Experts say panic buttons can enhance school safety, but only 6 states require them
CNN
In December 2021, the principal at Eagle Point Elementary School in Broward County, Florida, received an anonymous bomb threat. Using a silent panic alarm app on her phone, she alerted police and within seconds her image appeared on multiple screens in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
In December 2021, the principal at Eagle Point Elementary School in Broward County, Florida, received an anonymous bomb threat. Using a silent panic alarm app on her phone, she alerted police and within seconds her image appeared on multiple screens in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. The sheriff’s office was able to immediately give her instructions to evacuate the school, and call the fire department and the bomb squad. “We were able to coordinate the whole thing within seconds,” Capt. Michael Riggio with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office told CNN. Thankfully, the threat was unfounded. It was called in by an elementary school student as a joke, the sheriff’s office said. The school district, which serves more than 251,000 students, adopted a silent panic alarm system in the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives. Florida has since raised the minimum age to buy firearms from 18 to 21 under a law that also allows for some teachers to be armed. Despite the impassioned pleas for more thorough gun reform that followed the Parkland shooting, the number of school shootings in the US has climbed steadily each year since 2018, with the exception of 2020, when many schools were closed due to Covid-19, according to CNN’s analysis of events reported by the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety. Florida adopted Alyssa’s Law in 2020, named in honor of Alyssa Alhadeff, who was 14 when she was killed in the Parkland shooting. The law requires public schools to install a silent panic alarm system in schools that is directly linked to law enforcement. In the absence of gun reform, proponents of Alyssa’s Law say a silent panic alarm system can reduce response time in the face of gun violence or a medical emergency.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan are well matched, rhetorically forceful opposites. And they have been clashing for more than a decade over an increasingly relevant question of presidential power: How easy should it be for the president to fire the heads of independent agencies?
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Authorities in Colombia are dealing with increasingly sophisticated criminals, who use advanced tech to produce and conceal the drugs they hope to export around the world. But police and the military are fighting back, using AI to flag suspicious passengers, cargo and mail - alongside more conventional air and sea patrols. CNN’s Isa Soares gets an inside look at Bogotá’s war on drugs.