In an effort to stop the “school-to-prison pipeline” which had snared many black and Latino students, Broward County initiated programs to avoid arresting students who had disciplinary problems in the schools.
This pipeline became a popular topic during the Obama presidency through a belief in the social science statistics which showed many black and Latino students were getting arrested and into the court system, establishing records which hurt them for years to come in terms of higher education and employment.
According to prevailing social science, inequality in resulting arrests is a sign of inequitable application of discipline due to bias in the authorities. The Obama administration told municipalities that the assumption would be that a high rate of arrests for black and Latino students automatically represented oppression, rather than a higher rate of bad behavior among black and Latino students.
Broward County schools once recorded more in-school arrests than any other Florida school system. But that harsh approach fell out of favor amid concerns that it was funneling too many young people — and particularly black and Hispanic students — into the juvenile justice system. Cruz is listed on official documents as being white.
In recent years, Broward schools became a leader in the national move toward a different kind of discipline — one that would not just punish students, but also would help them address the root causes of their misbehavior. Such policies aim to combat what is known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” giving teenagers a chance to stick with their education rather than get derailed, often permanently, by criminal charges.
Beginning in 2013, Broward stopped referring students to police for about a dozen infractions ranging from alcohol and drug use to bullying, harassment and assault. Instead, students who get in trouble for those infractions are offered an alternative program that emphasizes counseling, conflict resolution skills and referral to community social service agencies.
Far from needing more mental health counseling, it appears that Nikolas Cruz received a massive amount of attention from the school district. He was getting help at least from his time in middle school and more help as he got older:
Teachers began to press school administrators to have Cruz transferred to Cross Creek School, a K-12 public school for students with emotional and behavior disabilities that offers intensive psychiatric counseling…
In February 2014, Cruz was transferred to Cross Creek. In January 2016, after about two years at Cross Creek, he transferred to Douglas High. It’s not clear why he left Cross Creek, a small school tailored for his needs, for a sprawling comprehensive high school of more than 3,000 students.
At Douglas, Cruz got into trouble four times during the first half of the 2016-2017 school year — for fighting, insults and profanity. In September 2016, after a fight, Cruz was referred to social workers. A week later, the Department of Children and Families opened an investigation.
However he was never arrested because the schools had a policy not to arrest for fights and other disruption. If he had been, he would not have been able to buy guns.
I believe gun owners look at these school shootings are the price our society pays to have the freedom for them to own guns. It seems very selfish to me, but I’m not sure if the consequences of disarming our society might not be worse for us all. Maybe that bothers you, but if it does, you might look at this story from the point of view of the freedoms you want preserved. A mentally ill man slipped through our crime prevention net because of a policy which has some sound basis. The students around Nikolas Cruz suspected he would come to the school and shoot them. The teachers feared him. Nikolas Cruz himself believed and told others that he wanted to shoot up the school. The FBI missed it. But it is virtually impossible to commit someone involuntarily for mental health reasons. Do we really want the FBI surveilling and arresting us for what we say on the internet? This case may seem obvious but the chances for abuse are massive for an agency which is weakly regulated. Would it have been better if the net had snared Nikolas Cruz before he killed? It would also have snared many of his classmates and destroyed their futures. What he did was evil. Perhaps our society has judged that what we would do to prevent it is more evil.
Got a source for the assertion that had Cruz been arrested he would not have been able to buy a gun in Florida?
Sure, it’s a price we pay. I say it’s a price too high… and it’s not the purchase we think it is…
And we’re not talking about ‘disarming’ completely. We’re talking about regulating appropriately.
If you take away the guns, then the tyrants on your side will come after the ex-gun people over something else. I was watching this unfold at the gym, with four tvs on. Sports, bachelor, news, and a cable cop show with cops blazing away with big black automatic weapons.
When you take away their guns, at that point how to they defend themselves? You guys will still have huge guns of course. And don’t tell me all your friends here are tolerant constitutionalists.
Oh, please.
One irony of your complaint is that it is, of course, those who most tightly grip their guns are the same folks who most loudly proclaim the importance of arming those police to the teeth.
I remind you that current response to the FL massacre is to propose that teachers carry guns.
We are not seeing defenseless patriots being gunned down by out-of-control left-wing tyrants. We are seeing, instead, out-of-control RIGHT WING hysteria and paranoia flooding our culture with millions of lethal automatic weapons that are being used to murder children in school classrooms.
America leads the world in senseless gun violence. The nations with the strongest gun control laws are:
1. Those whose citizenry enjoys the greatest liberty
2. Those with the lowest rate of gun violence
3. Those with the least intrusive police forces
Your comment exemplifies right-wing hysteria and paranoia.
I actually have long thought that school fights should be treated like the assaults that they are. Juvenile rather than adult court is probably appropriate in those cases, but they are technically breaking the law.
My issue is the ease with which Mr. Cruz bought his AR-15, and the large number of people who knew he had it and neither did nor said anything.
I want the dealer who sold that weapon to Mr. Cruz publicly identified. I want his home and business surrounded by a cordon of demonstrators who carry signs calling him a “child killer”. I want him publicly shamed. I want him to carry, for the rest of his life, the burden of knowing that HE is the person who armed the killer of those 17 high school students.
In the above paragraph, I’m intentionally invoking the way that anti-abortion activists pressured clinics, providers, and even churches like mine when they thought we were evil and immoral. I note that federal restrictions on abortion funding remain in place decades after the Supreme Court declared that access to abortion is a fundamental right of every woman.
I doubt that we will ever be able to identify disturbed individuals like Mr. Cruz before they commit their acts, at least not without falsely identifying hundreds or thousands of innocent men and women. Every such criteria has a false positive (incorrectly labeling an innocent person as future killer) and a false negative (incorrectly labeling a future killer as an innocent person) rate. In a society like ours where a tiny handful of miscreants are mixed in with a huge number of innocents, the false positive rate of ANY test that has a small false negative rate is just enormous.
This is one reason why focusing on the mental health of these terrorists is such a loser. We are a nation chock full of disturbed people — yet only a tiny handful of those disturbed people mow down dozens of victims with an arsenal of rapid-fire weapons.
That’s why we need to get these weapons, and the ammunition and accessories they require, out of circulation. There is no defensible reason why anyone should own these, and there are a host of reasons why they should not.
I’m weary of hand-wringing about these obscene weapons. I’m weary of the long litany of false excuses about why they’re really just fine and why there’s something wrong with me and people like me who react as we do.
Our schools — that we compel children to attend — have become shooting galleries. And STILL we refuse to do anything.
The excuses need to stop. The rationalizations need to stop. The lies and distortions need to stop.
I don’t think we needed arrest Mr. Cruz. All we needed to do is make it difficult or impossible for him to get his weapon of choice.
If he had arrived at that school with a machete or hunting knife, the outcome would have been far better.
What if he was arrested? Would it have made a difference if he spent a little time in jail?
I think that the gun lobby would be happy for us to be talking about Cruz’s mental illness rather than preventing anyone from getting their hands on the type of weapon that Cruz used. This kind of thing almost never happens in countries with genuine gun control.
So… lemme see if I got this straight… Broward County once had the highest rate of in-school arrests in Florida… that is to say, a ‘tough on crime’ policy that could only spring from the fevered imaginations of a distinctly conservative bent, with (one assumes) the concomitant racism that attends the ‘on the street’ application of such policies. … And this post is entitled “How a well-meaning liberal policy helped…” ??
To say a ‘liberal’ policy, implemented to confront the deleterious affect of a ‘conservative’ policy, is at fault suggests you find no problem, whatsoever, with the conservative policy.
There is –however– clear, unimpeachable, and voluminous, evidence to show, without doubt or evasion whatsoever, that the threshold between behavior and punishment is so much smaller for blacks and Hispanic than for white people. Or, put another way, there can’t possibly be a ‘higher rate of bad behavior among black and Latinos students” unless you define ‘bad behavior’ as ‘not being white.’
Applause, seascraper. Elegant and elaborate job of focusing on the latest killer to take the focus off of the obvious, and already successful solution: an assault weapons ban. Bravo.
Assault weapons bans work throughout free societies in Europe and in Australia, and it worked here as well.
Congratulations on your obfuscation.
This describes how gun laws function in Florida:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/02/16/what-florida-law-says-gun-ownership/347189002/
“Background checks are not required in private gun sales in the state of Florida, according to state law. If a convicted felon, a mentally ill person or an underage person privately bought a gun, the state of Florida wouldn’t know. And under Florida law, it’s illegal to create a database of gun owners.”
But gun stores are obligated to do a federal background check. In Florida, the background check requires approval by the Florida Dept of Law Enforcement.
The Florida state law mandates these requirements: No felony conviction. No misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, No adjudication as “mentally defective” or “committed to a mental institution” by a court.
Neither of the things Cruz did in school, bad as it was, would rise to that level. The problem was with the Florida state law, not with how schools handled the situation.
The most effective way this tragedy would have been prevented would have been:
– Ban assault weapons
– Bring background check at the local control level (town, NOT county). Effectively, this institutes the type of gun permit we have in Mass.
– Give the chief law enforcement officer of the town discretion to not give gun permits to troubled individuals – with ability for individuals to appeal.
None of these things are likely to happen in Florida, though. But the pressure is very high from high school students, and – interestingly – among businesses and even among some conservatives. You should read Peggy Noonan’s op/ed the other day in the Wall St Journal: “A Moment for Movement on Guns“.