This is an investigative journalism article that I think is important for anyone interested in school safety and security to read. It contains links to
actual policies and official agreements between school systems (Broward) and the police department (Broward).
This approach (no discipline, no police, no record) is proliferating all over the country, as a result of policies pursued during the previous presidential administration, via the Justice Department, and the Department of Education. Schools actually are
threatened with loss of funding streams, if they don’t officially adopt policies to stop involving police in crimes that occur on school property, by students. I don’t’ care what your political leanings are, these kind of astoundingly misguided policies make ALL students LESS safe at school. And they ENABLE troubled kids to escalate their violence.
This investigative journalism piece for Real Clear Investigations (a mainstream site that is part of Real Clear Politics, and about a dozen other RC topics) is written by Paul Sperry, who is a regular author for NY Post, IBD, WSJ, Fox, and other conservative, but mainstream publications.
Florida: Behind Cruz's Rampage, Obama's School-Leniency Policy
Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient.
Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida’s Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence. The aim was to slow the "school-to-prison pipeline."
“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."
Disclosures about the strategy add a central new element to the Parkland shooting story: It's not just one of official failings at many levels and of America's deep divide over guns, but also one of deliberate federal policy gone awry.
BBM.
https://www.realclearinvestigations...cipline_policy_and_the_parkland_shooting.html
Who is the author, Paul Sperry?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Sperry
Timeline: The Making of School Leniency in Broward
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/03/02/broward_timeline.html
Press Release from the FL Dept of Juvenile Justice:
http://www.djj.state.fl.us/news/pre.../04/29/zero-tolerance-bill-passes-full-senate
Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline:
https://www.browardprevention.org/w...10/Fully-Executed-Collaborative-Agreement.pdf
210 page document on strategies to "eliminate the school to prison pipeline" Broward County:
https://www.browardprevention.org/w...10/Fully-Executed-Collaborative-Agreement.pdf
*If* we can begin to agree that we ALL care deeply about school safety and preventing school shootings, regardless of our political leanings, then PART of our righteous outrage should be channeled at these kind of “soft on discipline” official policies. These policies, and the misguided mindset behind them, ENABLE very troubled kids,
of ALL races, to avoid (over and over, in most cases) ANY official responsibility and accountability for their criminal and violent actions at school. That leads to young adults with “no record”, who can then have unfettered access to dangerous weapons.
Raising the age to buy guns, and banning accessories like bump stocks, won’t make a dent in this problem, although these things are largely agreeable to those on both sides of the issue. IMO, they will pass both into laws, and I'm fine with that. But these measures
will not save a single life, IMO. But it will make a lot of people and politicians feel like they "did" something, so there's that. It's a strategy of the incremental effort to ever more restrict lawful gun ownership-- much like the far right pushes to enact ever more incremental restrictions on abortion, with the goal of eliminating legal abortion.
So while many advocate for more restrictions and bans, intellectually honest people must ALSO advocate loudly and persistently to abolish these “no discipline, no police, no record” policies immediately. These dangerous policies, and the motivations and mindset that created them, have made schools vastly LESS SAFE from disgruntled and disaffected kids bent on planning and carrying out school shootings.