This incident happened yesterday in the city of South Portland which is located along the coast in Maine. A 16-year-old boy was arrested by a SWAT team with help from the FBI after he apparently made specific threats. By all accounts, the teen was planning some kind of attack but exactly what and where haven’t been revealed yet.

South Portland Police Chief Dan Ahern said the teenager is a student at South Portland High School. He said the department’s school resource officer was first alerted to the teenager, who is not being named by law enforcement.

“We were made aware of it just two days ago and felt it was in such a serious nature we needed to take action and search that person’s home,” Chief Ahern said. “Based on the info and evidence we recovered, there quite possibly will be additional charges.”…

At South Portland High School, students said they knew about the teenager and said he had not shown up to school in some time.

All of that certainly sounds like this was a threat made against the school but no one is confirming that yet and the school superintendent said he hasn’t bee made aware of any threats.

Tim Matheney, superintendent of South Portland schools, said he has received no information that the threats targeted schools, students, or teachers in the city. He said he could not comment further when asked if the teen is a student at South Portland schools.

“I have been in regular communication with the Police Department since the arrest,” Matheney wrote in a letter to families and staff Thursday morning. “We have been assured by the police that our schools continue to be safe and secure, and we are looking forward to welcoming our students to this early release day leading into April vacation.”

A SWAT team was sent to his house and there was some excitement as his father attempted to prevent them from arresting his son.

Chief Ahern told us another male tried to intervene in his arrest.

He was cautioned, refused to comply, and was shot with a beanbag to his abdomen. He was taken to the hospital and then arrested.

Several guns were taken from the house and the teen is expected to be charged with arson, theft and criminal mischief. This report suggests social media also played a role in the search and arrest:

Police arrested a 16-year-old boy, who investigators say was planning to commit some serious crimes with weapons in the city.

A young man who police say was not on their radar at all.

Not until some of the content he was posting online got red-flagged by investigators.

This seems like good news in the sense that we’re barely hearing about it because something much worse was prevented from happening, either at the school or elsewhere. There have been so many cases in the past (the Parkland shooting comes to mind) where authorities had all the warnings in the world that someone was dangerous and a potential school shooter and seemingly did very little to stop it.

On the other hand, this is quite a response for a teenager (allegedly) making threats. So it’s a weird balancing act where the public is asked to place a lot of faith in law enforcement that they’re reacting to real, imminent threats and not overreacting to things which aren’t real or imminent. I’m not suggesting police got it wrong in this case. It sounds, so far, like they did they right thing. But it’s not hard to imagine other circumstances where getting it wrong could lead to another kind of disaster, i.e. a swatting where someone gets hurt.

The reality is that we probably need to see more arrests like this one given the number of failures to prevent school shootings in the past. Still, it’s a bit unsettling to see SWAT and the FBI go in like this against a teenager. That’s partly because we know so little about what prompted this arrest. Hopefully, we’ll get more information about what led to this soon.

Update: Here’s a local news report on the arrest.