Police dismiss online threat to students in Austin,

Police reiterated Tuesday that there was no credible threat to Austin-area students after a vague online threat emerged that seemed to target them.

The threat was posted on the website 4chan Monday afternoon, and screen shots of the post began circulating on Facebook and Twitter that day. Police Cmdr. Joseph Chacon of the intelligence division said Central Texas law enforcement agencies are actively investigating “every single threat” they come across but there was no cause for greater alarm.

“It’s safe to go to school,” Chacon said. “I have my child in school today.”

The threat on 4chan was similar to one posted shortly before the mass fatal shooting last week at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., but it targeted Austin.

Media outlets and authorities have since doubted that the original post was actually written by the Oregon shooter or that it even referred to the shooting.

“It was a very generic threat,” Chacon said. “We saw the same threat going across the country — the exact same wording, all they did was replace the name of the city. ... That’s one of the cases we’re working on, and we have a couple of others.”

Police have identified a suspect in a threat case, and charges could be filed, Chacon said, but he declined to say in which case.

In the wake of the Oregon shooting, “we’ve really seen an explosion that has happened online with people posting inflammatory comments,” Chacon said.

The reason Austin police decided to address this particular threat was because “there were so many different people sharing it on social media,” Chacon said.