No one who follows the blogging collective
known as the "Conservative Treehouse" will dispute my claim that its
most prominent blogger, "Sundance" by name, is America's best
reporter. I got to know Sundance doing research for my book on the
Trayvon Martin shooting, If I Had a Son. So
instrumental was the research of Sundance and his colleagues that I made the
"Treepers" the protagonists of the book.
Sundance's research into
the political dynamics of Martin's Miami-Dade school system led him to expand
his research into neighboring Broward County years before the Parkland shooting. We
communicated the day after that shooting. We had a shared sense of
what had gone wrong. I detailed some of this last week in an article
on what one public interest magazine called the "Broward County solution." In
Broward County, they call it more modestly the "PROMISE Program."
In November 2013, Sundance first reported that Broward County was
"willing to jump on the diversionary bandwagon." As an
attached Associated Press article noted, "One of the nation's largest
school districts has reached an agreement with law enforcement agencies and the
NAACP to reduce the number of students being charged with crimes for minor
offenses." The goal, as the article explained, was to create an
alternative to the zero-tolerance policies then in place by giving principals,
not law enforcement, the authority to determine the nature of the offense.
In a collaborative agreement among school officials and law
enforcement, the presence of the NAACP might seem anomalous, but not in the
Obama era, where considerations of race routinely shaped educational
policy. "One of the first things I saw was a huge differential
in minority students, black male students in particular, in terms of
suspensions and arrests," Broward's recently hired school superintendent,
Robert Runcie, told the American Prospect. A black American,
Runcie assumed that the differential was due largely to some unspoken
institutional bias against minorities. As he saw it, these
suspensions played a major role in the so-called "achievement gap"
between white and minority students.
The first two "whereas" clauses in the collaborative
agreement deal with opportunities for students in general, but the third speaks
to the motivating issue behind the agreement: "Whereas, across the
country, students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ students are
disproportionately impacted by school-based arrests for the same behavior as
their peers."
The spurious "same behavior" insinuation would put the onus
on law enforcement to treat black students more gingerly than they would
non-blacks. To make the issue seem less stark, authorities cloaked
the black American crime disparity with EEOC boilerplate about "students
of color" and other presumably marginalized
individuals. Although nonsensical on the face of it – one is hard
pressed to recall a crime spree by the disabled – this language opened the door
for Nikolas de Jesus Cruz. An adopted son of the late Roger and
Linda Cruz, the future school shooter had a name that fit the
"metrics" of the collaborative agreement, regardless of his DNA.
It is not hard to understand why Broward County officials would be
eager to adopt this program. Miami-Dade had been receiving all kinds
of honors for its efforts to shut down the dread "school-to-prison"
pipeline. On February 15, 2012, Miami-Dade County Public Schools put
out a press release citing a commendation the Miami-Dade Schools Police
(M-DSPD) had recently received. The Department of Juvenile Justice
had singled out Miami-Dade for "dramatically decreasing"
school-related "delinquency." Said M-DSPD Chief Charles
Hurley, "Our mantra is education not incarceration."
Seventeen-year-old Miami-Dade student Trayvon Martin got neither
incarceration nor education. Eleven days after this
self-congratulatory press release, Martin was shot and killed in Sanford,
Florida, 250 miles from his Miami home. For all the attention paid
to the case, the media have refused to report why Martin was left to wander the
streets of Sanford, high and alone on a Sunday night during a school week.
Sundance, who lives in South Florida, broke this story through
old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. He writes, "Over time the
policy [in Miami-Dade] began to create outcomes where illegal behavior by
students was essentially unchecked by law
enforcement." Sundance was alerted to the problem during the
investigation into Martin's death when six M-DSPD officers blew the whistle on
their superiors, the most notable of them being Chief Hurley. The whistleblowers
told of cases of burglary and robbery where officers had to hide the recovered
evidence in order to avoid writing up the students for criminal
behavior. "At first I didn't believe them," writes
Sundance of the whistleblowers. "However, after getting
information from detectives, cross referencing police reports, and looking at
the 'found merchandise' I realized they were telling the truth."
One of those incidents involved Martin. Caught with a
dozen pieces of stolen female jewelry and a burglary tool, Martin had his
offense written off as entering an unauthorized area and writing graffiti on a
locker. There could be no effort made to track the jewelry to its
rightful owner, lest Martin's apprehension be elevated to the level of a
crime. Instead, Martin was suspended, one of three suspensions that
school year.
When George Zimmerman saw him that night in the rain, Martin, now
on his third suspension, was looking in windows of the complex's
apartments. Zimmerman thought he was casing them. Given
his history, Martin probably was. Zimmerman dialed the
police. The rest is history – or, more accurately, would have been
history if the media had reported Martin's brutal assault on Zimmerman
honestly, but they almost universally refused to do so.
Broward County launched its "education not
incarceration" experiment four months after Zimmerman was rightfully found
not guilty in the Martin case. By this time, Sundance and his fellow
Treepers had exposed the corruption that Miami-Dade's seemingly enlightened
policy had wrought within its school police department. Given the
mainstream media's failure to follow up on Sundance's work, even in Florida, it
is likely that Broward officials did not know how deeply the policy had
compromised police work in Miami-Dade.
What Broward County authorities did know is that the best
"school resource officers," the euphemism for in-school sheriff's
deputies, were those most sensitive to the objectives of the PROMISE
program. It is hardly shocking that in 2014, the now notorious Scot
Peterson was named School Resource Officer of the Year by the Broward County
Crime Commission for handling issues "with tact and
judgment." The motto of
that crime commission? "Evil triumphs when good people
stand idly by." Yikes!
Peterson, the commission noted, was also "active in mentoring
and counseling students." It appears that Nikolas Cruz got
counseled a lot. Better to educate him, after all, than incarcerate
him. Although there are many details still to be known, the
Miami Herald reported on Friday that, in November 2017, a tipster
called the Broward Sheriff's Office (BSO) to say Cruz "'could be a school
shooter in the making,' but deputies did not write up a report on that warning."
The Herald added that this tip came just weeks after a
relative called urging BSO to seize his weapons. Two years prior,
"A deputy investigated a report that Cruz 'planned to shoot up the school'
– intelligence that was forwarded to the school's resource officer, with no
apparent result."
That school resource officer just happened to be Scot
Peterson. He did not err by letting this misunderstood Hispanic lad
go unpunished in any meaningful way. Peterson showed his
award-winning "tact and judgment." He had to understand
that to keep the PROMISE momentum going, the school would have to see fewer and
fewer arrests each year. This meant excusing worse and worse
offenses, especially for students who counted as minorities. As for
the qualities real cops are expected to show – courage under fire comes to mind
– those were obviously not Peterson's strong suit.
"The school resource officer was behind a stairwell wall just
standing there, and he had his gun drawn. And he was just pointing
it at the building," said student Brandon Huff of
Peterson. "And you could – shots started going off
inside. You could hear them going off over and over."
In a surprisingly tough
interview with Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, CNN's Jake Tapper
cited the 23 incidents before the shooting that involved Cruz and questioned
whether the PROMISE program might have been responsible for the inaction by the
sheriff's office.
"It's helping many, many people," said Israel in defense
of the program. "What this program does is not put a person at
14, 15, 16 years old into the criminal justice system."
Said Tapper, "What if he should be in the
criminal justice system? What if he does something violent to a
student? What if he takes bullets to school? What if he
takes knives to schools? What if he threatens the lives of fellow
students?" As solid as these questions are, if CNN had raised
comparable questions after the death of Trayvon Martin, 17 Parkland students
might still be alive.
Says Sundance in conclusion, "I will give testimony, provide
names, outline dates, and give all prior records to any lawyer for use in a
wrongful death lawsuit – so long as their intent would be to financially ruin
the entire system and personally bankrupt the participants."
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/incompetence_wasnt_the_problem_in_broward_county.html