What To Do if You Receive a Death Threat

A threat received anonymously by a person to kill someone is referred to as a “death threat”. Death threats are received via phone calls, emails, Internet blogs or postal letters. The frequency of telephonic death threats is the maximum.

Death threats are considered to be criminal offenses in many jurisdictions. Most death threats happen for terrorizing or pressurizing the victims for manipulating their behavior. In such cases the threat comes as coercion. If a person threatens to harm a head of a state in the United States and other countries, then it is taken as a serious crime. Therefore death threat cases of many states in America are encompassed by the respective coercion statutes.
 

For e.g. the Alaska coercion statute says:

“A person commits the crime of coercion if the person compels another to engage in conduct from which there is a legal right to abstain or abstain from conduct in which there is a legal right to engage, by means of instilling in the person who is compelled a fear that, if the demand is not complied with, the person who makes the demand or another may inflict physical injury on anyone…”

Precautions to be Taken

You may get a threatening call due to several reasons. Sometimes a threatening call can be directed to your phone number even by mistake. A death threat often involves international terrorists and other notorious criminals. Hence it is important to take a firm action as soon as possible. So exactly what to do if you receive a death threat?

• Try to take down the number from the caller ID immediately as the call comes.

After gathering the number, go to your nearest law enforcing body. File a FIR immediately. The law enforcers will tell you to be ready for another round of call. If you get the call again, receive it. The state police in association with the phone company will try to trace the location from where the call is directed. This is an approximately 20seconds operation. After careful investigation, the law enforcers will arrest the threat caller from the detected location and take necessary actions. 

• If your screen shows the message “private number” then the phone number is possibly blocked. In that case follow the steps below-

Registering a Complaint

Contact your nearest phone company and file your complaint. Your complaint will be accepted at the “annoyance desk” of the customer care office. The telephone company will try to establish a “Trap” service on your phone number. This is an extremely useful service for revealing the identity of unknown callers. As soon as a call hits your phone, you have to dial a certain code. This will automatically divert the call to the trap database. The call will be made to go through several programs before the number is detected.
 

When this entire procedure is taking place, the recipient will hear the normal ring tone. The trap system will generate the actual number. By a “Reverse phone search” the owner details will be retrieved in no time. The law enforcers will scan court records, criminal records and other related documents to know if the owner is a registered criminal under the law of the respective state. The police will track down the offender and arrest him/her immediately. Proper legal procedures will soon follow . The penalties imposed on the offenders vary according to the severity of the offense.