I intend to introduce a bill making it a felony to falsely report threats or emergencies to our schools.

As all of you know, shortly before Easter and following a tragic school shooting in Nashville, someone terrorized our communities through a series of false reports to law enforcement of active school shootings.  Our law enforcement responded swiftly and overwhelmingly.  While we now know that these alerts were all false, with each new false report our law enforcement continued to respond in force to ensure our students' safety.  One of those schools, New Castle High School, is in my legislative district.  It is simply not acceptable to manipulate our law enforcement system to cause chaos, frighten children, terrorize families, and to put many people in harm's way.

Although there are potential crimes that could apply to this situation, those crimes do not rise to the level of a felony despite the hundreds of victims, thousands of dollars in costs, and cruel targeting of schools.  For those reasons, I will be introducing a bill providing that this kind of misconduct will be treated as a felony.  Please join me in sponsoring this legislation.

Statutes/Laws affected:
Printer's No. 0046: 18-2706(d)