The people of Florida have not completely lost their marbles.
Not yet, anyway.
Disgraced former Sheriff Scott Israel’s primary to regain control of the Broward Sheriff’s Office has ended in defeat. His campaign opponent, Sheriff Gregory Tony, came up victorious in Tuesday’s primary, winning 37.3% of the vote to Israel’s 35.1%, roughly 4,700 more votes in a contest marked by bitter and frequently personal attacks.
Israel conceded after the results of the election became clear, telling local news reporters that he accepts “the decision of the voters.”
“I want the community to know that I poured my heart and soul into being the sheriff of Broward County, and I fought hard to protect everyone’s rights,” the former sheriff said.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Israel was a liar and a coward. He had no business even being near the levers of power, let alone putting his hands on them.
Israel, who came to the Sherriff’s Office in 2012, headed the department in 2018 when a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, claimed the lives of 17 people. It was in that tragedy that Israel’s ineptitude and political conniving became clear. For starters, in the aftermath of the mass shooting, Israel sought to assign blame everywhere but his own department.
Israel, with the aid of CNN, tried particularly hard to blame the National Rifle Association for the killings, telling its then-spokeswoman Dana Loesch that neither she nor her employer is “standing up for these students.”
“You just told this group of people that you are standing up for them,” Israel told Loesch, knowing better than anyone at the moment of his department’s many failures. “You’re not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.'”
Elsewhere, Israel praised himself for his alleged management savvy.
“I have given amazing leadership to this agency,” he said during a CNN interview on Feb. 25, 2018, just 11 days after the shooting.
And when he was not busy praising himself as a model leader, he was busy evading all responsibility for the chronic failures of his department.
For example, when asked whether his office might have done anything different to prevent the shooting, Israel responded glibly, saying, “Listen, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, O.J. Simpson would still be in the record books.”
As it turns out, quite a lot could have been done differently. For one thing, a Broward County sheriff’s deputy and sergeant were fired following the Parkland massacre after they were found to have “neglected their duties” when they refused to confront the gunman as he systematically murdered 17 people. The deputy was charged later with “child neglect, negligence, and perjury.” The sergeant, who hid behind his car during the shooting, was reinstated in 2020 with back pay.
Israel, for his part, said of the deputy, former resource officer Scot Peterson, “I gave him a gun. I gave him a badge. I gave him the training. If he didn’t have the heart to go in, that’s not my responsibility.” So the buck stops anywhere else.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office also ignored an estimated 18 phone calls that warned of the perpetrator’s intentions, including a caller who told the department in 2016 that the killer “planned to shoot up a school” and another caller who told the Sheriff’s Office two years later that the gunman was gathering weapons and “could be a school shooter in the making.”
In April 2018, the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association voted 534–94 in a no-confidence vote against Israel. In January 2019, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Israel for his handling of both the Parkland shooting as well as a Fort Lauderdale airport shooting. Later, in October of that same year, the Florida Senate voted 25–15 to uphold DeSantis’s suspension of Israel.
On Tuesday, Israel’s attempt to worm his way back into the Broward Sheriff’s Office ended in failure.
Tony, the county’s current sheriff whom DeSantis appointed in 2019 to replace Israel, promised Tuesday that he will continue to work to make the Broward Sheriff’s Office “effective, transparent, and accountable.”
In other words, the opposite of how Israel ran it.
