The US city of Los Angeles ordered all public schools closed Tuesday due to an unspecified electronic threat targeting the school system and its 640,000 students, officials said. New York City officials say they received the same threat that led to the closure of the Los Angeles school system but quickly concluded that it was a hoax.
New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said he thought Los Angeles officials overreacted by deciding to close the nation’s second-largest school system. He said a school superintendent received the threatening email Tuesday morning. Bratton said the person who wrote the note claimed to be a jihadist but made errors that made it clear the person was a prankster.
Ramon Cortines, the superintendent of Los Angeles schools, said he ordered the shutdown after police alerted him to a threat “made to not just one school, but many schools in this school district.”
The Los Angeles unified school district tweeted: “LAUSD schools are closed today due to credible threat.”
A Los Angeles school official says the threat that shut down the nation’s second-largest school district was emailed to a school board member and is believed to have come from an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany.
Los Angeles Unified School District spokeswoman Shannon Haber said Tuesday that she didn’t know if the district has ever closed all of its more than 900 schools and 187 public charter schools.
Police and FBI agents were called in to help search the more than 1,000 schools in the district, Cortines told a news conference, adding that he expected the operation to be completed by the end of the day.
The superintendent said the extraordinary measure was triggered in part by the 2 December attacks that killed 14 people in nearby San Bernardino.
“I think it is important that I take the precaution based on what has happened recently and what has happened in the past,” Cortines said.
The chief of the Los Angeles school police department, Steven Zipperman, also stressed the decision was an extreme precautionary measure.
“Earlier this morning we did receive an electronic threat that mentions the safety of our schools,” he told the news conference.
“In an abundance of caution, as the superintendent has indicated, we have chosen to close our schools today until we can be absolutely sure that our campuses are safe.”
“We need the cooperation of the whole of Los Angeles today,” he said. “We need families and neighbors to work together with our schools and with our employees to make sure our schools are safe throughout today.
The news conference was held shortly after 7 am local time, before the start of the school day for most children.
Steve Zimmer, president of the Los Angeles school board, said those families whose children had already been dropped off had been contacted and asked to come and collect them.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the United States, has 640,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and more than 1,000 schools.
The district spans 720 square miles (1,865 square kilometers) including Los Angeles and all or part of more than 30 smaller cities and some unincorporated areas.