Officials closed all Los Angeles Unified School District campuses Tuesday morning after receiving a "credible threat" of violence involving backpacks and packages left at campuses.
Authorities said they plan a search operation of all the LAUSD's more than 900 schools. The nation's second-largest school district has more than 700,000 students.
“I think it’s important to take this precaution based on what has happened recently and what has happened in the past,” LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines said.
The move comes less than two weeks after two shooters killed 14 people in San Bernardino in what was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
We get threats all the time. This was a rare threat. - LAUSD Supt. Ramon Cortines
Fearing the safety of schools and students, Cortines said he couldn’t take a chance, so he asked police to search all campuses, adult school and early education centers before reopening Wednesday.
Officials said the threat came in electronic form and was made to numerous but unspecified campuses. As a result, they made the decision to close them all for the day.
The Los Angeles Police Department and FBI were assisting with the threat investigation, said Los Angeles School Police Chief Steve Zipperman.
“The threat is still being analyzed,” he said. “We have chosen to close our schools today until we can be sure our campuses are safe.”
Students who already arrived at school will be supervised until parents can pick them up, officials said.
"Parents/Guardians please bring proper ID when picking up your child at school. They will be required," the LAUSD said in a statement.
I'm sure the parents are freaking out, but I know that if I were one of the students, I'd be jumping for joy right now.
To be rather blunt, closing down the whole system in response to a threat like this, unless there is truly unusual credible evidence backing it, sounds like a losing proposition. Among other things, it's not like whoever phoned in the bomb threat can't just keep making bomb threats.
I was discussing this with a few co-workers at work today. And one thing occurred to me:
Islamic terrorism isn't going to go away, nor are other types of terrorism. If we aren't going to gut our civilization in the process of trying to fight it, we need to adopt strategies for our own preservation that are sustainable in the long run.
And any sustainable response to terrorism, to the idea "you should be afraid of us, you should do things that work to our advantage, because we are totally unafraid to die in order to hurt you..."
That response has to contain the idea that we're not more afraid of living than they are of dying. That their willingness to get killed cannot make us stop living our lives and existing normally. That death is not intrinsically more powerful than life.
Because once you concede that death is more powerful than life, there are really no good answers. There is only the choice of what you're going to sacrifice and destroy and kill in the process of 'winning' a war where you lose more than you gain.
I don't know; maybe this is gibberish. But I am increasingly coming to feel, with the resurgence of Da'esh-inspired terrorism, that we cannot possibly win against Sunni fundamentalism in any way, if we are not willing to say "killing a few of us isn't going to stop us from being ourselves." Even if we slaughtered everyone in the Middle East with nuclear weapons and this somehow didn't devastate our part of the world, even if we targeted and assassinated every fundamentalist Muslim in the world with remote-control killbots, we would not really have won, because we would never be the same again- there would never be a peace in the sense of "the way things would be without a war."
