Earlier this month, the Claremont Police Department received a chilling 911 report: A caller said they were holding someone captive inside a Claremont McKenna College restroom, carrying a bomb and preparing to shoot anyone they saw on campus.
The call triggered a massive deployment of law enforcement and SWAT team members and sent waves of panic coursing through campus as students scrambled to find cover.
But the crisis was fake, the result of a “swatting” call, a hoax 911 report made in the hope of generating a large law enforcement response. The incident took place one day after a similar threat prompted a lockdown of Loma Linda University’s Children’s Hospital.
Swatting is a growing problem across the state and country. But California law can make it challenging to hold people accountable for the chaos their threats cause.
Although falsely reporting an emergency to 911 is a misdemeanor offense, lawmakers are seeking tougher penalties for threats that cause mass disruption and target vulnerable populations such as schoolchildren or hospital patients.
Under current law, threats are only considered to be a crime when they are made against an individual — not an institution, such as a school or hospital. Now, state legislators are backing new legislation to close that loophole.
“Right now, California law falls short,” state Sen. Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) said in a statement. “Unless a threat names a specific individual, officials have limited options, even when the danger is clear.”
Rubio is the author of Senate Bill 19, known as the Safe Schools and Places of Worship Act, which would allow prosecutors to charge individuals who make credible threats of mass violence against schools and places of worship, even if they don’t name a specific person. The goal is to hold people accountable for making intentional threats, recognizing that even hoax threats can cause mass panic, school closures and expensive law enforcement responses.
Assemblymember Darshana R. Patel (D-San Diego) has proposed similar legislation, Assembly Bill 237, which would close the same loophole and also apply to threats made against day-care centers, hospitals and workplaces.
“AB 237 will make it clear that threats against schools and religious institutions and hospitals and other locations will not be taken lightly and there are consequences,” Chula Vista Police Chief Roxana Kennedy said at a recent news conference to promote the legislation. “This bill empowers law enforcement to hold individuals accountable for wasting valuable resources and instilling fear in schools and in our community.”
A major motivator for both proposed bills was an incident involving Shoal Creek Elementary School in San Diego.
A 38-year-old man sent hundreds of emails threatening a mass shooting at the school, but a judge dismissed the case against him because the threats didn’t target a specific person, even though a gun and a map of the school were found at his home. Prosecutors have since refiled the case, naming the school principal as the target of the threats.
“The claim that you cannot threaten an entity is beyond false,” said Shoal Creek parent Jenny Basinger while testifying on behalf of AB 237. “We are the entity. We are Shoal Creek Elementary. The students, the staff, and the community are the ones left picking up the pieces of the threat.”
Rubio said she focused her bill on schools and places of worship because these are the most frequently threatened institutions; the senator said she also supported Patel’s more expansive bill. Should both bills pass, legislators would work together to combine them into a single law, she said.
The FBI reported in January 2024 that agents opened investigations into more than 100 separate threats targeting more than 1,000 institutions in 42 states during a one-month period.
Synagogues and Jewish community centers constituted the largest category of targeted institutions, with more than 400 saying they’d been threatened during that period. The second most frequent target was schools and school districts, followed by hospitals and hospital networks.
“These incidents cause fear and potentially dangerous interactions with law enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a 2024 bulletin. “Swatting calls and hoax threats are a daily occurrence, often come in clusters across the U.S., and are typically made to harass, intimidate, and/or retaliate against their intended target.”
Last month, a Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after making more than 375 hoax calls that included threats to detonate bombs, conduct mass shootings and “kill everyone he saw,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. However, many of the cases were difficult to prosecute under current state law.
Bevin Handel, a spokesperson for the city of Claremont, said it is the city Police Department’s goal to file charges against the perpetrator of the Claremont McKenna College call, but there are several challenges.
“The biggest hurdle in holding perpetrators of swatting calls accountable is determining their identities,” she said. “Advances in technology allow callers to mask their voices, phone numbers or IP addresses (‘spoofing’) or make their false 911 calls sound more credible.”
In addition, she said, current state law makes it challenging to file charges against swatters that “truly reflect the magnitude of the response and the fear and trauma they can cause.”
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