Schools across the country are facing a number of reports of active shooters that have since been found to be false, including in 19 Illinois counties on Wednesday.
The Illinois State Police said that law enforcement from 19 counties received “threats directed at schools” on Wednesday. In total, the ISP said there were 21 calls in 21 cities throughout the state, all of which produced no “actual threats.”
Some of the calls went well into Wednesday evening, with the Oak Lawn Police Department receiving a call after 7 p.m. from a man who claimed to be inside a high school and threatened to start shooting, officials shared.
The Rockford Police Department posted on Twitter that officers responded to one of the calls on Wednesday. After searching the school, they discovered it was a “false report.”
On Thursday, the calls continued in other parts of the country as emergency services responded to college campuses across Texas after several reports of an active shooter were made.
One report was made at the Texas A&M School of Medicine. Reporters on the scene with KBTX noted the presence of emergency response vehicles and that the call was most likely a hoax.
Another active shooter was reported at Del Mar College. However, the Corpus Christi Police Department has deemed the active shooter report a “hoax,” noting that the school has since been cleared.
Other schools in Texas to receive false reports included Texas Wesleyan, Galen College of Nursing, and Tyler Junior College. A building even received a false report, according to the Round Rock Police Department.
Two false reports also appear to have been made at a pair of Catholic universities in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning.
Trinity Washington University and the Catholic University of America each went into a shelter-in-place scenario after local law enforcement was made aware of the possible threats, The Washington Post reported.
Both reports were found to be false, as a D.C. police spokesperson shared that the calls were made within 10 minutes of each other and were nearly identical.
With the recent mass shootings in Louisville and Nashville, the threats of an active shooter should not be taken lightly, but law enforcement across the country shared that no threats were present at any of the schools mentioned in the reports.
“Responders have not located any actual threats as a result of these calls,” ISP said in a statement.
Instances of swatting are not new and hit the country last year in several states. Last September in Minnesota, the state’s BCA shared that false reports were made at 14 schools. Maine saw at least 10 schools have false reports last November, according to the state’s public safety commissioner.
An estimate from the National Association of School Resource Officers put the number of states to see officers respond to false calls at schools last September hit 30, and now it appears the calls are not slowing but returning.
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