NEW FLORIDA GOV. RON DESANTIS fired Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for his personnel’s inaction at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting.
Israel can fight the removal by taking his case to Florida’s legislature, but speculation is that this won’t happen.
I THINK THE SHERIFF may have gotten a bum deal.
The Sheriff’s Office (BSO) does have some deputies that need to be replaced. All departments have people who need to be replaced.
But the BSO is not alone in allowing the murder of 14 students and three faculty at the high school.
Communications
The multiple police agencies must share part of the blame, along with the county commissioners.
Why?
At the time of the shooting — and still today — law enforcement operates on multiple radio frequencies; frequencies that are not shared with all departments. Communication is fragmented which means that one department cannot call for assistance from other departments without going through intermediate dispatchers.
The county commissioners need to use their influence — that’s spelled with $$ signs — to get the local governments to cooperate.
If the commissioners cannot do that, perhaps the new governor should expend his removal efforts — at both the county and municipal levels.
School failure
The Broward School Superintendent and the entire school board must share a great deal of the blame for failing to have enforced policies and procedures to keep unauthorized personnel out of the facilities and to sound a campus-wide alert if an intruder is detected.
I believe the governor should remove both the school superintendent and the members of the school board who were sitting at the time.(There has since been an election and the board has several new members.)
It seems to me that the superintendent and the board should have seen — and acted upon — the lack of security at all the county's public schools.
How does a person enter a facility with a RIFLE? A pocket gun I can understand, but a rifle?
Doors were not secured or even monitored.
The disaster might have been avoided it
- a. All visitors had to enter through a single door
b. Visitors with a valid reason to go beyond a reception (screening) area had to be “buzzed” in.
Cameras in hallways — if the ACLU doesn’t object — would not STOP a shooter, but they could track a shooter and make locating and eliminating the threat faster (read “with less loss of life”).
Moreover, this school shooter — sorry, “alleged” shooter — had a history with the school system and had been removed from at least one school as a threat.
Was this communicated to law enforcement? If it was, was it shared among the different agencies?
FBI bears some blame
The FBI must assume a good part of the blame for the massacre. It had evidence that the alleged shooter was a threat to the school. But, as with 9-11-2001, it kept the information to itself. (In 2001, the FBI’s Chicago field office had information about the terrorists well before 9-11. Chicago refused, for whatever reason, to share that information with FBI HQ. We saw the result.)
Unfortunately, the governor can do nothing about Federal incompetence and the arrogance of secrecy that seems to permeate the Bureau at all levels. Perhaps former governor and now U.S. Sen. Rick Scott can pressure Congress to force the FBI to get its act together. It’s performance in this century has been pathetic at best. Florida’s other senator, Marco Rubio who probably still has visions of moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., can join Scott.
- It would be nice — and, frankly I don’t expect it — if Democrat leaders would join with Scott and Rubio and demand improvements in the FBI. Broward is heavily Democrat.
Not the first time
This is not the first time the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO) has had an active shooter disaster. On January 6, 2017, a man murdered five people and injured six others at the local airport, an airport “protected” by BSO officers.
According to an article in Airport Improvement (https://tinyurl.com/y84oq2mb), Deputies stationed at the airport raced toward the shooter as he fired 14 rounds. Within 85 seconds, law enforcement had him in custody. But he had already done his damage, and people lay dead and wounded. To be fair, the shooter was in an open area and, unlike at the school, not going from enclosed space to enclosed space. Also, the airport has numerous deputies inside and outside each terminal building, most doing traffic control, but on site none-the-less.
Most police and sheriffs’ offices practice “active shooter” drills with schools, at least on an annual basis.
From a cop’s point of view
My son is a cop. Has been for more than a decade.
His initial reaction on hearing that a deputy failed to rush into a building where shots were heard was: So he rushes in and the shooter shoots the deputy. How does a dead cop help anyone?
The sheriff’s guidelines at the time of the shooting stated that a deputy may enter an active-shooter environment before backup arrives.
Since the disaster at the high school, the policy now states a deputy shall enter the active shooter environment even without waiting for backup.
- Again, getting immediate backup under the current hodge-podge of cop shop radio frequencies may not be possible.
The sheriff is the scapegoat for everyone
Meanwhile, the governor-appointed sheriff comes to the job from a local police force where he was a sergeant. Desantis claims his appointee has command experience and expects him to shape up the Sheriffs Office. I question the new sheriff’s command ability; if he is such a good commander, why was he “just” a sergeant with the local department. Suddenly he heads up a very large, county-wide organization, a far cry from the small community police department from which the new governor plucked him.
I wish the new sheriff well, but I keep seeing images of the late Clevon Little as the sheriff in Blazing Saddles.
My own 2¢
I spent a number of years as an enterprise risk management practitioner.
My job was to look at organizations of all types; to work with management and line personnel, to identify risks to “business as usual” from any source.
- In a school, that means keeping everyone safe and learning.
The operative word above is “if.”
As a risk management practitioner, I know you can “lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”
Actually, anyone with an ability to “think outside the box” could have told the school board and superintendent — assuming they would listen — where there were security problems — and, for the same price, might have been able to tell the board how to save some money in school operations.
Perhaps the governor ought to hire some enterprise risk management people to go around the state — and to each state department ‐ to look for things that could interfere with “business as usual.” (Many years ago I was part of a team that did just that for the state’s Department of Management Services. I never found out if our recommendations were implemented. Horses and water.)
Bottom line
It may be that taking away Scott Israel’s badge is warranted, but in my opinion, if the governor stops now, he is derelict in HIS duties. There is no doubt the sheriff could have been a better leader, that he should have had his officers (better) trained for active shooter situations in schools and other multi-room buildings (e.g., hospitals, government buildings and other offices). The sheriff should have worked closely — more closely — together his constituents to identify risks and ways to avoid or mitigate them, and he should have “gone public” after the school shooting, telling everyone what the BSO was doing to prevent a similar situation in the future.
BUT Scott Israel is not alone; the blame must be shared with the school board and its superintendent, with the county commissioners and local governments, and — without any doubt — the FBI.
In the Bible, the scapegoat was one of two animals. In Broward County we have a flock of goats to send to their (political) ends. Making Scott Israel the sole scapegoat for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school disaster does the students and faculty who died a disservice and does nothing to prevent a recurrence.
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