Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel defiantly refused to consider resigning his position after investigation revealed his investigators had multiple chances to stop a school shooter before the incident.
Israel said on CNN’s “State of the Union” he “of course” would not resign despite devastating news about his department’s role in the shooting came out last week.
Video from the shooting showed one deputy, who worked as the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, waited outside the building for backup to arrive and didn’t enter the building to help stop the shooting.
Following that, investigators said local law enforcement was contacted about shooter Nikolas Cruz more than 20 times in the months leading up to the shooting.
Despite those failings, Israel said he’s not considering leaving his role as the county’s top cop.
“I will not resign. I never met that man. He doesn’t know anything about me and the letter was full of misinformation,” he said about a state representative who wrote a letter calling on him to resign.
“I wrote a letter back to the governor. I talked about all the mistakes that were in his letter. It was a shamefully, politically motivated letter that had no facts and of course I won’t resign.”
Israel added his deputies did their job most of the time.
“And as I said, of those 18 calls, two of those calls are being — 16 of them we believe were handled exactly the way they should. Two of them we’re not sure if our deputies did everything they could have or should have,” he said.
When asked why Israel didn’t provide this information during a town hall meeting on CNN Wednesday, the sheriff said he wasn’t aware of the information at the time.
Israel spent much of that town hall slamming the NRA and calling for more power for police officers to help stop shootings ahead of time. He brushed off a question about whether he improperly withheld that information from the community until after the nationally-televised town hall.
“We have investigators, homicide investigators, internal investigators investigators dissecting it and when they felt there was a video that ready for my view that I might take action on one of our deputies I looked at the video,” he said. “And let me add this … once I saw the video, the first order I gave was for our detectives to notify the families of those lost, the families yesterday, today and tomorrow, the families come first and I wanted to make sure the families knew what happened and what was about to happen.”
