Incredible account of Parkland shooting

[tbrown]

It's a done deal - Sheriff Smiley is gone. 5 1/2 pages of why.

Thank God!

Amen. It's the government, so I bet he's still getting paid, but at least he isn't aiding and abetting mass murder on the taxpayer dime.

[bbhack]

No pay according to the EO.

[tbrown]

No pay according to the EO.

[philip964]

With the way things are going in this country, he will run in 2020 and will be re-elected.

[Excaliber]

Functional security doesn't require great expense. It does require people to pay attention and act responsibly. Broward County Schools failed at that years before this kid started shooting.
Historically, when many shooters of this type were faced with an armed response, they were killed, immediately surrendered or committed suicide. There isn't time for a large tactical team to respond. I'm not suggesting that every teacher must be armed, and haven't heard anybody who has. I am suggesting that every teacher who is willing and able be armed. You don't want somebody coming to help, you want somebody who is already there to help. Also, yes, armed means loaded and on their person. I can comfortably wear a 1911 and two extra mags under the same dress pants and tucked shirt I wore in the classroom for 18 years.
Tuckable Commander 3.JPG

The first thing is to remove the idea that the person will NOT be confronted in their misdeeds. It is said that putting a sign in front of your house saying that you have an alarm system doesn't work but I've never seen anyone put up a sign saying their house is unprotected.

The real problem with these kinds of events is that the shooters have put a lot of thought into the situation before they act. They have, in my opinion, considered the reality of the situation more than the air-headed serendipity minded people who think that not even entertaining the possibility of a tragedy will make it not happen. A previous post talked about a multi-layered approach. In my conversations about arming teachers in our local district (and getting tremendous push back from teachers, school officials, police chiefs and parents) I've come to believe that a level of planning like that will never occur. The opponents can simply will the bad situation away. I think that is exactly what happened at Parkland. Even while the tragedy was unfolding, they were still trying to will it away, as they had previously done with Cruz.

You are absolutely correct that active shooters are stone cold realists and literally laugh at the unicorn security believers who think that a sign will stop someone who has decided to commit capital murder. They see the sign, they look for physical obstacles (secured areas, armed school resource officers, etc.) and consider if they can plan around them. In the Parkland case, Cruz correctly assessed the effectiveness of Broward's school resource officers and recognized they would not present an obstacle.

Professional risk managers understand the concepts of risk tolerance (how much damage to assets an organization is willing to accept or that cannot be avoided) and adversary task and response timelines. A rational organization deliberately defines its risk tolerance and designs its security plans in a way that ensures early responder notification and an adversary task timeline (from the time an attack starts to the time the damage to assets exceeds the risk tolerance) is longer than the response timeline (the time from start of the attack until effective termination of attacker action). Reversal of that ratio is the definition of an ineffective plan. This type of analysis pertains to anything worth protecting, whether it be lives, gun collections, jewelry, or anything else.

Poorly run organizations fail to consciously define their risk tolerance or evaluate the timelines built into their plans. This results in a risk tolerance that is not consciously defined and is often unrecognized. For example, a school that depends on external agency response to stop an active shooter is effectively accepting a risk tolerance of 20 - 45 casualties (2 -3 per minute on average during the average 15 minutes or so it takes until the shooter is stopped.) Pointing this out often results in stunned silence and queasy stomachs among those responsible for such a plan.

Properly trained armed teachers scattered throughout a school present a far better response timeline that is much more likely to keep casualties (some of which will have already occurred before an armed teacher recognizes an attack is underway) much closer to the low single digits. Signage that announces this provision without disclosing who, how many, or where is an extremely strong deterrent that is very likely to stop most attacks before they start because the attacker, even a suicidal one, can't be assured of the ten minutes of unopposed domination he needs to carry out a mass attack.

This is the thought process behind rational security planning. It remains a mystery to those who, as Mark Twain once said, have allowed their schooling to interfere with their education.

[puma guy]

Functional security doesn't require great expense. It does require people to pay attention and act responsibly. Broward County Schools failed at that years before this kid started shooting.
Historically, when many shooters of this type were faced with an armed response, they were killed, immediately surrendered or committed suicide. There isn't time for a large tactical team to respond. I'm not suggesting that every teacher must be armed, and haven't heard anybody who has. I am suggesting that every teacher who is willing and able be armed. You don't want somebody coming to help, you want somebody who is already there to help. Also, yes, armed means loaded and on their person. I can comfortably wear a 1911 and two extra mags under the same dress pants and tucked shirt I wore in the classroom for 18 years.
Tuckable Commander 3.JPG

The first thing is to remove the idea that the person will NOT be confronted in their misdeeds. It is said that putting a sign in front of your house saying that you have an alarm system doesn't work but I've never seen anyone put up a sign saying their house is unprotected.

The real problem with these kinds of events is that the shooters have put a lot of thought into the situation before they act. They have, in my opinion, considered the reality of the situation more than the air-headed serendipity minded people who think that not even entertaining the possibility of a tragedy will make it not happen. A previous post talked about a multi-layered approach. In my conversations about arming teachers in our local district (and getting tremendous push back from teachers, school officials, police chiefs and parents) I've come to believe that a level of planning like that will never occur. The opponents can simply will the bad situation away. I think that is exactly what happened at Parkland. Even while the tragedy was unfolding, they were still trying to will it away, as they had previously done with Cruz.

You are absolutely correct that active shooters are stone cold realists and literally laugh at the unicorn security believers who think that a sign will stop someone who has decided to commit capital murder. They see the sign, they look for physical obstacles (secured areas, armed school resource officers, etc.) and consider if they can plan around them. In the Parkland case, Cruz correctly assessed the effectiveness of Broward's school resource officers and recognized they would not present an obstacle.

Professional risk managers understand the concepts of risk tolerance (how much damage to assets an organization is willing to accept or that cannot be avoided) and adversary task and response timelines. A rational organization deliberately defines its risk tolerance and designs its security plans in a way that ensures early responder notification and an adversary task timeline (from the time an attack starts to the time the damage to assets exceeds the risk tolerance) is longer than the response timeline (the time from start of the attack until effective termination of attacker action). Reversal of that ratio is the definition of an ineffective plan. This type of analysis pertains to anything worth protecting, whether it be lives, gun collections, jewelry, or anything else.

Poorly run organizations fail to consciously define their risk tolerance or evaluate the timelines built into their plans. This results in a risk tolerance that is not consciously defined and is often unrecognized. For example, a school that depends on external agency response to stop an active shooter is effectively accepting a risk tolerance of 20 - 45 casualties (2 -3 per minute on average during the average 15 minutes or so it takes until the shooter is stopped.) Pointing this out often results in stunned silence and queasy stomachs among those responsible for such a plan.

Properly trained armed teachers scattered throughout a school present a far better response timeline that is much more likely to keep casualties (some of which will have already occurred before an armed teacher recognizes an attack is underway) much closer to the low single digits. Signage that announces this provision without disclosing who, how many, or where is an extremely strong deterrent that is very likely to stop most attacks before they start because the attacker, even a suicidal one, can't be assured of the ten minutes of unopposed domination he needs to carry out a mass attack.

This is the thought process behind rational security planning. It remains a mystery to those who, as Mark Twain once said, have allowed their schooling to interfere with their education.

[Paladin]

Functional security doesn't require great expense. It does require people to pay attention and act responsibly. Broward County Schools failed at that years before this kid started shooting.
Historically, when many shooters of this type were faced with an armed response, they were killed, immediately surrendered or committed suicide. There isn't time for a large tactical team to respond. I'm not suggesting that every teacher must be armed, and haven't heard anybody who has. I am suggesting that every teacher who is willing and able be armed. You don't want somebody coming to help, you want somebody who is already there to help. Also, yes, armed means loaded and on their person. I can comfortably wear a 1911 and two extra mags under the same dress pants and tucked shirt I wore in the classroom for 18 years.
Tuckable Commander 3.JPG

The first thing is to remove the idea that the person will NOT be confronted in their misdeeds. It is said that putting a sign in front of your house saying that you have an alarm system doesn't work but I've never seen anyone put up a sign saying their house is unprotected.

The real problem with these kinds of events is that the shooters have put a lot of thought into the situation before they act. They have, in my opinion, considered the reality of the situation more than the air-headed serendipity minded people who think that not even entertaining the possibility of a tragedy will make it not happen. A previous post talked about a multi-layered approach. In my conversations about arming teachers in our local district (and getting tremendous push back from teachers, school officials, police chiefs and parents) I've come to believe that a level of planning like that will never occur. The opponents can simply will the bad situation away. I think that is exactly what happened at Parkland. Even while the tragedy was unfolding, they were still trying to will it away, as they had previously done with Cruz.

You are absolutely correct that active shooters are stone cold realists and literally laugh at the unicorn security believers who think that a sign will stop someone who has decided to commit capital murder. They see the sign, they look for physical obstacles (secured areas, armed school resource officers, etc.) and consider if they can plan around them. In the Parkland case, Cruz correctly assessed the effectiveness of Broward's school resource officers and recognized they would not present an obstacle.

...

Reading some of history and quotes from N. Cruz in the report, it is quite clear that even though N. Cruz was a developmentally disabled teenager, he was a highly motivated murderer who had spend a considerable amount of time planning what he did. N. Cruz spent a lifetime not being held accountable for his actions like hitting a child in the head with a rock or knocking his adoptive mother's front teeth out or letting the world know he was specifically planning to shoot up "the school" with a rifle well before purchasing a rifle. N. Cruz knew from experience that no one in his environment would do anything until it was too late.

[Ruark]

But where did this "developmentally disable" kid get THOUSANDS of dollars to blow on all his guns and ammo? One police photo showed at least half a dozen guns on his bed, along with ammo, smoke bombs, a gas mask, etc. and it's confirmed that he owned at least 10 guns. It smells like somebody really screwed up here besides just Cruz and the Sheriff's department.

[bbhack]

But where did this "developmentally disable" kid get THOUSANDS of dollars to blow on all his guns and ammo? One police photo showed at least half a dozen guns on his bed, along with ammo, smoke bombs, a gas mask, etc. and it's confirmed that he owned at least 10 guns. It smells like somebody really screwed up here besides just Cruz and the Sheriff's department.

He could have killed as many with a Hi-Point reloaded twice. But your point is noted.

Cruz is either sub-responsible or insane. It's all our faults if we expect crazy people to function normally.

And he was brutally bullied. Who wants to put all the pieces together here?

[chasfm11]

But where did this "developmentally disable" kid get THOUSANDS of dollars to blow on all his guns and ammo? One police photo showed at least half a dozen guns on his bed, along with ammo, smoke bombs, a gas mask, etc. and it's confirmed that he owned at least 10 guns. It smells like somebody really screwed up here besides just Cruz and the Sheriff's department.

He could have killed as many with a Hi-Point reloaded twice. But your point is noted.

Cruz is either sub-responsible or insane. It's all our faults if we expect crazy people to function normally.

And he was brutally bullied. Who wants to put all the pieces together here?

I don't think it is possible to put all of the pieces together of a person who has mental illness. It becomes a chicken-egg scenario about whether whatever his underlying mental issue is or whether his treatment because of it was what pushed him over the edge. Our society continues a strong path of bullying for mental and physical abnormalities and I believe that many of our current school systems amplify, not reduce, those bullying actions. Further, my personal experience (through a family member) of our current mental health system gives me next to zero confidence that people like Cruz can be successfully treated. If criminals are recidivists, those with a mental problem are many times worse, being in and out of treatment many times in the course of just a few years.

The aversion to addressing security risks described by Excaliber is nothing compared to our aversion to acknowledging the risks involved with mental illness. We have jails full of people that prove that point.

[bblhd672]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-parkland ... 1547249451
(behind a paywall so copying below)

A Parkland Father’s Quest for Accountability
‘I blame the murderer for 50% of what happened,’ Andrew Pollack says. ‘There were so many people who didn’t care, who didn’t do their job.’

WSJ
By Tunku Varadarajan
Jan. 11, 2019 6:30 p.m. ET
Lake Wales, Fla.

In a campground near Lake Kissimmee, Andrew Pollack and I sit in the shadow of a white RV, his spartan home. He broods by my side in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. He’s just sold his large house in Coral Springs, Fla., because he feels “physically sick to be in Broward County,” where his 18-year-old daughter was shot dead last Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland. He’s lived in his RV for nearly three weeks with his wife and their Belgian puppy, who isn’t yet at ease with life in a mobile home. A campfire burns skittishly in the lakeside wind, its blaze nothing compared with Mr. Pollack’s burning rage.

A lean and rugged 52, he is a man of adamant words: He always says that his daughter, Meadow, was “murdered.” He scolds me—then swiftly apologizes—when I once say she “died.” I ask him about her name, and he tells me he and her mother (from whom Mr. Pollack is divorced) got it from “The Sopranos”: “I thought it was a pretty name. All my kids have unique names. Huck is my oldest, from Huck Finn. My other son’s called Hunter.”

There is a lull for a moment, as Mr. Pollack struggles to compose himself. He tells me he cannot bear to utter the name of Nikolas Cruz, the former student at Meadow’s school who is charged with killing 17 people—14 students and three adult staff members—in 11 minutes of unchecked carnage, making Parkland the worst high-school shooting in U.S. history. “I call him by his prison ID number,” Mr. Pollack says. “It’s 18-1958.”

In the 11 months since Meadow was murdered, Mr. Pollack has been transformed from an ordinary suburban dad and rental-market realtor to a vehement, in-your-face crusader for school safety. Days after the Parkland shooting, he met with President Trump at the White House. “We spoke for a while in the Oval Office,” Mr. Pollack says, “and that’s when I recommended to him that he should put together a commission on school safety.” In Mr. Pollack’s account, “the president then points his finger at Hope Hicks”—then White House communications director—“and he says, ‘I like that. I want to do that.’ ” Mr. Pollack returned to the White House when the commission’s report was presented 10 months later, sitting at a table to the president’s right. He has co-written a book, “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students,” to be published next month.

He doesn’t like to be called a “crusader” and says “I’m not a politician.” Yet Mr. Pollack is now a player in Florida’s politics. The day before we met at his RV, then-Gov. Rick Scott appointed him to the State Board of Education. He says he’ll use his position on the seven-member board to ensure “accountability,” a word he uses frequently. His objective, he says, is to hold to account “every individual, every institution, every policy” that led to his daughter’s death.

“I blame the murderer for 50% of what happened,” Mr. Pollack says. “I don’t blame him for the whole thing. Because there were just so many people who didn’t care, who didn’t do their job, that I blame them for the other 50%. And I need to expose them. That’s how I bounce back.” He pauses and corrects himself: “No, I don’t bounce back. I’ll never do that. I can’t even smile in photographs anymore, can’t show my teeth.” He thinks “day in, and day out” about accountability “for these people, because of whom I can’t walk my daughter down the aisle.”

Mr. Pollack believes that “political correctness killed Meadow.” A prominent villain in his narrative is Robert Runcie, who came to Broward from Chicago in 2011 as the superintendent of the county’s public schools. Mr. Runcie introduced a program called Promise—a feel-good acronym for Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education—under which students who commit crimes in public schools would no longer be reported to the police by administrators. Under Promise, students would be evaluated and dealt with exclusively within the schools and their associated reform programs. Even felonies as severe as drug dealing, sexual assault and bringing weapons to school could lawfully be kept from the police.

Mr. Runcie “saw that minority students were being referred to the police at higher rates than whites,” as Mr. Pollack tells it. “Rather than recognize that misbehavior can be the result of many complex problems outside school, or at home,” the superintendent concluded the disparity was because “teachers and schools were racist.” With no reporting, “now there’s no crime. The school’s data looks great. Problem solved.”

But a much worse problem was created: “No student has a criminal background as a result, so once you graduate from school and want to buy a gun, background checks are useless.”

Mr. Runcie and his supporters called their policy “discipline reform.” Violent students had to attend “healing circles,” among other sorts of in-house, nonjudicial remedies. The result, says Mr. Pollack—so agitated that he almost shouts—is that “mentally disturbed students, violent psychopaths like 18-1958, are right there in the classroom with normal students like my daughter, and with teachers who don’t know how to deal with them, since they can’t bring in the cops.” As Mr. Pollack writes in his forthcoming book: “His entire life, 18-1958 was practically screaming, ‘If you ignore me, I could become a mass murderer.’ ” Parkland, he says, “was the most avoidable mass shooting in American history. 18-1958 was never going to be a model citizen, but it truly took a village to raise him into a school shooter.”

Mr. Pollack describes the Broward County School District as “Ground Zero for a horrible approach to school safety that spread across America.” In January 2014, the Obama administration issued guidelines to the nation’s school boards, directing them to adopt Promise-like policies or risk a federal investigation and loss of funding. The report of the Trump school-safety commission, published Dec. 18, recommends abolishing such programs. “School boards won’t be hounded anymore to put these policies in place,” Mr. Pollack says. “But there’s nothing to stop a board from choosing to adopt Promise.” And Broward County has not abandoned it.

Mr. Pollack gives a detailed, impassioned account of the shooter’s behavior at school, every instance of which was reported to administrators and not to police. In middle school, the combustible adolescent was required to have adult supervision at all times. In high school, he vandalized a bathroom, causing more than $1,000 of damage. He racially abused black students and had fistfights with them. He carved swastikas on his desk. He hurled furniture across classrooms. He threw hard objects at other students, sometimes injuring them. He brought dead animals to school and often waved them before other students. He threatened to kill teachers and other students, and to shoot up the school. He wrote “KILL” in his notebooks and spoke frequently about guns. He brought knives to school and, on one occasion, a backpack full of bullets.

“After that,” says Mr. Pollack, “the school banned him from bringing a backpack to school. But I ask you, if he’s too dangerous to wear a backpack, why isn’t he too dangerous to be in class with kids like my daughter?”

The political correctness that is anathema to Mr. Pollack appears to have infected Broward County law enforcement as well. Sheriff Scott Israel was on a drive to reduce juvenile arrests, and the department allowed Cruz to keep a clean record even though deputies were called to his home 45 times in his middle- and high-school years. On one of these occasions, “he’d punched his mother so hard in the mouth that she’d needed to get a new set of teeth,” Mr. Pollack says. “Sheriff Israel judged his success by how many kids he kept out of jail. When officers never arrested 18-1958 despite 45 calls, they were following Israel’s policy.” On Friday the new governor, Ron DeSantis, suspended Mr. Israel from office. Mr. Pollack and two other Parkland parents stood alongside Mr. DeSantis as he made the announcement in Fort Lauderdale.

Cruz’s mother, who died three months before the shooting, was encouraged by Henderson Behavioral Health, Broward’s largest mental-health provider, to let her son “earn” a pellet gun for good behavior in 2014—which he proceeded to use to shoot at the neighbors’ pets and children. Henderson refused repeatedly to institutionalize Cruz, even as his mother pleaded with them to do so. In the week of his 18th birthday, Mr. Pollack tells me, she called them desperately, but their response to her pleas was that Cruz should be engaged “in coping skills such as reading magazines, watching TV, fishing and spending time with pets,” according to the health center’s own records.

Mr. Pollack has sued Henderson for wrongful death—“for their negligent approach to this murderer, for failing to deal with this psychopath.” In a statement last May, Henderson said it had no involvement with Cruz after 2016 and that the shooting “was not a tragedy that could have been lawfully prevented by Henderson.”

Mr. Pollack has also sued Scott Peterson, the armed deputy who was on the school’s premises the day of the massacre but chose to remain outside the building. Mr. Peterson has since resigned from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. But “he’s got his pension,” Mr. Pollock says, “$100,000 a year. This man—this coward. He retreats behind a pillar for 45 minutes. If he’d just gone in to the second floor—the shooter had just walked across there—he could have had a clear shot.” Mr. Pollack cites Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics to tell me that “shooters either give up or kill themselves if confronted with a weapon. They go into a gun-free zone thinking no one’s going to shoot back at them.”

Even though other deputies arrived within minutes—and didn’t go into the school either—Mr. Pollack is focused on Mr. Peterson, whom he sees as an embodiment of the forces that failed his daughter. Mr. Peterson’s lawyers moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the deputy didn’t have a duty to enter the school building. To which, Mr. Pollack tells me, the judge replied: “This is your defense? You’re telling me that this deputy didn’t have the duty to go in and save those kids?” The judge allowed the suit to go forward.

Punishment is not Mr. Pollack’s only objective, he says. The lawsuits allow him to “subpoena people throughout the whole district, school administrators, other deputies, policemen from the department in Coral Springs that did the right thing and rushed the building.” That, he expects, will “expose the incompetence in Broward County that goes right up to the sheriff.”

Mr. Pollack’s cause is righteous, but also lonely. “I feel a lot of times that it’s just my battle,” he says. “A lot of the other parents aren’t as focused on exposing these people as I am. To me, I have to do it for my daughter. And I’m not going to rest until I get accountability in the courtroom.” Nothing, it is clear, can fill the aching void in his life. He tells me that he stopped praying after Meadow was murdered. “I can’t,” he says. “I just can’t. At night, I used to thank God for my life. It’s tough for me to do that now. How could I? How would I? I’ll never have Meadow back.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-parkl...ty-11547249451
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Appeared in the January 12, 2019, print edition.

[Paladin]

...Further, my personal experience (through a family member) of our current mental health system gives me next to zero confidence that people like Cruz can be successfully treated. If criminals are recidivists, those with a mental problem are many times worse, being in and out of treatment many times in the course of just a few years.

The aversion to addressing security risks described by Excaliber is nothing compared to our aversion to acknowledging the risks involved with mental illness. We have jails full of people that prove that point.

It is certainly true that the current mental health system can not successfully treat all patients. Some can be treated. With others the treatments do not work or there are no treatments available.

Looking at N. Cruz's history showing a consistent record of violence since he 3-4 years old, N. Cruz was probably un-treatable and likely had serious issues from birth. I would speculate his birth mother was a drug/alcohol abuser. Here is a medical opinion from an MD. It is not the medical opinion only one I have heard. In fact, besides schizophrenia, many of these mass murders also appear to have fetal alcohol syndrome.

It troubles me greatly that, during Mr. Cruz’s life, no one was able to put the pieces together: adoption, psychosocial problems and increasing dysfunction are all textbook. Yet, all it really takes is one look at his face. The first time I saw Mr. Cruz on television, I felt comfortable making the diagnosis

- Jory F. Goodman, M.D.

Fetal Alcohol syndrome is a lifelong condition. Would N. Cruz grow out of violence one day? Don't cross your fingers.

[Paladin]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-parkland ... 1547249451
(behind a paywall so copying below)

A Parkland Father’s Quest for Accountability
‘I blame the murderer for 50% of what happened,’ Andrew Pollack says. ‘There were so many people who didn’t care, who didn’t do their job.’

WSJ
By Tunku Varadarajan
Jan. 11, 2019 6:30 p.m. ET
Lake Wales, Fla.

In a campground near Lake Kissimmee, Andrew Pollack and I sit in the shadow of a white RV, his spartan home. He broods by my side in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. He’s just sold his large house in Coral Springs, Fla., because he feels “physically sick to be in Broward County,” where his 18-year-old daughter was shot dead last Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland. He’s lived in his RV for nearly three weeks with his wife and their Belgian puppy, who isn’t yet at ease with life in a mobile home. A campfire burns skittishly in the lakeside wind, its blaze nothing compared with Mr. Pollack’s burning rage.

A lean and rugged 52, he is a man of adamant words: He always says that his daughter, Meadow, was “murdered.” He scolds me—then swiftly apologizes—when I once say she “died.” I ask him about her name, and he tells me he and her mother (from whom Mr. Pollack is divorced) got it from “The Sopranos”: “I thought it was a pretty name. All my kids have unique names. Huck is my oldest, from Huck Finn. My other son’s called Hunter.”

There is a lull for a moment, as Mr. Pollack struggles to compose himself. He tells me he cannot bear to utter the name of Nikolas Cruz, the former student at Meadow’s school who is charged with killing 17 people—14 students and three adult staff members—in 11 minutes of unchecked carnage, making Parkland the worst high-school shooting in U.S. history. “I call him by his prison ID number,” Mr. Pollack says. “It’s 18-1958.”

In the 11 months since Meadow was murdered, Mr. Pollack has been transformed from an ordinary suburban dad and rental-market realtor to a vehement, in-your-face crusader for school safety. Days after the Parkland shooting, he met with President Trump at the White House. “We spoke for a while in the Oval Office,” Mr. Pollack says, “and that’s when I recommended to him that he should put together a commission on school safety.” In Mr. Pollack’s account, “the president then points his finger at Hope Hicks”—then White House communications director—“and he says, ‘I like that. I want to do that.’ ” Mr. Pollack returned to the White House when the commission’s report was presented 10 months later, sitting at a table to the president’s right. He has co-written a book, “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students,” to be published next month.

He doesn’t like to be called a “crusader” and says “I’m not a politician.” Yet Mr. Pollack is now a player in Florida’s politics. The day before we met at his RV, then-Gov. Rick Scott appointed him to the State Board of Education. He says he’ll use his position on the seven-member board to ensure “accountability,” a word he uses frequently. His objective, he says, is to hold to account “every individual, every institution, every policy” that led to his daughter’s death.

“I blame the murderer for 50% of what happened,” Mr. Pollack says. “I don’t blame him for the whole thing. Because there were just so many people who didn’t care, who didn’t do their job, that I blame them for the other 50%. And I need to expose them. That’s how I bounce back.” He pauses and corrects himself: “No, I don’t bounce back. I’ll never do that. I can’t even smile in photographs anymore, can’t show my teeth.” He thinks “day in, and day out” about accountability “for these people, because of whom I can’t walk my daughter down the aisle.”

Mr. Pollack believes that “political correctness killed Meadow.” A prominent villain in his narrative is Robert Runcie, who came to Broward from Chicago in 2011 as the superintendent of the county’s public schools. Mr. Runcie introduced a program called Promise—a feel-good acronym for Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education—under which students who commit crimes in public schools would no longer be reported to the police by administrators. Under Promise, students would be evaluated and dealt with exclusively within the schools and their associated reform programs. Even felonies as severe as drug dealing, sexual assault and bringing weapons to school could lawfully be kept from the police.

Mr. Runcie “saw that minority students were being referred to the police at higher rates than whites,” as Mr. Pollack tells it. “Rather than recognize that misbehavior can be the result of many complex problems outside school, or at home,” the superintendent concluded the disparity was because “teachers and schools were racist.” With no reporting, “now there’s no crime. The school’s data looks great. Problem solved.”

But a much worse problem was created: “No student has a criminal background as a result, so once you graduate from school and want to buy a gun, background checks are useless.”

Mr. Runcie and his supporters called their policy “discipline reform.” Violent students had to attend “healing circles,” among other sorts of in-house, nonjudicial remedies. The result, says Mr. Pollack—so agitated that he almost shouts—is that “mentally disturbed students, violent psychopaths like 18-1958, are right there in the classroom with normal students like my daughter, and with teachers who don’t know how to deal with them, since they can’t bring in the cops.” As Mr. Pollack writes in his forthcoming book: “His entire life, 18-1958 was practically screaming, ‘If you ignore me, I could become a mass murderer.’ ” Parkland, he says, “was the most avoidable mass shooting in American history. 18-1958 was never going to be a model citizen, but it truly took a village to raise him into a school shooter.”

Mr. Pollack describes the Broward County School District as “Ground Zero for a horrible approach to school safety that spread across America.” In January 2014, the Obama administration issued guidelines to the nation’s school boards, directing them to adopt Promise-like policies or risk a federal investigation and loss of funding. The report of the Trump school-safety commission, published Dec. 18, recommends abolishing such programs. “School boards won’t be hounded anymore to put these policies in place,” Mr. Pollack says. “But there’s nothing to stop a board from choosing to adopt Promise.” And Broward County has not abandoned it.

Mr. Pollack gives a detailed, impassioned account of the shooter’s behavior at school, every instance of which was reported to administrators and not to police. In middle school, the combustible adolescent was required to have adult supervision at all times. In high school, he vandalized a bathroom, causing more than $1,000 of damage. He racially abused black students and had fistfights with them. He carved swastikas on his desk. He hurled furniture across classrooms. He threw hard objects at other students, sometimes injuring them. He brought dead animals to school and often waved them before other students. He threatened to kill teachers and other students, and to shoot up the school. He wrote “KILL” in his notebooks and spoke frequently about guns. He brought knives to school and, on one occasion, a backpack full of bullets.

“After that,” says Mr. Pollack, “the school banned him from bringing a backpack to school. But I ask you, if he’s too dangerous to wear a backpack, why isn’t he too dangerous to be in class with kids like my daughter?”

The political correctness that is anathema to Mr. Pollack appears to have infected Broward County law enforcement as well. Sheriff Scott Israel was on a drive to reduce juvenile arrests, and the department allowed Cruz to keep a clean record even though deputies were called to his home 45 times in his middle- and high-school years. On one of these occasions, “he’d punched his mother so hard in the mouth that she’d needed to get a new set of teeth,” Mr. Pollack says. “Sheriff Israel judged his success by how many kids he kept out of jail. When officers never arrested 18-1958 despite 45 calls, they were following Israel’s policy.” On Friday the new governor, Ron DeSantis, suspended Mr. Israel from office. Mr. Pollack and two other Parkland parents stood alongside Mr. DeSantis as he made the announcement in Fort Lauderdale.

Cruz’s mother, who died three months before the shooting, was encouraged by Henderson Behavioral Health, Broward’s largest mental-health provider, to let her son “earn” a pellet gun for good behavior in 2014—which he proceeded to use to shoot at the neighbors’ pets and children. Henderson refused repeatedly to institutionalize Cruz, even as his mother pleaded with them to do so. In the week of his 18th birthday, Mr. Pollack tells me, she called them desperately, but their response to her pleas was that Cruz should be engaged “in coping skills such as reading magazines, watching TV, fishing and spending time with pets,” according to the health center’s own records.

Mr. Pollack has sued Henderson for wrongful death—“for their negligent approach to this murderer, for failing to deal with this psychopath.” In a statement last May, Henderson said it had no involvement with Cruz after 2016 and that the shooting “was not a tragedy that could have been lawfully prevented by Henderson.”

Mr. Pollack has also sued Scott Peterson, the armed deputy who was on the school’s premises the day of the massacre but chose to remain outside the building. Mr. Peterson has since resigned from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. But “he’s got his pension,” Mr. Pollock says, “$100,000 a year. This man—this coward. He retreats behind a pillar for 45 minutes. If he’d just gone in to the second floor—the shooter had just walked across there—he could have had a clear shot.” Mr. Pollack cites Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics to tell me that “shooters either give up or kill themselves if confronted with a weapon. They go into a gun-free zone thinking no one’s going to shoot back at them.”

Even though other deputies arrived within minutes—and didn’t go into the school either—Mr. Pollack is focused on Mr. Peterson, whom he sees as an embodiment of the forces that failed his daughter. Mr. Peterson’s lawyers moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the deputy didn’t have a duty to enter the school building. To which, Mr. Pollack tells me, the judge replied: “This is your defense? You’re telling me that this deputy didn’t have the duty to go in and save those kids?” The judge allowed the suit to go forward.

Punishment is not Mr. Pollack’s only objective, he says. The lawsuits allow him to “subpoena people throughout the whole district, school administrators, other deputies, policemen from the department in Coral Springs that did the right thing and rushed the building.” That, he expects, will “expose the incompetence in Broward County that goes right up to the sheriff.”

Mr. Pollack’s cause is righteous, but also lonely. “I feel a lot of times that it’s just my battle,” he says. “A lot of the other parents aren’t as focused on exposing these people as I am. To me, I have to do it for my daughter. And I’m not going to rest until I get accountability in the courtroom.” Nothing, it is clear, can fill the aching void in his life. He tells me that he stopped praying after Meadow was murdered. “I can’t,” he says. “I just can’t. At night, I used to thank God for my life. It’s tough for me to do that now. How could I? How would I? I’ll never have Meadow back.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-parkl...ty-11547249451
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Appeared in the January 12, 2019, print edition.

I think this is an important article. My thanks to President Trump for putting together the commission on school safety. I'm not finding any disagreements with Mr. Andrew Pollack's reasoning. God Bless you Sir!

But Mr. Pollack should have hope that there is the both seen and the unseen, like what is described in the bible. There is far more to the universe than just what we can see, hear, and touch. The Buddhists know this as well. I've had the chance to get a glimpse of it myself through a near death experience. On his death, N. Cruz will experience all the suffering that he has inflicted on others. And Mr. Pollack should have faith that he will ultimately see his daughter again.

[Boxerrider]

Superintendent indicted.
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-fl ... c3a6e88cb0
I believe there really should be some genuine jail time and a civil suit because of his actions.

[ELB]

Superintendent indicted.
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-fl ... c3a6e88cb0
I believe there really should be some genuine jail time and a civil suit because of his actions.

He's not being arrested for the lousy job he did on security for the school, and I highly doubt he ever will be. He's being arrested only for lying to the grand jury about what a lousy job he did. I doubt it goes anywhere either.

School Board general counsel also indicted and arrested for unlawfully disclosing grand jury proceedings.