"Many of them seemed uneventful at the time...". That’s how the Miami Herald described the events in Nikolas Cruz’ life over a 10 year period leading up to the deadliest high school shooting in the U.S.
I’m sorry, but like Emma Gonzalez, I call BS on this.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO), under the direction of Scott Israel, announced during a Thursday press conference that one of its own, Scot Peterson, 54, was on the scene during the start of the shooting and did not take any action to stop Cruz. Peterson was assigned to the school as a school resource officer or SRO. SROs are a routine part of many schools’ makeup and many are trained officers — many are also armed, as Peterson was that day.
There was a healthy debate on DK last night as to whether a trained officer should have rushed in, knowingly outgunned, to confront the shooter in an attempt to take him out.
Since the Columbine school shooting that left 12 dead in 1999, cops have been trained not to wait for heavily armed SWAT officers but to enter buildings to find and kill the threat.
“When we train police, the first priority is to stop the killing,” said Pete Blair, the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.
Said former Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti: “These events are over in three to five minutes. You don’t have the luxury to wait. You might not have the best equipment, you might have small numbers, but you’re armed. Those kids are not armed. You have to go in and engage the shooter. Our job is to protect and serve.”
Really. So what these LEOs are saying is that they train their cops to go in and attempt to take out a shooter who has 100x the fire power and in many cases, a tactical advantage, with the full knowledge that the odds of their survival — and the survival of civilians caught up in this thing — is rather low.
But that’s not really the point I’m going for here. We may never know why Peterson decided to hold his position and not enter the school. To some, he will be forever branded as a coward.
Yet I can’t help but to think about LEOs in other instances who didn’t hesitate for a second to take a target out.
Tamir Rice was 12 years old and playing with a toy gun when police rolled up on him and shot him dead within seconds. He was on an empty playground on a snowy Cleveland day and the cops just rolled up their car onto the sidewalk and playground and shot him dead — the cop had barely got out of the car in doing so.
Philando Castile was in his own car in a Minneapolis suburb with his girlfriend and her young daughter when police stopped his car. He told the cop that he was armed with his own gun that he had a legal license to carry (concealed). He complied with the cop and the cop shot him anyway, killing him.
Anthony Hill, an U.S. Air Force veteran was clearly not in his right mind. He was also very naked in the street outside of his apartment complex in Chamblee, GA walking about when cops were called. The officer who shot him dead claimed Hill charged toward him. But he was naked and unarmed, yet the cop did not hesitate to shoot and kill him.
Yet many of the 23 instances where the BSO were called to the Cruz home over the past 10 years ‘seemed uneventful at the time’.
Really Miami Herald? Are you kidding me?
Obviously we have a problem with America’s love for assault weapons — weapons that no civilian has any business owning and possessing, but that’s not the only problem we have here.
Rice, Castile and Hill were all African American. Yet LEOs seem to have no problems assessing the threat potential in these instances, even if their assessments are wildly unfounded and unsupported.
But Cruz? I mean, it’s not like the BSO didn’t know about him — they did.
The first report came in November 2008, when Cruz — then 9 years old — threw a rock at another boy outside their Parkland home. In the following years, Cruz’s mother called police to report various disturbances: her sons were fighting, Cruz hit her with a plastic vacuum-cleaner hose, the boys left the home through a bedroom window….
...An employee of Henderson Behavioral Health came and said the boy did not meet criteria for involuntary psychological evaluation under the state’s Baker Act…
...Seven months later, in September 2016, a Douglas school counselor reported to the school resource officer that Cruz might have ingested gasoline and attempted suicide by “cutting himself.” He also said he wanted to buy a gun and had a Nazi symbol on his book bag.
The school initiated a “threat assessment” on Cruz, then 18, suggesting he suffered from depression. The Florida Department of Children and Families also investigated Cruz and determined he was not a threat to himself or others. At the time, he was undergoing therapy with Henderson Behavioral Health…
There was a report on Cruz back in 2016 that he planned to shoot up a school and the BSO determined that Cruz had in his possession knives and a BB gun — that information went to Peterson and nothing came of it. The BSO was directed to Cruz’ instagram page where there was a picture of ‘a juvenile with a gun’ (I’m assuming that the juvenile was Cruz, but the Miami Herald does not say).
When Cruz’ mother died in November, 2017 a relative of his asked the BSO to seize his weapons.
They didn’t.
I mean damn. All of these things were ‘uneventful’? So why does Cruz get multiple passes and Rice, Castile and Hill get none? Cruz is in the school with an AR-15 killing people and still he gets a pass. Rice was a child, Castile was a law abiding citizen (who worked in a school!) and Hill was a soldier having clear mental problems — just think if any of them had been given half as many chances as Cruz, Rice would be a teenager, Castile would continue to be a favorite at the school where he worked and Hill would have been in treatment at the VA.
AR-15s are just part of the problem in this country.