Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel Faces No-Confidence Vote from his Own Deputies

I’ve written about Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel before.  You might remember that he bragged he showed “amazing leadership” after the Parkland school shooting, even though he repeatedly mishandled major aspects of the national tragedy.  Now, he’s facing a no-confidence vote from the deputies union.  CNN has the story:

Jeff Bell, the president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, told CNN on Friday that union members had decided to move forward with the vote, which will begin electronically tonight and will close on April 26.

“There is a complete failure at the sheriff’s office and he doesn’t recognize it,” Bell said.

Calling the vote a “ploy,” Israel said the union “is trying to use the Parkland tragedy as a bargaining tactic to extort a pay raise.”

Of course, the union is correct to have serious doubts about the sheriff.  The number of mistakes his department made were staggering. First, his sheriff’s department had been told repeatedly that this shooter was a potential threat. Just three months prior, a tipster said this nineteen year old was potentially a “school shooter in the making.”   The shooter himself even called the police to tell them he was suffering after his mother died. Even though the sheriff’s department (and the FBI) should’ve known this person was possibly planning a school shooting, they did nothing.

Second — and worse — that’s what the officer at the school did as well. Senior Brandon Huff saw an armed school resource officer behind a stairwell wall in a bullet proof vest. He was “just standing there, and he had his gun drawn. And he was just pointing it at the building. And you could — shots started going off inside,” Huff said. “You could hear them going off over and over. And he was just talking on the radio, and he never did anything for four minutes.” It was later reported that three other Broward deputies showed up and stood behind their patrol cars instead of going inside to help fight the shooter.

Not only did the police refuse to go in after the shooter left the building, they reportedly even prohibited first responders from entering the school. As children were bleeding out inside the building, no one came to their aid. “Everything I was trained on mass casualty events says they did the wrong thing,” one first responder told WSVN. “You don’t want wait for the scene to be cleared. You go in immediately, armed, retrieve the victims. You can’t leave the victims laying there.”

But that’s what they did. The shooter ambled out of the school along with the other students. Then he walked into a fast food restaurant and ordered a drink. He meandered around the neighborhood, walked past an elementary school, and finally surrendered to a Coral Springs police officer with whom he crossed paths.