There are a lot of angles being debated over the Parkland school shooting. There’s the gun control debate where liberals are arguing that more laws would have stopped Nikolas Cruz from shooting and killing 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, while others blame gun-free school zones acting as magnets for madmen who want to shoot as many people as possible without worrying about someone shooting back.
Another topic people are talking about is how local police were called to Nikolas Cruz’s home dozens of times and nothing was ever done. Someone saw something and said something to the FBI, and they too dropped the ball.
But the topic no one is talking about concerns a closely held secret in which the Broward County School Board and the District Superintendent entered into a political agreement with Broward County police to stop arresting students for crimes.
What? Yes, you read that correctly.
It all started about 6 years ago in Miami-Dade County, which is just south of Broward County. Miami-Date County School District was struggling and looking more and more like a failing school district, which not only harms the district’s reputation, but has monetary consequences as well.
For schools, data on performance is everything.
The district noticed that a large percentage of their school population was being arrested at a higher rate proportionally than the rest of their community, and they came to the realization that if they were able to cut down the criminality of their students, the data would begin to look better, and it would help with the reputation of the school district, which means more money, more money, more money.
Instead of combining the intellectual talents of school professionals with law enforcement to come up with ways of actually lowering the amount of crimes being committed by students, they instead came up with a way of lowering the crime rate by entering into a political agreement with the local law enforcement that would see to it that the police would stop arresting as many students.
The school district realized their goal when they received more money for the schools after lowering the crime rate among their student population. Beside the fact that they entered into an agreement with police to omit the facts about students committing crimes, they actually did nothing to lower the real crime rate. In fact, they did worse than nothing, because they created the perception that crime was coming down among school students, giving off a false sense of security for the community while they didn’t do anything but stop making arrests.
In the following years crime got worse in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, so bad that a strange quota system was created that after a certain agreed upon number of arrests had been made leadership would make sure that other crimes committed would be excused. They made teen criminals above the law.
South Florida gangs got word of the scheme and started using high school students to commit more of their crimes. They got sophisticated by studying the patterns, and soon enough they began planning their biggest crimes toward the end of each month, at times when schools were collecting data for reporting on crime, because those were the times when police looked the other way due to the agreement they made with the school district.