Reports of an active shooter at Clark Atlanta University on Friday night have been dispelled as unfounded, bringing relief to a tense campus community. School officials, alongside law enforcement, responded to the initial scare with a shelter-in-place order, which has since been lifted. The school's police department conveyed, in a statement noted by Atlanta News First, that reports of an active shooter "are not accurate."
The Atlanta Police Department, called in to assist campus police, arrived around 8:55 p.m. at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, as told by FOX 5 Atlanta, and despite the search extending past 10:45 p.m., officers found no sign of a threat, yet there was a heavy police presence captured in videos from bystanders, some officers crouched behind vehicles, as police helicopters canvassed the area, all clear signs of the urgency with which the potential threat was taken, however false it may have been. In concert with the false alarm at Clark Atlanta University, two other metro Atlanta institutions, the University of Georgia and the University of West Georgia, were also the recipients of similar malignant hoaxes.
These incidents join an unsettling pattern of hoax calls that have placed several institutions in Georgia and across the nation under undue distress. Just in the past week, a spate of false alarms have sent law enforcement scurrying to universities, from Arkansas to New Hampshire, with each responding to phantom menaces of active shooters, as FOX 5 Atlanta has reported. Mercer University and Central Georgia Technical College, among others, have been subjected to similar ordeals, raising concern and prompting the involvement of FBI Atlanta, which is investigating the recent wave of fake emergency calls.
In response to the series of hoaxes, authorities are emphasizing the serious repercussions of such actions, the FBI stating through Atlanta News First that “Knowingly providing false information to emergency service agencies about a possible threat to life drains law enforcement resources, costs thousands of dollars, and, most importantly, puts innocent people at risk.”
