Backlash: Los Angeles officials criticized for closing schools

Los Angeles faced a backlash on Tuesday for closing more than 900 schools in response to a sweeping — but potentially erroneous — threat of violence.

In justifying their decision to close the nation’s second largest school district, city officials repeatedly referenced recent attacks in nearby San Bernardino, Calif., and alluded to far-flung violence from Islamic extremists in Paris.

{mosads}Yet skeptics worried whether Los Angeles had merely contributed to a growing sense of unease about American national security by overreacting to what their counterparts in New York City dismissed as a simple hoax.

The dynamic highlights the nation’s concerns about overreacting to rising terrorist threats, even after weeks of the nation being on edge.

“These are tough times,” Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said on Tuesday. “Suffice it to say that any time these kinds of threats are made against our campuses, given all the schools shootings in America, given San Bernardino, we take them seriously.

“Southern California has been through a lot in recent weeks,” Beck added. “Should we risk putting our children through the same?”

Tuesday’s decision by the city’s Unified School District was quickly criticized by officials in New York, who said they had received the same threat but dismissed it as unserious.

“These threats are made to promote fear,” New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said in a statement posted on Twitter.

The threat itself was not credible, he added, though he was “concerned with people overreacting to it.”

The “preliminary assessment,” added Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), who is the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is that the threat “was a hoax or something designed to disrupt school districts in large cities.”

“The safety of our communities and particularly our young people is paramount,” claimed Schiff, whose district was affected by the school closings. “At the same time, in an environment in which it is very easy to transmit threats, real and otherwise, and when fear and disruption may be the goal as well as the effect, communities and law enforcement will need to make a difficult judgment as to how to respond in a variety of circumstances.”

According to multiple officials, members of the Los Angeles school board received an email late on Monday evening, threatening a range of attacks at multiple schools across the city.

The author of the email claimed to have the support of 32 accomplices, and pledged to use automatic weapons, explosives and a “nerve agent” to carry out their violence.

New York received a nearly identical message, Bratton said, as did other unspecified school districts.

Yet only Los Angeles took the extreme step of closing down its hundreds of schools.

The decision reflected a broader concern about terrorism unseen in the United States since the days after 9/11.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that 18 percent of the country believes terrorism is the most important problem facing the country — higher than at any point since February 2003. Meanwhile, just 46 percent said the government is doing “very” or “fairly well” in reducing the threat of terrorism, the lowest point in the post-9/11 era.

Critics have warned that the rising fears of foreign terrorism have prompted increasingly harsh rhetoric, including GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to keep Muslims out of the country.

A number of indicators suggested that Tuesday’s threat, which was routed through Germany, was a hoax.

The author of the email claimed to be “an extremist Muslim jihadist,” according to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), whose district includes part of Los Angeles.

Yet the message included “a pornographic reference to a body part,” Sherman said, which would be out of place in a message from a devout Islamic extremist.

A reference to Allah was also spelled with a lower-case “A” — practically unheard of for someone claiming to follow Islam.

“That would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell ‘Allah’ with a capital ‘A,’” Bratton said from New York.

As events progressed on Tuesday, Los Angeles officials were forced to walk back their warning about the threat, and appeared increasingly defensive.

“I will not categorize [the threat] as credible or non-credible at this point,” Beck said late Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, hours after canceling classes for 640,000 students.

“It is very easy, in hindsight, to criticize a decision based on results that the decider could never have known,” he added, striking an especially defensive note. “It is also very easy to criticize a decision when you have no responsibility for the outcome of that decision.”