Police from three departments responded to Hanover High for a “swatting” call. All photos © Eric Francis.
HANOVER - Students were locked down for about an hour as a heavily armed contingent of police officers searched Hanover High School after a hoax threat was called in to school’s office on Thursday afternoon.
The chain of events began about 2:21 p.m. with the anonymous threat, which was received by a staff member and immediately relayed to the Hanover Police Department.
“For the safety of the school we responded and treated it as a real world incident and set up a perimeter and a unified command,” Hanover Police Chief James Martin explained.
“The threat was specific to the outside of the school so we had no information that anyone had breached the interior but, as a precaution, we did an interior sweep of all the rooms…the physical fitness area, the cafeteria, etc…as well as an exterior sweep that was going on at the same time.”
“It went smoothly and we determined there was no threat,” Martin emphasized. “Everyone has been well trained in this, unfortunately, due to recent events, and everybody did what they were supposed to do.”
Within minutes eight Hanover police officers, three Norwich officers and three Grafton County Sheriff’s deputies had encircled the campus and begun checking floor-by-floor through the facility, sending students out in groups from each classroom as they cleared the area.
“Because of the time of day, the school administration decided to take an early release,” Martin said. Buses and parents were allowed to pick up students and shortly before 4 p.m. the campus was completely reopened for normal after-school activities.
The chief said that while there haven’t been any other incidents so far this year, prank calls in general have been getting more frequent and Thursday’s remains under investigation.
“We use these false calls—some people call them ‘swatting calls’—almost as practice exercise so if it ever does happen we are going to get it right,” he noted. “We always do an ‘after action review’ to see where we can improve our process and we’ll look at things we did today and improve going forward for the next time.”
The chief said the students appeared to take the incident in stride.
“They seemed fine. They’ve been through the drills before and they know what to do and they performed like they were trained to do,” he said, recalling, “I just walked out the front door and so many of them were saying ‘Thank you!’ to us. They know we take these seriously and they appreciate it.”
Anyone with possible information on the source of the threat is being asked to call the Hanover Police Department at (603) 643-2222 or anonymous tips can be submitted at https://hanovernh.org/265/Police-Department.
