GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — This week, West Michigan has seen a spike in school threats. Districts impacted include Central Montcalm, Decatur and Rockford schools, just to name a few.
In some of those cases, investigators believe "swatting" is to blame.
Swatting is a relatively new term. It's so new, the FBI established a national database this past June to track these kinds of crimes.
According to the Michigan Attorney General's Office, swatting is a prank call to 911 to try and dispatch law enforcement to a particular location.
But there's no real threat.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, each incident is estimated to cost law enforcement at least $10,000.
Getting caught comes with prison time: up to 20 years in Michigan for communicating a threat of terrorism.
FOX 17 spoke with experts on Wednesday to take a deeper dive into these recent school threats.
From Decatur to Central Montcalm to Rockford, a plethora of school threats this week led FOX 17 to talk with both the Kent County sheriff and a cybersecurity expert about what these types of threats could mean. Experts tell FOX 17 these incidents are likely more than just kids messing around.
“There’s a number of threats that are coming in. Some of them are a little more public because we’ve talked about them already. Like, school threats that are coming in," Kent County Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young said.
School threats like the one at Belmont Elementary School in Rockford on Monday aren't the only potential "swatting" calls Kent County is facing.
“Some of them aren’t schools. There’s a couple we’ve received that are private residences,” LaJoye-Young said.
These types of calls aren't even unique to Kent County.
“We’re not alone. This is happening all over the country,” LaJoye-Young said.
All over the country, and all over West Michigan, threats are coming in to area schools.
Decatur Public Schools evacuated on Tuesday due to a suspected threat from overseas.
Central Montcalm Schools were closed on Wednesday as officials investigate a threat there.
More broadly, these types of threats have caught the attention of national law enforcement agencies, the Kent County sheriff says.
“It is something the FBI is working on,” LaJoye-Young said.
It's something that's cause for concern, says cybersecurity expert Greg Gogolin from Ferris State University.
“A lot of people think it’s just a local issue, but a lot of those types of threats do come from international. They may be politically motivated,” Gogolin said.
Gogolin says typically, a wave of false threats or "swatting" calls last around a week in a specific area before moving on to elsewhere.
“Since it happens to schools so much, people jump to the conclusion that it’s a student making a prank or something like that. That does happen. But there’s so many other situations involved,” Gogolin said.
The Kent County sheriff says these threats are being vetted thoroughly to see if they're coming from overseas.
“There has been history in our nation of swatting calls coming from Russian terrorist groups. I don’t have the information to say these are indeed connected, but it certainly does have some of the indicators that there is a language difference in some of the text messages themselves,” LaJoye-Young said.
The Decatur Public Schools superintendent spoke with FOX 17 on Tuesday night about the evacuation the district faced that evening.
“There’s absolutely no reason for any of this to happen. We are understanding that the bomb threat is coming from somewhere overseas, someone who doesn’t know about Decatur. Even if they did, why would you want to do something like this? But I’m very proud of the students, the staff, for reacting so quickly. We were evacuated within minutes,” Superintendent Patrick Creagan said.
The Kent County sheriff says these threats don't appear to be kids messing around.
“This isn’t your old-school kids calling in threats,” LaJoye-Young said.
The KCSO says this is an issue that's crossing jurisdictions, and that they're regularly being briefed on the issue. The sheriff's department adds that the most difficult part of these types of calls is that they are taxing for first responders. Every response to a fake call means a real one is potentially left waiting for help.
