the thing. He has autism,” Chitwood said. “I am not going to perp walk this kid on video this time. He’s in custody with a felony charge, and will be facing the consequences of his actions.”
“My promise to publicly show others who make these threats still stands,” the sheriff said.
In a way, what Chitwood is doing is like bullying, Yalda T. Uhls, founder and executive director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and assistant adjunct professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, told CNN.
“To publicly shame someone in a way that’s permanent, that’s shareable … it has very lasting mental health effects, probably more extreme than traditional in-person bullying … it’s going to impact their lives,” said Uhls, who studies how media affects the social learning and behavior of preteens and adolescents.
However, for some youth the public shame and embarrassment may be enough to motivate them to change behaviors, Uhls said, if coupled with further support through empathy building or a change in school culture.
Without that secondary approach, Uhls said it could just backfire.
And because of the sense of permanency the internet brings, this is the kind of thing future employers or colleges will have access to, Uhls said.
“Fifteen years ago people were worried about drinking or traditional teenage behavior but now it’s about violence or sexism or racism and these kinds of things end up really hurting children and communities,” she said.
An uptick in school shooting threats nationwide
What’s happening in Florida isn’t happening in isolation, as reports and arrests due to school threats are popping up in various states.
Several students in Northern California were arrested this week for making shooting threats online, CNN affiliate KCRA reported.
“You will go to jail, you will go in handcuffs, and you’ll be taken out in front of all your friends and classmates,” Amar Gandhi, spokesperson for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office told the station. “We’re not worried about your feelings at that point. You’re going to go to jail. Don’t try to be a hero, don’t try to be a prankster amongst your friends. There are consequences to this.”
In New Jersey, Franklin Township Police said they will be charging a 10-year-old student in the area with causing a false public alarm after a video circulated on social media that “depicted a disturbing video of a school” in the district, the department said in a news release Wednesday. It was determined to be a potential threat so all district buildings activated their safety protocols – which included deployment of law enforcement officers to each of the schools in the area.
And in South Carolina, 21 juveniles were charged in connection with threats made against local schools this week, authorities said.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is aware of over 60 threats targeting schools throughout 23 counties since September 4, the agency, which was asked to assist with six school threat investigations, each in a different county, said in a news release Tuesday.
A possible cause for the uptick in violent school threats could be attributed to peer contagion, which happens when two people influence each other to behave or act in a certain way through aggression, bullying, weapon carrying and more, research says.
“On some level, by making it so public, it could become a badge of honor,” Uhls said. “There could be peers copying other peers.”