In September, library systems in Hawaii, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and other states were forced to closed temporarily after receiving shooting and bomb threats. While the threats were ultimately determined to be non-credible, the unusual pattern of incidents has left library workers reconsidering their safety on the job—and wondering how to respond in the future.
The threats come at a time when libraries have become an unwitting political battleground—from book bans to anti-LGBTQ harassment by far-right groups. The American Library Association (ALA) has asked FBI director Christopher Wray to investigate whether there is any connection between the recent threats, but little remains known about whether the events are part of a coordinated effort to disrupt services.
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Responses to these threats have varied widely, from closing facilities and alerting the public to maintaining normal operations and letting all staff know days later. Some library workers worry that there seems to be little to no consensus on how library systems are supposed to handle violent threats made against them.
Lessa Pelayo-Lozada, 2022-23 president of the ALA and assistant manager for adult services at the Palos Verdes Library District in California, says the ALA doesn’t have any specific guidance on how a library should handle these types of threats.
“All of our libraries are very localized institutions,” Pelayo-Lozada told Motherboard. “The resources that they have available to them, the political arenas that they are living in, and how they operate are all very different.”
Pelayo-Lozada says the ALA encourages library systems to have policies and procedures in place so that staff are aware of what the process looks like, should they receive a violent threat in the instance they are on the receiving end.
“What we are encouraging folks to do is to just really share those plans with their staff as broadly as possible,” she added. “They have to work with their local security, with their local police, with their local protective units to be able to figure out what that process looks like for them and what the best practices are for the community that they’re living in.”
These plans can look dramatically different depending on the library’s location and the types of communities it serves. In some places, libraries have faced backlash for displaying LGBTQ-supportive titles, and anti-LGBTQ groups have sprung up in many areas that attempt to remove titles they find objectionable from shelves—in many cases, successfully. In June, Motherboard reported that library users often distrust local law enforcement to take care of potential threats such as protests of LGBTQ-themed events. Some supporters have formed community defense groups and taken matters into their own hands.
“I understand that these were hoax bomb threats, but given the climate and all the stuff that staff have encountered from anti-mask protests to First Amendment auditors, and now this, it’s draining morale and eroding trust in leadership,” Maty Cropley, president of the Boston Public Library Professional Staff Association told Motherboard.
Cropley says that people tend to be more frightened because they don’t feel confident that they know enough about how to respond in different situations.
“Setting aside communicating what happened to people, I think the response is to provide training and education and awareness and information for staff on how to react to these types of situations,” Cropley added. “This is a time when we should be engaging with training, practice, drills—that kind of stuff. Safety is a practice.”
Although the ALA does not have a set of policies and procedures for library safety and security, the organization does work with a handful of consultants who specialize in library security. Steve Albrecht, according to many, is one of the only games in town. He says that the more detailed a threat, the more likely it is to be credible, but does not advocate for closing a facility if a threat is received.
“We find out about bombs in this country after they go off and lots of people make bomb threats, whether or no bombs, and I think we overreact to bomb threats because we are in condition to shut down,” Albrecht, a former police officer, told Motherboard. “I don’t mean we don’t look for a real device or don’t pay attention or don’t call the police. But I’m saying it’s not always our first option.”
Albrecht advocates for librarians to undergo training that teaches them how to work with law enforcement. He says he advises the library director, security manager, facilities director and a department head who needs to make decisions on behalf of the staff to know about and respond to an incident.
“I’m trying to make it so that people want to feel safe and enjoy their jobs and feel like they have some tools,” he added. “That their management has the facts and understands what they’re trying to do.”
Not everyone is on board with involving the cops, however. Librarians have a long history of resisting police surveillance, and many are inherently distrustful of solutions that involve creating a police presence.
Christian Zabriskie, executive director of the Onondaga County Public Library in Syracuse and founder of Urban Libraries Unite, has been trying to deescalate the presence of security guards in the library system by replacing them with a community engagement team that serves what he calls a high needs community.
“We had level security guards who are actually, you know, carrying firearms and are armed security responders. We had a community engagement team and we had a police presence,” Zabriskie told Motherboard. “As I looked at it, I realized that the most effective group was our community engagement team who are trained in de-escalation.”
The community engagement team at Onondaga County Public Library comes out of a local group called the Street Addiction Institute—an organization that works to address the root causes of neighborhood violence. Zabriskie was inspired by Ryan Dowd’s The Librarian’s Guide to Homelessness: An Empathy-Driven Approach to Solving Problems, Preventing Conflict, and Serving Everyone which offers advice to library workers who have frequent contact with homeless patrons.
“We’re spending over half a million dollars a year on this and it’s worth it because we are seeing results,” he said. “We have had a total of six incidents across 11 locations over three months, and we write up everything.”
Zabriskie believes the Onondaga County Public Library has been successful because they have a clear policy around threats that includes things like verbal abuse that puts staff treatment first.
“I’m okay with people who are disrupting the rules and harassing people and making it an unsafe space, feeling that they’re not welcome in the library,” he said. “I don’t really have a problem with that, but some people in my profession feel that everyone should always be welcome and you always get all the chances that you want. And unfortunately, you know, that’s kind of led to a space where a lot of times our staff are not necessarily the first things that are taken into consideration when we look at security and libraries, and I think that’s really too bad.”
Pelayo-Lozada says that she and president-elect Emily Drabrinski are working to strengthen the ALA-Allied Professional Association—a 501(c)6 that provides professional development certifications around security, mental health and salaries among other issues specific to modern librarianship.
“We do emphasize that everything is very localized, just like with book censorship, but you know, with book censorship we do also have some best practices that go along with that, and so we’re hoping to start working on a lot of those things to be able to support our members and our library workers in the near future,” said Pelayo-Lozada.
