Be Afraid

All schools in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District have been ordered closed due to a threat.

School district spokeswoman Ellen Morgan announced the closure on Tuesday but released no further details. At a press conference, school superintendent Ramon Cortines said that the threat was “not to one school, two school or three schools” but to “many schools” and “at school students” generally. He declined to describe the nature of the threat.

He said he had asked staffers at schools to look for “anything that is out of order” but “not to touch anything, not to do anything” before contacting authorities – suggesting that he and school officials fear a bomb threat.

  The Guardian

Now that's what I call streamlining fear-mongering.

The superintendent said the district police chief informed him of the threat around 5am on Tuesday. “He shared with me that some of the details talked about backpacks, talked about other packages,” Cortines said.

That's very helpful.  Backpacks in schools.  Beware.

Students will soon not be allowed to carry backpacks and have to go back to the bad old days before backpacks when we carried loose books in our arms, jostling them around and dropping them often enough trying to open doors.  Maybe backpack manufacturers will go bankrupt.  Or maybe they can make transparent packs with built-in metal detectors.

Steve Zipperman, chief of the Los Angeles school police department, said the threat was delivered as an “electronic” message, and that the decision to close schools was made “in an abundance of caution”.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest "abundance" is too weak an adjective.

Cortines said that he would release a statement describing the threat only after police had searched schools. He asked for employers to be flexible with parents so that they could reunite with children.

Everyone duly frightened and more enraged about Muslim terrorists.

“We get threats all the time,” he said. “We do evacuate schools, we do lock down schools, etc. We do not release students until we notify parents.

“So what we are doing today is not different than what we always do, except we are doing this in a mass way.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.