PITTSBURGH — On Thursday afternoon, panic spread across Villanova University after reports of an active shooter near the law school prompted students to run for cover and barricade themselves in classrooms. Police swarmed the campus, only to later determine the call was a hoax.
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The call came in around 4:30 p.m. during the university’s orientation Mass for new students, sparking a massive law enforcement response. Authorities now say it was an instance of “swatting,” a type of hoax where fake emergency calls are made to trick police into sending a large, armed response.
“If you’re a mall or a school, you have to react like it’s real,” said retired Secret Service agent Jeff James. “You don’t have a choice, because making an error the other way is going to cost people their lives.”
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James says that swatting should be treated as a felony, and those responsible should be required to pay restitution for the chaos and costs caused by such hoaxes.
The Villanova scare is not an isolated incident. In 2023, several local schools in Western Pennsylvania, including Oakland Catholic, Central Catholic, Laurel Highlands and Hopewell, received swatting threats claiming there was either an active shooter or a bomb on campus. Police later determined all of those calls to be fake.
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James warned that swatting can be more than just a prank. Criminals can use hoaxes to test and observe law enforcement responses.
“The concern is that if someone is doing this as a probe to see what the law enforcement response is going to be in planning their attack, they would know, okay, I’m going to have three minutes where I can be actively shooting people before the police get here,” James said.
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James said that, as hoax calls grow more sophisticated, the law and police technology will also likely evolve.
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