Threats by menacing clowns led DC police to surveil online accounts
Vague threats from social media users dressed as menacing clowns in 2016 led to intense police monitoring of their accounts and an effort to “identify those who may be responsible”, according to records from Washington DC’s Metropolitan police department (MPD).The threats, which came in the lead-up to Halloween from accounts billing themselves as “killer clowns” under user names like “snappytheclown_” and “dmvclownns”, led to intensive surveillance of those participating in the clown craze which triggered a wave of clown-themed media coverage.
Clown sightings were eventually recorded all over the US in 2016, having apparently begun in Greenville, South Carolina, before spreading across the south and then the rest of the nation. They also came to the attention of the police.An 3 October 2016 document, entitled Social Media Clown Threats, laid out measures taken over the previous four days in relation to “threats coming from accounts created by unknown persons with profile pictures of clowns” on “the popular Social Media sites today like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc”.
The report was found in a trove of police documents stolen and published by the ransomware attack group Babuk. Some were later redistributed by the transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets, from whom they were obtained by the Guardian.The clown-themed document said threats had been made to public schools throughout the DC area, and had “been garnering the attention of many School Administrations and have been a cause of concern for many parents”.It went on to detail social media posts which hinted at some looming, but non-specific threats to a large number of schools in the area. Some of the threats recounted by the document came from an Instagram account, “snappytheclown_”, and a Facebook account, “killerclownamber”.Posts reproduced from “snappytheclown_” included a photo of two men in sinister clown outfits, and blocks of text reading “Cardozo and Bell, here we come” – which names two public schools in the DC area – “The attack will be Monday at 3.30 PM after I prove you will join me in humanity’s annihilation”.The document also details elements of the police response to the message.
On 3 October 2016, the Homeland
Security Bureau “responded to Friendship Public Charter School” after a school resource officer reported that a sixth-grade student had shared a screenshot of an Instagram post from an account, “dmv_clowns”, which claimed that they would be “coming to” that school along with seven others. The document says the officers “met with [the boy] and school personnel and spoke with him about this posting”.In another incident, they said they received a report from an eighth-grade student who “stated that she definitely saw two individuals wearing Clown Masks while they were walking on the dirt path from Somerset heading towards Alabama Ave near the Liff ’s Market”.The report, the document concluded, merited “further investigation”, even though the student said that the clowns had not threatened her, and nor did she believe that they were armed.In other incidents featured in the 14-page document, details are given of the suspension of a middle school student after he brought a clown mask to school in his bag; the disciplining of two middle school students who created a clown account to scare one of their friends; and an email from a high school principal reporting that the school had received a phone call from someone who according to the principal said: “Coming for you. I am a clown. Watch.”The document also describes police efforts to obtain warrants to get account information for several clown Instagram accounts and Twitter’s deletion of an account, @joetheclown.
The document also details two incidents in which middle school children claimed to have been chased by clowns, but whose stories revealed inconsistencies in conversation with police. In one of these cases, the reporting child admitted they had made the incident up.