BLOUNT COUNTY, Tenn. — A new Tennessee law will take away driving privileges for students who threaten mass violence in schools.
The law states that if a juvenile makes a threat to commit mass violence on school property or at a school-related activity, the child's driving privileges will be suspended. If the student does not already have a driver's license, they cannot get one for one year. The law will go into effect July 1.
It's a growing trend on the radar of law enforcement, prosecutors and educators. They all say they are seeing more kids making fake threats against East Tennessee schools.
Lt. Joe Seaton has been a school resource officer in Blount County for 20 years. "It gives us an opportunity to be a positive role model for kids, and I love that," he said. "It's great. I have the best job in the world."
Throughout two decades, Seaton's passion for what he does has never changed. The job itself, however, has.
"We see a lot of the bomb threats, we see a lot of the shoot-up-the-school type threats ... and those are taken extremely seriously. We don't wait, we don't hesitate," he explained.
In today's world, social media makes it easier than ever to make threats of mass violence. That includes students making threats against East Tennessee schools—day or night.
"Typically, it's a student kind of lashing out saying that something's gonna happen, or something's gonna go down at the school, or they'll take a photograph of themselves with a firearm saying that people are going to pay for mistreating them," explained Blount County District Attorney Gen. Ryan Desmond.
He said once the threat is made, the response from law enforcement is serious and swift. The first step is determining if the threat is credible. "Immediately, law enforcement is going to respond to that person's residence. You're going to pull social media records, you're going to probably do a search warrant on the child's phone to get all the information off the child's device. The child, if it's shown did actually send the communication, is probably going to go into custody pretty quickly."
In Anderson County, threats of mass violence are a common occurrence.
"It's something that we deal with frequently enough that it takes up quite a bit of our time," said the school district's Assistant Director of Schools Greg Deal. "It creates a lot of traumatic responses from our students and our teachers."
Deal recalls witnessing that trauma first-hand in the aftermath of a false active shooter threat: "You have all these law enforcement officers run into a school because they believe, based on reports that they'd received from 911, that there was an active shooter in an elementary school. Well, it turned out to be false, but the damage was done. I had one teacher tell me, she said, 'The only thing I was worried about is whether the sweatshirt I had on was going to be thick enough to protect my kids that were huddled behind me from a bullet.'"
Bullets and bombs, officials say these threats disrupt learning for hours and sometimes days.
"When we see those threats, law enforcement, we can't afford to not take those as seriously as possible," said Knoxville Police Department Communications Manager Scott Erland. "We are very fortunate that we have two Office of Tennessee Office of Homeland Security agents who are embedded within our Violent Crimes Unit, and their primary role is to assist in those investigations into school threats."
Across Knox, Blount and Anderson counties, threats of mass violence against schools are not taken lightly. "We don't overlook it. We're never going to brush it off," Seaton said. "We're always going to investigate it to the end, so do not do it."
A threat of mass violence is a misdemeanor. If found guilty, juveniles can be held in custody for up to 30 days.