A Florida sheriff who says he is fed up with hoax threats to schools and their disruption is getting the attention of juvenile justice advocates. The sheriff vows to publicly identify any student who makes such a threat, but experts say the tactic is counterproductive and morally wrong.
Michael Chitwood, sheriff of Volusia county, raised eyebrows recently by posting to his Facebook page the name and mugshot of an 11-year-old boy accused of calling in a threat to a local middle school. He followed up with a video clip of the minor’s “perp walk” into jail in shackles.
“You don’t stand up on an airplane and yell, ‘Hijack.’ You don’t walk into a movie theater and yell, ‘Fire.’ And you don’t get online and post that you’re going to shoot up a school,” Volusia County Sheriff Michael Chitwood said in another video. “It’s going to get your ass sent to jail.”
Daniel Mears, a criminology professor at Florida State University and expert on school shootings, said that while Florida law allows the sheriff to identify minors charged with felonies, such a move violates the principles of the juvenile justice system.
“Juvenile records were supposed to be confidential for a reason. The idea was that kids would have a second shot in life,” Mears said.
But he conceded that “school shootings are just really unbelievably scary and concerning to people”.
For the 2022-2023 school year in Volusia County, Chitwood said the department had seen 357 written threats to kill or shoot up a school. As of Wednesday, they already had 282 and school has only been in session for three weeks this school year.
In a 12-hour period from last Thursday night to Friday morning, the department had 54 threats come in, which were all found to be “bogus,” Chitwood said. The department has arrested 12 juveniles and confiscated 11 weapons so far, he said.
