A series of bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh it putting university officials in a precarious Catch-22, says the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Do police continually evacuate buildings, sometimes three or four at a time, and feed into the suspect’s or suspects’ wishes? Or do they ignore the threats and risk catastrophe? “There’s no cookie-cutter approach to how you respond to a bomb threat,” said Paul Verrecchia, chief of police for the College of Charleston in South Carolina and president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. “You’ve got to go with your gut instinct and experience.”
Pitt police have chosen to take no risks while two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and a privately hired handwriting expert work to decipher the menacing messages, which have been scrawled in anonymously rerouted emails, on bathroom stalls and on paper towels left in rest rooms. “All this is still worth it,” Pitt police Chief Tim Delaney said as teams of bomb-sniffing dogs swept the 42-story Cathedral of Learning for the eighth time since mid-February. “I will never put the kids in danger.”