Twitter Users Help Solve School Threat

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how some crafty and persistent work by several Twitter users helped solve an anonymous school death threat in St. Louis, Missouri earlier this week.

Incident
It all began with an Internet search that a teacher in Virginia asked her husband, Jeremy Boggs, to run for a class she was teaching the next day. Reading a Wikipedia entry from the search, Boggs found a threat posted in the middle of the Wikipedia text, that said in part "I'M GOING TO SHOOT EVERYONE AT THAT (expletive) SCHOOL...ESPECIALLY KATRICE NOBLE" (quoted from the St. Louis-Post Dispatch article). Boggs used Twitter -- the social networking service that limits users to posts of 140 characters only -- to ask friends and colleagues whether he should do anything about the threat. The Twitter responses - or tweets, as they are called -- told him he should report the threat, both to Wikipedia editors and to the police.

But which police to call? The threat didn't specify a school or town, only Katrice Noble. Through the cooperation of several individuals on Twitter over the course of several hours -- and communicating using only 140 characters at a time -- these Twitter users were able to determine that Katrice Noble heads a charter school, Lift for Life Academy, in the St. Louis area. They then tried notifying Noble's school and the local police but weren't able to reach anyone because it was late at night. Finally, one Twitter user in Ohio was able to reach police in her area, who were able to reach Noble in St. Louis. Eventually the police and school officials were able to identify the student that posted the threat and determined that it was done as a prank. The school re-opened without incident.

Analysis
I think Boggs and his fellow Twitter users deserve a huge round of applause for their sound judgment in deciding to report the threat -- and even more importantly for their persistence in doing so. It took some digging for them to find out the school with which Katrice Noble was affiliated, its location, and the police department that served the area. And then it took several attempts and a fair amount of time for the Twitter group to reach someone who could help. They didn't stop even after leaving phone messages with the school and with local police. The Twitter group kept at it until they were sure that someone in law enforcement knew about the threat and would handle it from there.

What's important to recognize here is that people often don't report threats or troubling behavior, even though they should. In the Secret Service / Department of Education study of school shootings, one of our major findings was that prior to most shootings, other people knew about the shooters' plans beforehand, but never told anyone. There are a lot of reasons why people don't report threats that they hear, or tell someone about troubling behavior they observe. Decades of research on "bystander apathy" have shown time and again that most people fail to do something to help, such as call the police - even when a crime occurs right in front of them (for more on bystander apathy, click here). In the case of not reporting threats, these reasons can range from thinking the person is just joking, to thinking someone else is better equipped to know what to do, to fearing some consequence (like becoming a target themselves) if they try to do something to help (see the Secret Service/Department of Education Bystander Study for more information on why some students have reported threats while others have not).

But it is clear that there was no bystander apathy in this case. The Twitter users who helped stop the school threat did all the right things. They gave Boggs good advice after his initial query -- that he should report the threat because it is better to be safe than sorry. But Boggs and the Twitter group then went above and beyond to make sure law enforcement knew about the threat. I hope that people will remember this story of the Twitter group if they are ever in a position to report a threat or troubling behavior. In most cases, it won't be so difficult to pass along information to someone who can help. But even when it is difficult, the Twitter group showed us just how important it is to continue to try.

It's not often that we hear good news stories like this - perhaps because prevented attacks and people doing the right thing are not as "headline grabbing" as the bad things that happen every day. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has done a great service in sharing this Good Samaritan story.