It’s been a couple of week since the events in Parkland and quite a few things are coming into focus.
This started with the Obama administration’s Promise program. Trying to break the “school to prison pipeline” and improve race based statistical outcomes, criminal offenses were not reported to police. Students that would have been charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, were now be disciplined through participation in “healing circles,” obstacle courses and other “self-esteem building” exercises.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel backed the plan and a November 2013 video shows him signing the district’s 16-page "collaborative agreement on school discipline,” which lists more than a dozen misdemeanors that can no longer be reported to police, along with five steps police must “exhaust” before even considering placing a student under arrest.
Nikolas Cruz was a repeat offender that really benefited from this program. He was disciplined for multiple offenses -- including assault, threatening teachers and carrying bullets in his backpack -- but he was never taken into custody or even expelled. Instead, school authorities referred him to mandatory counseling or transferred him to alternative schools.
“He had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the system,” veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello told RCI. “He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement.”
Yeah, the FBI screwed up. The didn’t follow the process when Cruz was reported to them for that comment on YouTube. But it’s easy to see why, Cruz had no record. A quick check would have turned up nothing. Even if the FBI investigated, Cruz’s record was clean. That’s no excuse for not following the proper procedure though. If the FBI had done so, they might have realized Cruz was a threat and stopped this before the shooting.
If local law enforcement had been aware of his threats and behavioral issues, they too might have prevented the attack. Instead, Cruz was protected by the school resource officer, Scot Peterson, who had previously even refused to cooperate with a investigation of Cruz. I’m not sure how much blame we can pin on Peterson, he was only following policy.
Speaking of local law enforcement and procedure, we’ve learned that Capt. Jan Jordan, commander of BSO’s Parkland district, gave the order to form a perimeter around the deadly scene instead of following BSO training and nationwide active-shooter procedure calling for armed law enforcement officers to confront shooters immediately rather than secure a scene. One wonders at how many dead kids we can attribute to that failure.
In the aftermath, the comedy continues as the survivors of the shooting have achieved celebrity status. The MSM is fawning over them and how they just naturally work the activist events. Credit, when offered and it rarely is, has been given to the schools debate program and the kids’ innate relationship with social media.
We now know why that credit was largely a mystery. The reality is that there are literally millions of dollars being thrown at these kids by people like George Clooney and Oprah and PR firms have been engaged. Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz aiding in the lobbying a teacher’s union organizing the buses that got the kids to protests. Michael Bloomberg’s groups and the Women’s March and MoveOn.org are doing social media promotion and (potentially) march logistics, as well as training for student activists provided by Planned Parenthood. The president of the American Federation of Teachers has admitted they’re also behind the national school walkout, which journalists had previously assured the public was the sole work of a teenage victim. And just today, some of the students are directly engaged in fundraising for the DNC. This is hardly some natural talent on display here.
This event was a tragic thing. Using the young victims as props in a political sideshow is another tragedy.