Honolulu Deputy Police Chief John McCarthy and Superintendent Christina Kishimoto want to put an end to the recent rash of threats by students against local schools.

“Since Jan. 1, we’ve dealt with more than a dozen threats directly dealing with Oahu schools,” McCarthy said Friday at a press conference at HPD headquarters. “We’ve made several arrests in the last couple of days.”

So far, he said, the threats have turned out to be hoaxes and weapons have not been found on campuses.

“We just wanted to stop the waste of resources, to stop the fear, the rumors, the waste of time that goes into it all,” he said. “There is no need for this kind of stuff. It just has to end.”

Students can face criminal charges of terroristic threatening along with school discipline, including expulsion. Their cases remain confidential because they are juveniles, he said.

“We encourage the students, parents and the public to call 911 whenever they’re aware of a threat to a school,” McCarthy said.

Kishimoto noted that school districts across the country are dealing with rumors and threats against school safety, often spread across social media, and the same is happening here.

“As state superintendent, I want to say this is absolutely unacceptable,” she said. “When our school administrators become aware of a school threat, police are immediately notified and an investigation is launched.”

“We cannot stress enough that these threats are not taken lightly,” Kishimoto said. “I encourage all our parents to work with us to support our children and to ensure that they are not living in fear.”

McCarthy said police take every threat seriously and carefully assess its validity. HPD works closely with the FBI and the Department of Education.

“You’ve got to realize that Hawaii is still a very, very, very safe place,” McCarthy said. “The kids, why they do it, to get out of school, get attention, there’s a variety of reasons.”

“We’re not finding weapons in schools,” he added. “The problem is that we are expending a lot of time, energy, manpower, resources addressing what eventually turns out to be bogus incidents, and I think that needs to stop.”

All guns, including nerf guns, are prohibited on the 256 public school campuses in Hawaii. Students who are found with firearms at school are dismissed from school for a year.

The most recent reported school case involving a handgun was in May 2011, when a 14-year-old boy discovered a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol on the ground in a remote area of his Highlands Intermediate School campus in Pearl City.

He picked it up to show his friends and it accidentally discharged when one of them pushed it away. The student’s father said later to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the boy had never touched a gun before and “broke down” when his dad pointed out that he could have unintentionally killed someone.

The Department of Education’s latest annual report to the Legislature, covering 2010-17, lists no handgun cases other than the Highlands Intermediate one, and no incidents with rifles in the last seven years.

In the last academic year, there were 21 incidents involving air guns, a broad category encompassing BB guns, pellet guns, nerf guns and paintball guns. That figure had dropped from 31 in 2011-12. There are nearly 180,000 students in Hawaii’s public schools.

As far as firearms on campuses, McCarthy said, “there’s never been one that I can recall that was actually brought to school and used in a criminal offense at the school.”

Both he and Kishimoto stressed that there are consequences to false threats, both in the criminal justice system and at school, and that misconduct as a juvenile can haunt an individual into adulthood.

McCarthy also cautioned against reposting threats made on social media. He noted that terroristic threatening is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

“If you are reposting threats, it’s as good as making the threat itself, because you’re contributing, you’re carrying on that initial conspiracy, so to speak,” he said.

McCarthy said police can track down the source of the threat using exceptions to the law that allow them to get such information quickly and without a warrant.