PIPELINE TO ASSAULT

The Florida school shooting was a conundrum to me.

When the sheriff blamed his men...publicly shaming them as "cowards"...that seemed very off-putting.  Yet if the officers weren't the problem, what WAS the problem?

Was it the gun and police had not been issued a jacket that would withstand AR15 fire?  Was it their procedure which called for them to set the perimeter and wait for the SWAT Team?  Surely the gunfire called for a response.  It bothered me that things didn't add up.

Now some things have come to light.  Have you ever heard of the "School to Prison Pipeline"?

In 2013, a program was established in Florida to alter the percentages of young brown/black inmates and to also make college and a brighter future possible for troubled kids.  So far, so good.

Federal money for the program and political sway complicated things.  The theory was that kids were "over-policed and under-educated" and to combat that, they would NOT CALL INTO ACCOUNT minor infractions.  In plain English, criminal behavior slid by.

Just as kids know how to act when they have a substitute ("cra-cra"), these kids quickly figured out how to work the system.  Besides them, who else would benefit from such a convoluted system?  Robert W. Runcie was the Superintendent of Broward County Public Schools.  He bragged how student arrests had plummeted under his bold leadership.

Federal money came to the school systems and continuance was insured by a downturn in criminal referral numbers.  They agreed not to report, arrest, or prosecute students like Nikolas Cruz.

And there was another problem.  It would seem that Cruz as a "student of color" suffered as a victim of racist policies.  So the school district didn't do anything about his behavior while Cruz's behavior SCREAMED for intervention.

Who did speak up?  The "School Security Specialist", Kelvin Greenleaf, and the head of JROTC, Peter Mamoud spoke up.  Who else?  Kids showed the school staff Cruz's repeated messages threatening to kill them.  They filed written reports that he brought weapons to school.  Threatening to kill someone is a felony.  A felony would have kept Cruz from buying a gun.  Protection was in place but went unused.

Somehow in the death of common sense, it escaped notice that bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior.  The new policy seemed to say to the kids that they didn't need to behave in high school; they just needed to leave high school with no criminal record.

The system seemed to think arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system were the problem.  So SNAP!  Problem eliminated.  What began as an attempt to help troubled kids have a brighter future...came with unintended consequences.

Here are the officials who signed onto the agreement on November 5, 2013:

Robert W. Runcie, Superintendent of Schools

Peter M. Weinstein, Chief Judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit

Michael J. Satz, State Attorney

Howard Finkelstein, Public Defender

Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff

Franklin Adderley, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department

Wanly Walters, Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice

Marsha Ellison, President of the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP 
         and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board

(taken from an article entitled "The School-to-Mass-Murder-Pipeline")