The failures of the use of the Promise Program to prevent Nikolas Cruz from greater accountability years prior to a year ago are well documented. Excuses to protect the Promise Program as-is ranged from clerical errors in the process of paperwork to a lack of communication between officials about Cruz specifically. But there’s one immovable fact. Whether it was the Promise Program that failed or the people tasked with administering the program, it let Cruz slip through the cracks.
In the long list of failures by those in positions of authority that led up to the attack, this is the earliest. He was referred to the program in 2013, literally about as soon as it began. How’s that for tragic irony. The program had just been created and Cruz was to be one of its earliest participants. It’s not helpful to say that had it not been created at that point, there’s almost certainly a different outcome, but it’s the overwhelming reality.
Here’s data from the FDLE on the Promise Program:
- A juvenile could have multiple in-school PROMISE diversions and multiple out-of-school civil citation diversions without either system being aware of the multiple diversions.
- Generally speaking, recidivist behavior warrants criminal charges.
Does it make any sense to anyone that a juvenile could have multiple in and out of school problems and no one’s supposed to know because of the program? How does that addup.Sound good to you as a parent?
So yeah, let’s audit and go from there. The premise of Promise was likely always flawed.
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