ELDER PATRIOT – Across the board the last half-century of left wing ideology has made for bad public policy. In fact, it’s hard to think of a progressive policy that has improved either the lives of those it was intended to benefit or, society as a whole.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the deaths of seventeen students and teachers at the hands of Nikolas Cruz in Broward County, Florida where the policy requiring race-based results was crafted with the input of the NAACP.
The Obama administration was intent on equalizing outcomes in everything from outcome-based standards of living to criminal arrest records. The focus here is on one of the many “progressive” policies that the Obama administration implemented to equalize criminal arrest records.
In the case of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. massacre, those policies led to the slaughter of these 17 innocents and left grieving families in its wake.
It also did nothing to help the intended beneficiary of the Obama-era policy, the shooter Nikolas Cruz.
Obama’s Department of Education authorized a policy threatening school districts with lawsuits and funding cuts wherever if found racial “disparities” in suspensions and expulsions. The contention was such disparities created a “school-to-prison pipeline” for African-Americans children. The agency claimed such disparities were the product of racism in schools.
Their solution was to tie Superintendents’ bonuses to discipline stats and lower suspension rates.
The result was an astounding across the board decrease in arrests and an attendant increase in violence. St. Paul, MN, was typical of the war zone the “good” kids were expected to endure while trying to learn. Suspensions may have gone down, but assaults rose by 62%.
In St. Paul, “students” who had been emboldened by the “look the other way” rules attacked no less than 14 school officials.
In essence, the inmates were now running the asylum.
This was going on all over the country, nowhere more so than in Broward County, Florida, where Obama sycophant Sheriff Scott Israel began coordinating the efforts of his police with Broward Superintendent of Schools Robert Muncie to effect the Obama Education Department’s decree.
The policy ignored the incredibly hard earned success that cities like New York had employed in turning around criminal activity when it went to the “broken windows” policy.
The broken windows model focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. The underlying principle, that has been proven effective in communities where it has been implements, is that disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.
The police can play a key role in disrupting this process. When they focus on disorder and less serious crime in neighborhoods that have not yet been overtaken by serious crime, they can help reduce fear and resident withdrawal. Promoting higher levels of informal social control helps residents take control of their neighborhood and prevent serious crime from infiltrating.
I can attest from first hand knowledge that under Rudy Giuliani New York made an incredible turnaround both in reducing crime and increasing commercial activity as a result of safer streets.
Unfortunately, Broward Country Sheriff embraced the Obama approach.
For non-violent misdemeanors like trespassing, harassment, incidents related to alcohol, possession of a misdemeanor amount of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, administrators are instructed to try and resolve the situation without an arrest.
The policy had been already been in force in Miami-Dade to disastrous result.
The policy employed by Miami-Dade police and schools produced outcomes where increasingly illegal behavior by students went essentially unchecked in a race to the” bottom.” Six Miami-Dade police officers blew the whistle on their superiors after the death of Trayvon Martin. The whistleblowers chronicled case after case of burglary and robbery where officers were actually ordered to hide recovered evidence to avoid filing the appropriate reports of students engaging in criminal behavior.
Over time, the Miami-Dade outcome based “see no evil hear no evil” policy neutered all law enforcement efforts in the schools.
Those results didn’t phase the ideologically driven Sheriff Israel nor Superintendent Muncie.
Within months of the policy’s implementation at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. school-related arrests had dropped 41%. But, while Obama’s sycophants were busy congratulating themselves the seeds of anarchy had been planted.
Shockingly, Superintendent Runcie had worked with the NAACP to create the new student code of conduct. Not so shockingly the result was that standards of conduct began breaking down.
And, in the effort to continue lowering year over year arrest statistics, the school resource officers continued allowing more and more “minor” offenses by repeat offenders to go unpunished.
By 2014, the Broward County Crime Commission awarded Scot Peterson – the deputy who cowered outside while Cruz was massacring students and teachers –its School Resource Officer of the Year.
Peterson won the award for finding ways to avoid charging violators with ever increasingly more violent crimes. The commission celebrated Peterson, citing he was “active in mentoring and counseling students.”
One of those students was Nikolas Cruz.
In 2015 “A deputy investigated a report that Cruz ‘planned to shoot up the school’ – intelligence that was forwarded to the school’s resource officer – Scot Peterson.
According to the Miami Herald, in November 2017, a tipster called the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO) to say Cruz “‘could be a school shooter in the making,’ but, in what no longer comes as a surprise, deputies did not write up a report on that warning.”
In both cases, along with dozens of other warning signs including 39 police calls to his residence, Peterson showed his award-winning “tact and judgment.” His primary focus was to keep the PROMISE to lowering arrests – and effective policing.
And, because the system was based on race-based outcomes, this meant excusing worse and worse offenses for minority students.
The result was Nikolas Cruz was free to kill seventeen innocent victims.
