A North Harford Middle School student was charged with posession of a deadly weapon Friday after police said he brought a large knife to school.
The incident came as Harford County Public Schools were on alert following the spread of rumors on social media regarding a possible violent incident at one of their schools.
According to Harford County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Edward Hopkins, a deputy went to the school at 8:30 a.m. to conduct a patrol check. While there, the school’s principal told the deputy two students had reported an eighth-grade student was in possession of a knife.
A survival-type knife, approximately six inches long in a leather sheath, was recovered. The student’s father was notified, Hopkins said, and the youth was charged with possession of a deadly weapon on school property before being released to his parents.
In a robo-call Thursday night, Harford County Public Schools officials said rumors of a potential incident spreading online had been deemed not credible, but that additional police presence would be at the schools on Friday.
According to Hopkins, the school system had initially only asked for Sheriff’s Office deputies to patrol schools as part of their usual duties, rather than take up positions at every school.
“There was not a request from the School System for increased patrols to specifically mean law enforcement would have a presence at each school,” he said in an e-mail. “Their expectation was that police would patrol through as often as possible. Not necessarily sit at each school. As you know we have SRO’s that serve at the high and middle schools in the county and would already have a consistent presence in those schools.”
“Given the latest events in Conn it also would have been a normal course of daily business for deputies to conduct additional patrols of schools and communities–maybe have a higher visibility than normal–as part of their duties,” he added.
That changed after the school system’s robo call, as citizens began contacting authorities, concerned for their children’s safety.
“Precincts began receiving inquiries from citizens stating that Facebook chatter and other social media forums were driving additional rumors, speculation, uncertainty and fear,” Hopkins said in an e-mail Friday. “After being advised of this members of the Sheriff’s Command Staff met late Thursday evening December 20th and in an abundance of caution, and in an attempt to minimize that fear, decided to hold the midnight shift over having those deputies stand by or have a presence at schools not covered by SRO’s.”
Where are the Jess Bane haters? Who is going to be the first to pipe in about overtime costs? On behalf of my family, I would like to say thank you to Sheriff’s Command Staff for making everyone feel a little better today. Job well done!
Oh pick me, pick me…”If we had another sheriff in office this would have not happened”
If you think this was Lionel Bane’s idea, think again. He is clueless, as it is clearly obvious that he had no plan to do anything at the schools until the parents started callling.
@ Mary H you are right if it wasn’t for people calling the precincts this would have never happened. Where was the Intel unit? Matt and GraduateLongAgo clearly you are command staff, nice scripted response. If better planning was done then units like the Gang and Cart unit could be used to cover this detail, instead they held the Shift 1 units over. So I say piss poor planning on the command staff’s part. @ Eddie Hopkins SRO’s spend most of their time at their high school they are assigned to, and then they go to their middle school. The only dedicated school with a middle school SRO is Edgewood Middle. That needs to change, you cant blame this all on Jesse Bane the school system failed when Terri Cranefeld put out her robocall that made things sound good. Did Bob B(school security) forget to call the Sheriff’s Office. Oops!
The school system fails all the time. I am thankful today that an off duty deputy who has a child in our elementary school monitored the school all day in uniform and greeted each child as they came through the door. We all felt very safe and so did the kids. He never got paid a dime. Bob Bennedeto and Wayne Boyer need to be fired.
Benedetto is nothing but a cop wannabe. I was dismayed but not at all surprised that Eddie Hopkins has already had to backtrack and cover for Bane. From his doubletalk, it’s clear that Bane was pressured to do something, otherwise there would have been no need for a meeting with the command staff late Thursday evening. If Bane had any common sense, like Lenny Lane said, he would have used the resources available to him and there would have been no need for a late night meeting and for deputies to be paid overtime.
i can tell by the comments here that no one in harford co has any idea what to expect from the perverts and thief’s we give guns and badges to!…i can tell you what to expect in the future from theses assholes. ur kids will be on joy rides to the pig station for things like pencils that are too sharp or rulers that have a point. how will you feel when you have to p/u ur 7 year old from the jail instead of the school you dropped them off at this morning. how safe will you feel when those same trigger happy pinheads are pumping slugs into ur 5 year old for thinking a water gun would be fun?…the worse thing you can do to a man is give him a gun and a badge and tell him he’s protecting the innocent. hell, most of the “police officers” and i use that term loosely, can barely get their pants over their fat asses….cop wannabe’s?…most of them are struggling to be human beings, thats if you can get them out of the bar. they shoot themselves in the foot when they play pocket pool and you want them protecting your children?
Dissenter, a person that writes like he dropped out of Elementary school and posts a rant about police at 4:19 in the morning should probably keep their opinions to themselves. Maybe get some sleep and start fresh on making something of your life the next morning. I have always found in funny that people point out the exceptions rather than the majority. Harford County has had almost no officer involved shootings in a decade and one of the ones we did have, the officer was said to have relied too much on his TASER and should have gone to his firearm sooner. You clearly don’t understand how law enforcement works, officers generally respond to calls from citizens first. Therefore, the public we serve had to be concerned about something prior to us getting involved. Then, we use our training and knowledge of the law to apply to the scenario given to us for what we do next. In most cases, the individual receives a criminal citation and ultimately it is up to the State’s Attorney and the courts to determine what additional charges are brought and which charges are dropped. There is no worry of seven year olds going to HCDC because of any officer’s decision, the law clearly details when a child that age can be charged as an adult and be taken to HCDC. You point out the overweight officers, most officers are disgusted by the fat slobs that wear our uniform. You are again describing a few dozen officers in an agency of 500. You choose to ignore the teams of officers participating in a 5K, 10K, half marathon, warrior dash, tough mudder, etc. You choose to ignore the vast majority of our officers are relatively young, in great shape, and recently passed a rigorous physical agility test to get hired. Immature, stupid people make generalizations about entire groups of people based on just a few samples which is what you have done, making yourself no better than a common racist.