Nearly two dozen juveniles have been charged in connection with online threats made against schools in South Carolina since early September, the authorities said on Tuesday.
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According to the news release, the charges are part of a sprawling investigation into more than 60 threats targeting schools in 23 counties since Sept. 4, when the authorities say a 14-year-old gunman fatally shot two students and two teachers at his high school in Georgia.
Threats of mass violence have proliferated on social media since the Georgia shooting and have left law enforcement officials, who traditionally have been limited in their response to threats of possible violence, feeling exasperated. In Central California, several teens have been arrested in connection with threats. In Broward County, Fla., where 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland in 2018, officials said last week that they had arrested nine students since August in connection with threats of violence.
e; archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rlrUp
And in an unusual step, Sheriff Mike Chitwood of Volusia County, Fla., this week posted pictures and videos of an 11-year-old who was charged in a fake school shooting threat, part of a pledge to take a tough stance on the wave of threats.
That’s counter productive in a couple of ways
Not only is this sheriff’s publicity stunt harmful to children, but it also risks fueling contagion around both threats of violence and actual school shootings. It’s also vindictive. At a news conference last Friday, Chitwood said, “Every time we make an arrest, your kid’s photo is going to be put out there and if I can do it, I’m gonna perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid’s up to.”
This is exactly the kind of law enforcement message that reporters should examine and challenge, rather than mindlessly repeat.
This is exactly the kind of law enforcement message that reporters should examine and challenge, rather than mindlessly repeat.
I hate this sort of criticism. 90% of reporting is … reporting. It’s not editorializing.
Sorry, but I’ve gotta disagree. Even in things you might just call “reporting”, there are always choices that have to be made in what facts a journalist chooses to include or exclude and whose claims of facts get examined and complicated for the readers and which are just taken at face value and repeated, and journalists should be pushed to make those choices in an intelligent and responsible way.
e; added words to flesh out the same basic thought
Reporters are very often not experts in the things they report on. You don’t want them injecting their own personal thoughts into every article. Picture an anti-vax reporter reporting on a CDC briefing.
They’re reporting on what the guy said so that you know what was said. You can make the determination on whether it has merits or not and, in fact, you have. There are times where you need press to push back - that’s Journalism. But your average on-the-street reporter who isn’t an expert in everything isn’t equipped to do more than “observe and report” which is fine.
Reporters doing their jobs also report on experts’ views for an alternative viewpoint. Which they should do any time a cop says anything.
This period of online extremism is a little reminiscent of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
