TORRINGTON – Just after 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, December 19, the Torrington Police Department, and other area law enforcement responded to the City of Torrington Airport to investigate a bomb threat which had been reported at the facility. 

“With the information we’ve received, it appears as we said in our [Facebook] post, it appears to be a nationwide sort of a scan thread, or hoax threat,” Torrington Police Chief Matt Johnson told the Telegram. “A bomb threat without the corresponding explosive device.”

Torrington was one of the handful of Wyoming towns to receive the threat and according to Johnson, the department quickly jumped into action to serve and protect the community. 

“Sadly, we are getting a lot of practice,” Johnson said. “It’s a really difficult balance to maintain where you’re trying to preserve the safety of your community but also recognizing there are some really ill-intention criminally minded people in the world that seem to be intentionally trying to disrupt and cause disorder in our society,” he continued. “There’s a whole range of theories why they are doing that, but it is happening. We try as quickly as possible to not only conduct the investigation about the information that we have but also to network with the Wyoming Information Analysis Team as quickly as possible and look at information from other agencies as well to figure out if this threat is being reported in other places. Is there more creditability or less creditability based on the information coming in and then we try to balance our response based on all of that information.”

According to multiple social media posts, Cheyenne and Casper also received threats like Torrington.

“At approximately 10 a.m. Cheyenne Police Officers were dispatched to two separate reports of a bomb threat – one was at Frontier Mall located at 1400 Dell Range Boulevard and the other was at Cheyenne Regional Airport located at 4020 Airport Parkway. In each case, a threat was received through email,” the Cheyenne Police Department said in a Facebook post. 

News outlets in Casper also reported police presence at the Eastridge Mall on Tuesday. 

“Online threats were reported by the corporate office at 10:45 a.m., according to a statement to Oil City News by Casper Police Department spokesperson Amber Freestone,” the new source read. 

According to Johnson, Torrington Police Department will continue to answer every bomb threat call as the real deal. 

“We still, regardless of the information we get back we still have to respond with that in the back of our minds that this could be real, and we have to make plans accordingly and protect people accordingly and figure out what the right balance is to maintain that safety without potentially making things making things worse by going overboard.”

Bomb threats appear to be becoming more frequent, according to Johnson. 

“We’ve had (bomb threats) it in our schools. Schools are probably the more frequent target, but it is going to keep happening in a sense that we need to talk about it as a community and most importantly we need to be working together as a community,” Johnson told the Telegram. 

The community can be a large asset to the law enforcement, according to Johnson. 

“The availability to be open and have those conversations and have people paying attention,” Johnson said. “Being aware of what’s going on is incredibly beneficial. When you’re dealing with things like this (bomb threat) often times what people haven’t seen is just as important as what they have seen. If we are dealing with an alleged threat in whatever environment and we show up and we have good witness and folks that have been paying attention and are there and happy to help and talk with us and work with us to get everything figured out, it really does smooth that process and help us to insure safety as soon as possible and hopefully get everyone back to doing what they were doing before.”

“Because this crime was perpetrated on a national scale, Torrington Police Department will collaborate with Federal Law Enforcement for the conclusion of the investigation,” the Torrington Police Department Facebook post read.

“There is always the worst-case scenario where we are going to have a legitimate threat that’s going to take a lot longer and be a lot more involved with, but these hoax-type threats the more information we can gather from cooperative and helpful members of the community, the quicker we can resolve things and get it taken care of,” Johnson said.