DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — The NYPD received an email threatening city schools and Mayor Bill de Blasio, but quickly deemed there was “no substance whatsoever to it,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said Friday afternoon.
Officials think it was sent Thursday night by the same person or persons responsible for an email that led to the shutdown of Los Angeles schools on Dec. 15.
“Like phoning a bomb scare or pulling a fire box for a false alarm, as little of a story we can make of this I think would be to our advantage, both in the police department, in the school system and, frankly, in the media,” said Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller. “Because the bigger deal we make out of it, the more we encourage the same individual and others to do the same thing.”
Police got the email at about 11 p.m. Thursday night and contacted officials in Los Angeles, who told them they had not received the message, Miller added.
The email was also sent to several private schools in the city.
Both NYPD and FBI experts examined the email, tracing it to an anonymous server outside the country, Miller said. However, the threat was sent from a different server and email address than the one in December.
“We come to the same conclusions we came to based on the same tried-and-true criteria of threat assessment we did the last time — that the threat is non-credible,” Miller added. “So rather than to play into the hands of the people behind these threats and jump through all those hoops in a very public way, that’s probably all we are going to say about it.”
