State of Our Schools: Police increase presence at Hudson Valley schools over social media threats

Police in the Hudson Valley announced Thursday that they are stepping up patrols at schools due to a viral TikTok threat that spread to other social media platforms.

News 12 Staff

Dec 17, 2021, 3:20 AM

Updated 1,030 days ago

Share:

Police in the Hudson Valley announced Thursday that they are stepping up patrols at schools due to a viral TikTok threat that spread to other social media platforms.
Westchester County police say they began investigating the threat before many of the districts had seen it. They say the threat didn't even start in the U.S. - it originated somewhere overseas.
Police were able to deem it a non-credible threat - but districts had to respond.
"We run down all of these and research all of them. We have protocols to keep kids safe. Keep the learning going, keep the instruction moving forward and we've got well-trained teams of people in our schools that can find out what the accurate information is," says Eric Byrne, the president of the Lower Hudson Council of Superintendents.
Many districts are taking the opportunity to remind parents to talk to their kids about how they act on social media and what they post. In this case, it wasn't even a student in the region, but someone thousands of miles away.