At every level of government, Broward County has continued to fail its children. U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom has thrown out a case brought by 15 students against the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the school district, ruling that neither law enforcement nor the public school system was culpable for failing to prevent the Parkland rampage that culminated in the deaths of seventeen innocents.
Consider, Sheriff Scott Israel received at least 45 calls concerned about the shooter before the actual event (CNN caught Israel in the lie that he received just 23 calls.) Just before the rampage, a campus security monitor saw the shooter enter the building and recognized him, but he took no action and alerted no one. When responding to the event, armed sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson and seven other deputies stayed outside of the building as they heard children being murdered by gunfire. As a recent public safety report notes, the deputy sheriffs’ actions were “unacceptable and contrary to accepted protocol.”
In other words, some or all of those 17 victims might be alive today if not for the dereliction of duty both on the parts of the Broward County school district, which knew that at least two school counselors suggested that the shooter be involuntarily committed for mental evaluation in September 2016, and Broward’s law enforcement, which cowered behind cars while children took the bullets.
Bloom’s ruling rested on the notion that the shooting was directly caused by a third party, the shooter himself. But every modern notion of Western justice understands that law enforcement is preventative and demonstrative, from the broken windows theory to Foucault. If law enforcement will not uphold the application of the law, what’s to stop the next shooter? In not preventing or stopping an assailant with approximately two-and-a-half million red flags, were the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and school district not at least partially complicit in the massacre?
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now recommending that school faculty and staff undergo armed training as a direct result of the Parkland shooting. The idea sounds outlandish and certainly disturbing at first, but if every element of the government, from the school district to law enforcement to the courts, continue to fail the children of Broward County, the federal government may have to step in with suggestions as heavy-handed as teachers, not cops, carrying and defending their students.
