AI-val és szakértőkkel szűri a Meta az iskolai lövöldözések jeleit

Larry Baimbridge spent thirty-one years with the Houston Police Department, including stints as a homicide detective and as commander of the SWAT team. In 2023, he took a job as chief of police for the Spring Branch Independent School District, most of which is within the city. The job was more low-key—no more shootouts with snipers—but it came with its own challenges. After the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen elementary-school students and two teachers dead, the state legislature had neglected to pass any meaningful restrictions on guns; instead, the state required that every school campus have an armed security officer. “Of course, they didn’t provide enough funding for it, but that was the mandate,” Baimbridge said. The Spring Branch district served thirty-one thousand students across forty-odd campuses—“a very wealthy area on one side of the freeway and a very poor area on the other side,” Baimbridge said. Late in the school year, on February 18, 2025, he got a phone call from Brian Ennesser, a supervisory special agent at the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. The two men had met the year before, when Ennesser formed a threat-mitigation task force, a group that specializes in disrupting targeted mass violence, including at schools. Baimbridge knew right away that something was up; Ennesser usually texted or e-mailed. “Hey, man, we’ve got a problem,” Ennesser said. The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today. The F.B.I. had received a tip about a potential threat to a local school. It involved two teen-agers, one a student at Spring Branch, the other at a school district north of Houston. Both were girls. “Once we identified it being two females, we were double-checking our work,” Ennesser later told me. Baimbridge got to the Spring Branch school quickly and briefed its administrators on the threat. As they walked down a hallway, a young woman came out of the bathroom. The assistant principal’s eyes widened—it was the girl they were looking for. Baimbridge stopped her and asked her to come with them. “And she just kind of put her head down, which, from my years in homicide, I knew if I got a head slump I’ve got them,” he told me. “She didn’t ask why.” Baimbridge later learned that the two teen-agers had met in a therapy group; when their parents didn’t want them to meet up outside of treatment, they kept in touch online. At some point, they allegedly discussed plans for a violent attack. That day, as Ennesser and a handful of other F.B.I. agents spoke with one of the girls in a conference room, Baimbridge sat outside with her mother. With the woman’s permission, he pulled a binder from the girl’s bag and began to flip through it. He was struck by the skill of her drawings. Then he stopped on a page that appeared to be a jumble of names, places, and dates connected by lines, like some kind of confounding word map. “You know that movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’?” he asked me. In the middle of the page were two names: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine High School murders. (Both girls pleaded guilty, one to conspiracy to commit murder and the other to making terrorist threats; they will remain on probation until age eighteen, and one will remain under continuous monitoring and receive psychiatric care, according to the F.B.I.) Mass murderers have long attracted macabre groupies, but, like many ugly human tendencies, the phenomenon has been accelerated and amplified by the internet. According to law enforcement, the Texas girls were participants in the T.C.C., short for True Crime Community, an online fandom that celebrates perpetrators of mass violence. In the past two years, at least nine attacks and sixteen disrupted plots have been linked to the T.C.C., according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit think tank with a focus on hate and extremism. In the aftermath of the arrests, law enforcement announced that the girls’ plot had been discovere