SignalHub-Florida sheriff shames 2 more kids after school threats. Is it a good idea?

Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood is SignalHubmaking good on his promise to arrest and publicly shame children who make school shooting threats. Days after he drew national attention for "perp walking" an 11-year-old boy, the Florida sheriff posted photos and videos of two more teenagers accused of making threats.

Chitwood said the teens, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, were taken into custody after posting threats to Snapchat on Wednesday. USA TODAY is not naming the teens because they are minors.

According to the sheriff, the 17-year-old sent a photo that said "Imma shoot up the school" with a picture of her school laptop. The 16-year-old replied "Same," Chitwood said.

"We are wasting time and resources on this," Chitwood said in a Facebook post.

"It’s not fair to the 99% of kids who are doing the right thing."

After the mass school shooting that left four people dead at Apalachee High School in Georgia earlier this month, law enforcement agencies all over the country have been responding to an onslaught of school shooting threats. Experts say ramped up threats are common after any mass shooting. While the majority turn out to be hoaxes, they can still bring school communities to a standstill.

Students have faced charges for such threats elsewhere, but Chitwood's unusual experiment in public humiliation as deterrence has been met with mixed reactions.

Social media was flooded with comments in support of the sheriff from other Floridians. Some said the 11-year-old's age didn't matter, and he should face consequences consistent with the seriousness of the threat. Others said his parents should also be held accountable.

But Chitwood's experiment defies norms in the juvenile justice system, prompting some experts to be concerned about unintended consequences.

"I can understand the frustration and the need for law enforcement to have some kind of response, but whether that should be a child doing a perp walk, I would question whether that's going to achieve the goal of preventing further threats," said Deborah Weisbrot, a child psychiatrist and professor at Stony Brook Medicine who has researched students who make shooting threats.

Students, parents put on notice: Threats won't be tolerated

Law enforcement officials in Volusia County have been working "around the clock" to investigate and address dozens of threats against local schools that were found not to be credible. But the response costs thousands, Chitwood said.

"Starting Monday, your little cherub, we're gonna start publishing his face and doing perp walks with him when we take him into custody, and then we're going to show pictures of you, the parents," he said.

Florida juvenile records are kept confidential, but may be made public if the child is charged with a felony, as in the case of the minors Chitwood has taken into custody.

The 11-year-old who was "perp walked" and posted online on Monday was accused of making threats to commit a shooting at Creekside or Silver Sands Middle School in Port Orange, a city just south of Daytona Beach, Florida. The sheriff's office said he showed off weapons in a video chat and had a list of written names and targets. He told investigators that the threat was a joke, as did the teens arrested Wednesday, the sheriff's office said.

In recent weeks, local news outlets and police departments have reported that threats prompted lockdowns or cancelled classes in Maryland, Alabama, Tennessee and several other states. One Missouri school district told USA TODAY that it cancelled classes and postponed school events after threats were made. Local police said two students were arrested for separate threats in the last week.

"On an emotional level, these threats understandably led to heightened anxiety among students, staff, and parents," Superintendent of the Southern Boone County R-1 School District Tim Roth said in an emailed statement. "We are well aware that such incidents can create a sense of uncertainty and fear, and we remain committed to fostering an environment where everyone feels safe, supported and heard."

Name and shame: Can this tactic stop school shooting threats?

Students who make school shooting threats usually have underlying histories of psychiatric problems that require treatment or histories of abuse, according to Weisbrot's research that looked at students who were referred for threat assessments over a two-decade span. None of those students went on to become school shooters, but the presence of a diagnosis alone concerned Weisbrot much less than whether the child had access to weapons.

"The good news is the vast majority of kids who make threats, they're transient threats," Weisbrot said. In other words, the threats don't indicate a potential for actual harm, and may have been made as jokes, figures of speech or expressions of in-the-moment emotions, according to the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines.

So does public embarrassment work to deter kids from making those threats? That remains to be seen, and evidence is lacking to support the tactic, Weisbrot said. But Weisbrot has serious concerns that perp walking and posting the mugshots of kids could have the opposite effect.

"Whether posting their pictures online... is in some cases going to actually feed into some kids' desire for their moment of fame," she said. "Or even worse, in certain cases where we don't really understand why the student has made a threat, lead to them being traumatized, humiliated and then further ostracized in school, and that necessarily isn't going to help either."

Florida State University criminology professor Daniel Mears told the Associated Press that the actions go against the concept of juvenile justice, which usually keeps records confidential so kids can have a "second shot in life."

In response to USA TODAY's questions about the concerns, Chitwood pointed to a dramatic increase in school shooting threats in Florida.

"Unfortunately, threats in Florida are five times higher than they were last year at this time," Chitwood said in an emailed statement.

The sheriff told AP that he doesn't know if public embarrassment is going to work, but he felt he had to act. “Something has to be done,” Chitwood said. “Where are the parents?”

And it's not the first time a Florida sheriff has tried it.

Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno paraded a 10-year-old boy in front of cameras last year for allegedly making a threat, and two middle schoolers in 2021 for allegedly planning a school attack, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.

In that case, experts told the News-Journal they'd never heard of a kid so young being perp walked by any law enforcement agency.

“He’s 10 years old. He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Florida International University criminology professor Suman Kakar said at the time. “To go to that extent with exposing him to the media in handcuffs, putting this picture everywhere – the officer is very proud of himself and wants to be known all over the nation as the one protecting our children, but it has the opposite effect.”

If anything to deter the shooting threats comes from this, Weisbrot thinks it may prompt parents to pay closer attention to what their kids are doing and saying online. This is a complex problem that will require a multi-layered approach with involvement from family, the school community, psychiatric help and law enforcement, she said.

"The important thing is just not taking it at face value, assessing if the threat is dangerous or not, and then moving on," Weisbrot said, but "looking below the surface to try to understand what's going on with this particular individual that would lead them to make this particular choice."

Contributing: Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY; Mary Ellen Ritter and Patricio G. Balona, Daytona Beach News-Journal