In the wake of Stoneman Douglas – the more things change the more they stay the same
Who made key mistakes in Parkland school shooting? Nine months later, no one held accountable - Sun Sentinel
Excerpt: Despite an extraordinary series of governmental failures leading to the bloodshed in Parkland, just a few low-level employees have faced consequences over errors that may have cost lives.
But not the school administrators who failed to act on warnings of weak security at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, or the ones who mismanaged gunman Nikolas Cruz’s special education needs when he was a student there. Not the sheriff’s deputies who took cover while children were shot, or their supervisors. And, by all indications, no one at the FBI, which fumbled compelling, back-to-back tips about Cruz in the months before his rampage.
Bottom Line: Bingo, this Sentinel writer nailed it. Last week, I advanced this conversation on back of the lawsuit against the FBI led by Fred Guttenberg. As we’re sitting here in South Florida having been run through the wringer because of incompetence and illegality by supervisors of elections in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, let's not forget that it still persists in the Stoneman Douglas situation. This is a list of all of the names and players:
- Superintendent Robert Runcie
- Broward School Board
- Broward School administrators of the Promise Program
- Broward Sheriff Scott Israel
- Deputy Scott Peterson
- FBI
What do they all have in common? No actual accountability. Yeah, Peterson’s out of a job but with a pension that pays him more than double what the average income in Broward actually is. Yeah, Superintendent Runcie and Sheriff Israel have likely had sleepless nights and had to deal with the ire of thousands, none the least of which are the victims' families, but they’re still in the jobs same as before. The greatest failure of all, the FBI, had undergone no known changes or had anyone held to account best that anyone knows.
It's possible the FDLE investigation which seems endless at this point will lead to accountability but that’s not helpful in the here and now. I’ve been hopeful that the Broward School District had enough of a fire lit under them that they’d follow through on the only approach that had the potential to stop all school shootings that’d occurred. I'm talking about metal detectors, but after killing the piolet program that was to take place at Stoneman Douglas there’s no indication that it’ll get off of the ground anytime soon.
In fact, the most successful campaign to date for the Broward School District has been the coercion to get residents of Broward to vote themselves another tax increase to provide even more money to this team for what exactly? More of the same?
In the real world, there’s accountability for incompetence, or worse. It’s about damn time we started to see it in all of these government failures in South Florida. From the Supervisors of Elections to the FBI. The time is now and frankly, with an aggressive and non-PC governor about to take the reins, we might be about to start seeing it.
Photo by: Joe Raedle/Getty Images