Well, it turns out there was a reason for at least some of that police incompetence demonstrated before the Parkland shooting in Florida.

I’ve written about the number of mind-blowing mistakes the sheriff’s department had been told repeatedly that this shooter was a potential threat. Just three months ago, 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.

Why all the inaction?  Turns out, this was a direct response from an edict the Obama administration put out in order to prevent too many kids going to jail. The Washington Times reports:

The demand for an answer to that question has focused attention on Broward County Public Schools policies embraced by the Obama administration that were designed to help rule-breaking students avoid permanent blots on their records by reducing referrals to law enforcement.

Under Superintendent Robert W. Runcie, who worked for Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Chicago Public Schools, school-based arrests dropped by 63 percent from 2012 to 2016 after he implemented policies designed to derail the “schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline.”

But the approach also helped keep Cruz off the law-enforcement radar, despite school-based offenses that reportedly included assault, threats and bringing bullets to school in his backpack.

“Mr. Cruz is a perfect example of someone just falling through the cracks that we create through bad policy,” Jeff Bell.

Wow.  Here’s more about how the local deputies had their hands tied once the student conduct code was changed to accommodate a new agreement they made with their partners, the NAACP, the Broward County Sheriff, and the Broward state attorney.  It “included a diversionary program for repeat offenders called PROMISE and listed 14 misdemeanors no longer subject to school-based arrest.”

“They were basically paying us not to make arrests,” said Officer Bell.

I’ve written a great deal about self-governance, and how it’s important that Americans are able to make decisions as close to home as possible.  When edicts are handed down from “on high,” things don’t go well.

Of course, that’s an understatement when you think of all the carnage and destruction this student achieved.

All of it could’ve been avoided.

Image Credit: By Police photo (according to ABC News and WPTV), probably the Coconut Creek Police Department [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Hat Tip: Washington Times

 

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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