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Sheriff Israel Has Failed His Department and His Community
Over at PJ Media today, I join the growing chorus of people calling for Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel to be ousted from his job. It has been revealed that the department he leads failed on many levels, both before and during the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14. Compounding those failures has been Israel’s preening for the cameras, most obnoxiously at CNN’s town hall, at which students, parents, and teachers from the school gathered to hector Sen. Marco Rubio and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch. Remarkably, Sheriff Israel came to be a crowd favorite, echoing the crowd’s anti-gun sentiments and fueling the passions of the youthful mob.
But now we know a few more details about the shooting and the events that led up to it, such as the many times Broward Sheriff’s deputies had contact with the shooter, and the fact that as many as four deputies waited outside the school as children and school staff members were being shot inside.
Scot Peterson, the now-former sheriff’s deputy, has come in for the bulk of the criticism as it was he who was the assigned “school resource officer” on the campus, and who waited outside as shots rang out. Before I can condemn him, however, I need to know what his department’s policy was regarding responding alone to an “active shooter.”
As I say in the PJ Media piece, until my retirement from the Los Angeles Police Department a few years ago, I was a member of a squad specially trained and equipped to respond to these incidents (there were several such squads stationed around the city). At the time I left the LAPD, the policy was for officers to assemble in groups of at least four, and ideally five, before entering a building under attack. The optimal configuration was a diamond formation consisting of a team leader in the center, with officers on point, on the left and right flanks, and as a rear guard.
It has been my understanding that this practice has been widely adopted by police departments, though some agencies train officers to confront active shooters alone, if necessary. I have not yet heard what the policy of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department is. If Deputy Peterson was following department policy by waiting for backup to arrive, it makes a difference on how harshly we should judge him.
That said, there is a question for every police officer to ask himself: How many gunshots am I willing to listen to, with each shot potentially taking another life, while I adhere to department policy? In the LAPD, officers have been disciplined for acting on their own and not waiting for backup, albeit in circumstances less dire than those at Stoneman Douglas High School. But if, as has been reported, there were other Broward deputies present, all of whom failed to assemble as a team and enter the building, that is an inexcusable breach of an officer’s duty.
I have no doubt there are many dedicated and courageous deputies in the Broward County Sheriff’s Department who only wish they had been in a position to confront the gunman. My fear for them is that their boss, now beleaguered with calls for his head on a spike, will be more concerned with saving his own hide than with leading the department through this crisis. Any internal report on the department’s failures, whatever they may be, will have to be approved by Sheriff Israel – assuming he’s still in office – and should be viewed with that in mind.
As always, I encourage my friends here at Ricochet to read the piece and return here to comment. As time allows, I’ll do my best to answer your questions.
Published in Policing
I didn’t think that I could be more appalled. You mean that, whilst defenseless-by-law children and actually courageous but unarmed caretakers are being slaughtered, the Proper Procedure is to gather five officers and get into formation and… what a boatload of steaming horse clops. Why not wait for a tank? And close air support? And maybe an amphibious-capable rescue team? My mind during my morning walk was roiled by reflections on the parable of the good shepherd. If I or more so my grandchildren are in danger, I want them to be watched over by the good shepherd, not the hireling. They might not meet the Good Shepherd quite so prematurely.
I was under the impression police officers were to enter in pairs and eliminate the threat as soon as a couple officers were present.
I think if the people of Broward County want to keep him, they should. I also think they should keep their criticism for what happened confined to Broward if that is the case. I do think as a US citizen, I question the FBI’s failure, especially after reading the transcript of the call made to them last month. It was written, it may have come off less serious in oral format, but the ums, ahs, broken sentences seemed like a person stressed about this.
I don’t expect the world to be like me but I’d have gone in unarmed and done my best until dead. Those cops now have to live with their sorry cowardly backsides.
The sheriffs dept was also not arresting teens for any crimes but murder so they could get federal money. Sheriff Israel colluded with school board and superintendent to not arrest teens. He , sheriff Israel , is responsible for all these deaths. His policies let this happen. He is a disgrace. He’s a deceptive punk of a man, unworthy of his title.
So what do you think is good policy in such cases? Go in or wait for back up? If the later how many? I’m honestly curious because I think there are good arguments for both. Certainly for the victims I can see how going in seems the right choice, but in a building where you cant see inside and one you may not know the lay out to going in alone may just add to the body count rather than prevent anything. I think the problem is that these events are so rare and there is so much chance involved maybe no best practice can be developed. As any good plan or practice can turn bad instantly on the slightest whim of chance.
“Amazing leadership,” though.
?
The LAPD policy assumes multiple officers responding simultaneously to a radio call of an active shooter. They arrive, grab their rifles, and enter in groups. As with any policy, it does not address every possible scenario. Surely it will be re-examined in light of what happened in Florida.
It may be in some places. As I explained in another comment, the LAPD’s policy assumes many officers arriving simultaneously. This may not be a fair assumption in some places.
This is a scandal of its own.
Peterson’s attorney maintains that Peterson thought the shots were coming from outside the school.
In rescue diving courses we’re taught to assess the situation (of a distressed fellow diver) and only intervene if we believe we can do so without undue danger to ourselves. The thinking, and I think there’s something to it, is that there’s no point turning one death into two.
Now a sheriff’s deputy obviously has a different level of duty than a dive buddy. He’s sworn to protect and that implies a willingness to take a certain amount of risk. But it seems to me that “assess what’s possible” and “don’t pointlessly become roadkill” are still maxims that should impact his decisions. Maybe he should err more on the side of intervention (even alone) but even if you eliminate cowardice from the equation entirely, that doesn’t mean he should necessarily have intervened in this case.
I’m not defending this guy. I really don’t know. But it occurs to me that a lot of the people who are both attacking and defending him don’t really know a lot of things one would need to know to make a judgement. Not only department policy but the layout of the school, his position, his ability to judge where the shots were coming from, what kind of access he might have had to that location, whether there was “cover” available to allow him to get in position to take the gunman out, etc., etc., etc.
Yes, maybe he was just a coward. Or maybe there were other reasons he was unable to act.
Here’s from a man with 30 years in law enforcement, including quite some time as a School Resource Officer. He’s in a more generally rural jurisdiction than LA or Broward County.
And from a long time rural Texas Sheriff’s Deputy:
In looking at the shooter, I feel sorry for him. The caller to the FBI confirms what my gut tells me, that he has low mental capacity. I am not excusing him, he will have to pay for what he did. More will come out and the whole story will become more clear. I think some facts are still being sorted out.
I do think the vitriol thrown at the NRA and conservatives is in part, a guilty conscience of those that have known him and known of him through the years. Many said before they knew who it was, they guessed who it would be. The caller seemed sure something was going to happen. I imagine he was overlooked, barely tolerated, and hoped he’d go away. He was an insignificant person, a pest, a bad egg to the school and the cops, but, I imagine, deemed incapable of doing more than impulsive childlike anti social things. This was not an impulsive act. He wasn’t so sneaky that at least one who knew him well took him seriously.
Had the police arrested him, they would have done him a favor, and served the now dead much better.
The failure to arrest him was neither accident nor incompetence. See here, and as follows; emphasis added:
“At the time I left the LAPD, the policy was for officers to assemble in groups of at least four, and ideally five, before entering a building under attack.”
I thought that after Columbine that the procedures had changed to move in as soon as you arrived?
I don’t believe I could have waited. Best case you kill the shooter, worst case you may sacrifice yourself, but distract the shooter and allow more students to escape.
The shooter had generated calls to 9-1-1 to include hitting his mom with a vacuum cleaner hose, in another call he punched another family member. A relative asked for a deputy to seize his firearm and knives. The first two incidents would probably be enough to generate a pysch hold.
All in all this young man generated at least 23 calls to 9-1-1. Some were as a juvenile, and some were as an adult. I’m not sure how many calls it takes in Broward County to determine if someone is a danger to himself, or to others. I usually had that figured out on the first call.
This Sheriff is an admin cop who is a politician first. I’ve met a few, and they can do a lot of damage both inside, and in this case outside their agency.
The sherrif is incompetent, ignorant, unwilling to be accountable, and and unworthy of being taken seriously. He is probably due for an advancement.
And the same training in diversity, etc. crap goes on at the FBI.
He will probably get a medal, maybe the Liberty medal that Jeb pinned on Hillary months after Benghazi.
Jack, I’m sure you are a good man and were a good cop. You have done several great posts in the past.
But please, the idea of waiting for 4 or 5 officers in LA is absurd.
I live in the Hollywood Division area. Hollywood Division covers something like 300,000 people, and a whole series of venues including the Hollywood Bowl ( capacity 18,000) Greek Theatre ( capacity 5,000), Hollywood and Highland which includes the Dolby Theatre where American Idol and the Oscars are filmed, the Pantages, El Capitan, Griffith Park Observatory, the performances at Hollywood Forever, John Anson Ford Theatre, dozens upon dozens of clubs, hundreds of bars and restaurants, and a crime ridden East Hollywood just to name a few places to police. Hollywood Division can only roll 7 squad cars max at any one time. Seven – count’ em seven. That’s it. It is also a very large area with very bad traffic. You would have to wait hours to get 4 or 5 cops at a spot usually. During rush hour it can take easily over a hour to go from the Hollywood Division Police station on Wilcox to where I live in the Hills.
Police response is usually terrible to non-existent. For years, I never saw a squad car patrolling my neighborhood. Over 45 years ago, my family’s house was creepy crawled ( a la Charlie Manson) and the police took 45 minutes to get there. We all should have been dead.
Waiting for that kind of back up is just not realistic. Particularly when they all knew kids were dying while they were waiting for whatever.
Well I know they seem like they happen all the time because of the coverage, but in comparison to other crimes they are not that common.
Some details on this scandal
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/966854507744374784
Well it took the deaths in the earlier N.Y. shooting to uncover (for most Americans) the existence of the “diversity lottery” for immigration in time for its sunset to be attached to DACA discussions. And likewise for this absurd rewarding the release of problem “kids” to be uncovered by the Florida school shooting. I’m actually surprised that the liberal press allowed those little details into their stories…or were the policies uncovered by some conservative reporters, and then the background had to be admitted?
Anyway this should never be left out of any “gun control” discussions. Let us make it another shame-on-the-left issue in the mix, wherever discussions are found. Plenty of independents and even thinking Democrats who are not blind worshippers of every “affirmative action” by Obama should stop and think. If there has to be a re-formatting in society, let erasing some of existing nonsense be a price for more infringements on law-abiders.
Why tackle perceived problems in the permitting phase on guns with one hand and then simultaneously hide or release part of the human element-in-waiting from the other hand? Treat the problem with counseling or whatever, but don’t reward releasing the trouble again on society with its own tax money and zero accounting for whether the problem gets any better as a result (which I doubt).
Jack Dunphy: “Scot Peterson, the now-former sheriff’s deputy, has come in for the bulk of the criticism as it was he who was the assigned “school resource officer” on the campus, and who waited outside as shots rang out.”
After reading the post and comments, I’m more convinced than ever that the best idea is to harden the fortress first. The L.A. model won’t work here. You need more school resource officers, better trained than Scot Peterson. Waiting for backup is generally OK, but time is lost; security guards (cops or private) are already at the school.
Yet, in the Stoneman Douglas shooting it’s reported that 3 others deputies arrived while the shooting was ongoing. And they all froze!
Respondeat Superior: Of course Scott Israel should be held responsible for the acts of his subordinates, and the policies that caused the acts (in this case failure to act).
Things did change after Columbine, where officers were faulted for waiting for SWAT teams to arrive. The protocols put into place call for the first arriving officers to engage the shooter. The LAPD’s method, as of the last time I went through the training a few years ago, presupposes many officers arriving simultaneously to a reported incident. In my case, I worked an undercover squad. We kept our body armor, helmets, and long guns in the trunks of our cars, and we debated among ourselves on whether to take the extra few seconds required to don the protective gear and retrieve our rifles or go straight in with only our handguns. There are obvious risks to either choice. If we took the time to kit up and grab our rifles, how many might be shot in that time? If we went in directly, how effective would we be in countering the threat?
While it’s true that patrol is under-deployed in L.A., I’m confident that a report of an active shooter anywhere in Hollywood would bring a rapid response of many officers. The seven patrol cars you refer to are the area “A cars,” i.e., the beat patrol units. Hollywood, more than most other LAPD divisions, has many officers working specialized assignments like vice, narcotics, and so-called special-problems units, all of whom would respond to an active shooter. And so too would officers from the surrounding divisions.
I agree. His department’s failure, whose responsibility rests on his shoulders, was astonding. He needs to be fired. Police that lack the courage of their jobs are not worth it.
I’ll start by saying that Peterson, deservedly or not, is now in hell and no ordinary mortal can get him out. We all hope we’d go in without thinking and do our best, even if it meant dying. But I suspect many of us pray that we wouldn’t freeze, and all of us pray that we’d never have to decide. I believe that what would get me through that door would be the fear of waking up the next day as Peterson. That would scare me worse than anything. That would get me going.
As for waiting for a given number of officers, that probably amounts to a recognition that going in solo might turn out to be a suicide mission, and that’s a hard thing to order beforehand, in a policy.
Israel’s response sounded like a kind of hysteria, a plea to have the crowd blame anybody but him. Before this incident, it probably looked like a kind of Chicago job, where you show up or not, collect a salary, maybe face some hassles. But police work is a deadly serious business and no day is predictable.
Conservative Treehouse tweeted information from a Broward Sherriff’s officer with over 10 years in the department:
Scot Peterson was School Resource Officer of the year in 2014
Depending on how long Peterson was with the department, he may never have done its active shooter training; the department’s priorities were apparently elsewhere. Such as making sure that students don’t have arrests, let alone convictions, which would keep them from growing up and accomplishing their goals. Like becoming a school shooter.
There are reports that Scott Israel’s R —> D switch was a sincere move: he was sincerely angling for FBI Director under Her Inevitability. (If true, another reason to be grateful for President Monkeywrench.)
Schools are prime target for mass shooters be they of the insane persuasion, ideological or religious fanatics, or some combination, so it seems to this naive civilian that a School Resource Officer ought to be a top priority for the department’s active shooter training.
I hope that Peterson’s training history is soon publicly available. There’s much too much A hanging out for the department to successfully C.
Florida’s moniker is “The Sunshine State.” Some sunshine is sorely needed in Broward County law enforcement.
Makes perfect sense. There are probably departments all over the country in the same situation.