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DENVER (AP) — A bill to make it easier to catch kids who call in false bomb threats and prank others with phony threats failed Friday in the Colorado Senate.
The measure would have modified Colorado's anonymous threat hotline, called Safe2Tell. The hotline was enacted after the 1999 Columbine High School shootings to give students an anonymous way to report threats.
Officials say the hotline has saved lives. But the anonymity has made Safe2Tell a bullying tool for some.
The sponsor of the measure, Sen. Owen Hill, said that the word "Safe2Tell" has become a verb for bullies to threaten others with falsely reporting that the target is considering suicide or hurting others.
Authorities have no way of identifying the source of Safe2Tell calls that falsely direct police to a student's house, a prank called "swatting."
"We have created a long-term culture in which you may now do the things we are all opposed to, whether it's the false alarm reports, or whether it's just the vicious act (of) calling a SWAT team to people's house," said Hill, R-Colorado Springs.
But Democrats and some Republicans voted against the bill.
Senate Democratic Leader Morgan Carroll argued that false reporting has been a problem as old as the telephone, and that any breach of Safe2Tell anonymity endangers the whole reporting system.
"That it's anonymous is the whole premise," Carroll said. "It is not meant to be a tool to prosecute kids."
Carroll, D-Aurora, sponsored a law last year to use state money to support the hotline. Before then, Safe2Tell relied on private funding. Lawmakers made the hotline part of state government after the 2013 Arapahoe High School shootings.
In that case, students at the school later told investigators that they knew the gunman planned a violent attack but were afraid to report his threats. The gunman, an 18-year-old who described himself as a "psychopath," killed one student and then himself.
Authorities say the hotline has gotten 12,000 reports since 2012 and is responsible for dozens of suicide preventions and stopping other kinds of violence.
Susan Payne, executive director of the Safe2Tell program, told lawmakers earlier this month that false reports have been "very few."
"We don't want to cause harm to the program," Payne told lawmakers, though she didn't take a position on the bill.
The proposal was amended to allow tips to be traced only with a warrant. Hill pointed out false threat reports are criminal.
"Right now, today, if I have a test that I don't want to take, and I call the school office on my cellphone and say that there's a bomb in the locker room, that's a felony," Hill said in that earlier hearing.
But lawmakers voting Friday decided against the change. The measure failed on an unrecorded voice vote.
"We have a better way to deal with pranks and false reports," Carroll said. "An anonymous program that is Safe2Tell is in danger of being UnSafe2Tell if we pass this."
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Kristen Wyatt can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt
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Online:
Senate Bill 139: http://bit.ly/1E0adRa
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