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Bang / Guns Title: Was Parkland shooter enabled by Obama-era Dept of Education policies? The responsibility, reports Paul Sperry at Real Clear Investigations, falls on the Obama administration’s Department of Education, which attempted to disconnect punishment from crimes committed by students — and turned people like Cruz loose. In 2013, Perry explains, the school district in Broward County rewrote its disciplinary procedures to avoid referrals to law enforcement. Current superintendent Robert Runcie developed the program, and the Department of Education not only endorsed it but made it part of their own policies: In 2015, the White House spotlighted Runcie’s leading role in the effort during a summit on “Rethinking Discipline.” Broward, the nation’s sixth largest school district, is one of 53 major districts across the country to adopt the federal guidelines, which remain in effect today due to administrative rules delaying a plan by the Trump administration to withdraw them. That would explain the school’s refusal to refer Cruz to law enforcement. But law enforcement was already involved with Nikolas Cruz. Whether one believes Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel’s claim that they’d been called 23 times or a CNN report of 45 calls drawn from public records, law enforcement had plenty of opportunities to act on their own. So why didn’t they? It turns out that Runcie and Israel had agreed to ignore crimes committed by students in the district. The program is called “restorative justice,” and claims to be “repairing the harm done” to victims while keeping the students from facing consequences of their actions: The expressed goal of PROMISE is to bring about “reductions in external suspension, expulsions and arrests.” Delinquents who are diverted to the program are essentially absolved of responsibility for their actions. “This approach focuses on the situation as being the problem rather than the individual being the problem,” the website states. Additional literature reveals that students referred to PROMISE for in-school misdemeanors – including assault, theft, vandalism, underage drinking and drug use – receive a controversial alternative punishment known as restorative justice. “Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done,” the district explains. Indeed, it isn’t really punishment at all. It’s more like therapy. Delinquents gather in “healing circles” with counselors, and sometimes even the victims of their crime, and talk about their feelings and “root causes” of their anger. Despite a combined number of sixty-eight opportunities to rethink this approach for Cruz, neither the school district nor law enforcement abandoned this policy. They had specific and credible warnings of Cruz’ potential for violence; one of the offenses the school noted was bullets in Cruz’ backpack. Students and neighbors repeatedly warned that Cruz would shoot people. All it would have taken to prevent Cruz from buying the weapon was one arrest and conviction out of sixty-eight separate incidents and calls. And, Perry argues, all of this emphasis on “restorative justice” and absolving perpetrators of responsibility for their crimes came from the Obama administration. They wanted to lower the arrest rates for juveniles because they believed that arrests and prosecution unfairly targeted people of color and poorer children. Even if that were true, how does ignoring crime solve anything other than the data reported? The lack of disciplinary options available to school districts and the law enforcement agencies that partnered on these programs left other students, teachers, and school personnel much more at risk as students quickly learned that they would face no serious consequences for serious crimes. Hans Bader warned about the consequences of the Obama-Duncan policy last year at Liberty Unyielding: His findings are based on student and teacher responses to questions contained in the NYC School Survey. As he notes, “the de Blasio administration removed the vast majority of school-order-related questions on the NYC School Survey, limiting our ability to judge changes in school climate. But the answers to the five questions that were asked consistently reveal a troubling pattern. According to teachers and students, school climate … deteriorated dramatically” when de Blasio’s curbs on suspensions were implemented from 2013 to 2016. In terms of violence, 50% of schools deteriorated, and only 14% of schools improved. In terms of gang activity, 39% deteriorated, while only 11% of schools improved. For drug and alcohol use, 37% deteriorated while only 7% of schools improved. By contrast, these measures had been stable during the preceding four years before Mayor de Blasio took office. Ironically, although these curbs on suspensions were done in the name of helping minority students and ending a supposed “school-to-prison pipeline,” they harmed minority students the most, producing “a significant differential racial impact.” Still, while the Department of Education pushed these approaches and incentivized their adoption by making stars out of people like Runcie and Israel, those decisions got made by the local school district and law enforcement agency in and around Parkland. They made the choice to turn a blind eye to Cruz literally dozens of times, not Arne Duncan or Barack Obama. Even in a “restorative justice” model, there has to be some judgment applied to emerging threats, and that responsibility lands entirely on Runcie, Israel, and their respective agencies. While the Trump administration needs to end these Obama-era policy initiatives, we also need to make sure that Runcie, Israel, and others like them get held fully responsible for their own failures. Otherwise, we run the risk of making the same mistakes the Obama administration incentivized — making no one responsible for their own actions. Poster Comment: We had a few articles that mentioned these 0bama policies in passing. Morrissey details them in this piece. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#1. To: Tooconservative (#0)
How else can we explain the failure to act against this shooter? The FBI (two warnings), Broward sheriff (29 or 45 visits, complaints), the school, the FL child services... There is a structural reason why no one stopped him. I think this is it. I liked that Morissey collected the broader background info to put the Broward failure in context nationally. It's a bad policy in any state but especially lethal in a populous state where guns are readily available. To me, this shooter should have been banned when he started cutting up live animals (lizards, birds) so he could "see what's inside". That is classic serial killer stuff if you know the type and their typical psychotic fixations.
#3. To: Tooconservative (#2)
I believe the root cause of the problem is that Broward County School Board and District Superintendent, Robert Runcie who draws an unbelievable annual salary of $335,000, entered into a political agreement with Broward County Law enforcement officials to stop arresting students for crimes. The motive was simple. The school system administrators wanted to improve their statistics and gain state and federal grant money for improvements therein. There was a 2013 “Collaborative Agreement On School Discipline” between the School Board of Broward County and the Sheriff of Broward Country, as well as the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP and a variety of other state and local legal bodies, and it can be found HERE. It was all about money....it always is. I think that everyone who took part in this agreement should be investigated. Depending upon the results of those investigations, I would personally consider a charge of “accessory to murder” for their dereliction of duty....but I know it would never get that far.
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