House Intelligence Committee member says Los Angeles school threat is believed

New York City school officials received the same bomb threat early Tuesday that prompted the closure of the Los Angeles school system, but police quickly concluded that it was a hoax.

Meanwhile, New York City officials said a “specific but non-credible threat” was made against unspecified schools Tuesday morning.

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Beck’s predecessor with LAPD, had said a similar threat was deemed a hoax.

New York Police Commissioner William Bratton agreed, quipping that it looked like the sender of the threat had watched a lot of the Showtime terrorism drama “Homeland”.

“We do not see that as a credible terrorist threat”, he said.

Police Chief Beck said it was “irresponsible” to criticise the decision in the aftermath of the December 2 attack on a regional centre in San Bernardino, California, east of Los Angeles. “This one just warrants an absolute increase in security and police presence, of course, but not the disruption of the entire school day for that many children”.

The district “needs to embrace the same real-time notification that our students and parents are already using”, he wrote in a Facebook post.

During a press conference Tuesday, district police Chief Steven Zipperman said the threat was still being evaluated. A nation that readily lets terror call the shots is not the one in which I grew up – and it’s certainly not the one in which I want to raise my kids.

Given that the latest threat was made against multiple schools and in light of its potentially global nature, he hopes “this decision wasn’t done in a vacuum, because obviously the federal and state government can bring in additional resources (who) are much more familiar with these types of threats, if they are indeed coming from an worldwide source”. It warned that every school in the city would be attacked with pressure cooker bombs, nerve gas agents, machine pistols and machine guns. Ask your teachers, your principals, your school superintendent, and your community leaders how safe they believe their school is.

“You need somebody with a little background in this area to make that determination, to say this threat warrants closing the school system”, Katz said. The threat was not specifically directed at bus operations, Cortines said.

Los Angeles shut down 1,000 public schools on Tuesday, after an email threat that claimed to be from “an extremist Muslim who has teamed up with local jihadists” according to a congressman. “Is this going to cause her some kind of trauma so that she’s not going to feel safe at school?” Meanwhile, a member of the House Intelligence Committee said the threat appeared to be “a hoax or something created to disrupt school districts in large cities”. While she waits for her school to reopen, Ms Kochakji hopes to find out “what professional psychologists are recommending in terms of what to tell students”.

The board asked parents to keep all 643,000 students at home to allow time for a full search of more than 1,000 schools.