A report of an armed subject at Boca Raton High School on Tuesday morning was discovered by Boca Police to be a false alarm.
At 10 a.m., the BRPD announced via Twitter that they were responding to a call of a “suspicious incident” on the school’s campus. The school was immediately placed on lockdown while officers searched the area and at 10:23 a.m. an announcement was made that the school had been cleared and “nothing suspicious was located.”
Schools across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County were also placed on lockdown after receiving similar reports, and the schools were subsequently searched and cleared with no evidence found. The incident appears to have been an attempt at “swatting” the schools. According to Miami-Dade police, the swat call came from somewhere outside the country.
There has been a noticeable uptick in swat calls in school districts around the country, wherein a prank call is made to emergency services in an attempt to draw heavily armed police presence. Last week, dozens of hoax calls in South Carolina led to thousands of students, teachers and faculty being placed in lockdown.
Last year, in attempt to crack down on swatting, Florida passed H.B. 371, a bill which reclassified swatting from a first degree misdemeanor to third degree felony when a false report “results in a public safety agency response that exceeds $2,000,” a second degree felony when a false report results in injury, or a first degree felony when resulting in an individual’s death.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the calls today which placed several South Florida schools on lockdown were made around the time that closing arguments for the penalty phase of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz’s trial were to be heard.
