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It’s a Fine Line
In my time as a police officer, I saw and dealt with the unedited person. I saw them before a defense attorney cleaned them up to present them to a jury. I saw them before a social worker visited them. I saw them before the therapist saw them. I saw them in real time.
When someone I confronted told me they were going to fight, if they were so intoxicated that they couldn’t get up off the floor, or sidewalk without my help, I considered that a low-level threat. The intent to fight was expressed, and until I could search them for weapons I was still on my guard. Someone who expressed the intent to fight, and who could stand up without my help, whether they were intoxicated or not, found themselves on the receiving end of a different response.
In the aftermath of the Florida school shooting the mental issue is being discarded concerning firearms ownership or possession. Generalizations don’t work for me. I’m interested in specific behavior, that includes specific threats, and specific actions that lead to a specific outcome.
The Florida shooter’s history from an article on BuzzFeed:
From 2010 until November 2016, Broward County sheriff’s deputies responded to at least 36 emergency 911 calls from a pleasant-looking, tree-lined suburban home on 80th Terrace, the street in Parkland where Cruz lived with his younger brother, Zachary, and mother, who died last November at the age of 68.
On Aug. 22, 2012, Lynda Cruz called 911 because her sons, 12 and 13 at the time, were “threatening her.” In November of that year, officers came because Nikolas had beat up his brother. A few weeks later they returned after he attacked his mother with the plastic hose from the vacuum cleaner, one report says.
One evening in January 2013, officers responded to a call from Lynda Cruz, detailing that Nikolas’s behavior was escalating after she took away his video games. The 14-year-old then threw a chair, dog bowl, and glass across the room, screaming that his mom was a “useless bitch,” the sheriff’s report said. After the teen barricaded himself in his room, deputies briefly handcuffed him and put him in the back of a squad car until a youth emergency services counselor arrived.
Nearly a year later, Nikolas Cruz punched a hole in the wall after his mother took away his Xbox.
Neighbors, classmates, and friends also described an estranged “loner” whose disturbing social media profiles were littered with guns, shooting targets, dead frogs, and a user always dressed in black with his face covered. He also reportedly left comments declaring his desire to shoot and kill people on YouTube, one of which was flagged to the FBI in September.
This history does not cover his expulsion from school, the threats that he made at school, the fact that he threatened kids in his neighborhood, or his social media posts.
Would you sell this young a man a firearm if you were aware of his personal history? Would you want someone else selling him a firearm?
The mental health issue is complex when it comes to firearms ownership. There are other problems with the NCIC background check. Some local courts are not reporting their violent felony convictions, and their domestic violence convictions, to the FBI for inclusion in the NCIC database. Some schools are not reporting crimes committed by students on school grounds to their local law enforcement authorities.
Students in one Florida high school were not surprised that this young man was responsible for killing 17 of their fellow students, unfortunately, some other people that knew him were surprised.
Published in General
There are no easy answers. There is no quick fix. Whatever we do to make this problem better is going to take a lot of hard work by a lot individual people (with quite a bit of it falling on the already overworked men and women in law enforcement). People don’t want to hear that. They want “something” done and for the problem to go away. They want there to be an app for that. The idea that we’ll have to treat every kid as an individual, getting to know every one, learning who is a risk and getting those kids the help they need before the next tragedy is overwhelming. But it’s true.
Indeed. They should be taught that they can’t have both until the quotes are removed and it reads “They want something done that makes the problem go away.”
Well said, @nickh! One of the fundamental errors of our age is the treatment of humans as “units”.
There are problems throughout our mental health systems. Nothing is working as it should and as the American people want it to.
Exactly, I don’t believe in collective guilt, and I don’t think anyone would want policing to be based upon collective guilt. The mental health issue and firearms is complex, but ignoring individuals like this young man and his history, or pretending that they are “okay” doesn’t work.
The mother was 49 and 50 when she had the kids?
She and her husband adopted them.
I feel as desperate as those kids wanting a solution to stop mass shootings. Unlike them, life has taught me that there are rarely easy solutions in life. Patience to figure this out along with the willingness to consider a complex resolution are hard to find. Also, since the solution might be complex, we need to be prepared to modify it if something goes awry. The politics of making changes to the policy as we go along are difficult to navigate. With all the talented people and great minds we have access to, we must figure this out. I hope. Thanks for a good post, Doug.
Apparently, he was suspended but not expelled because the he has a right to an education, though that doesn’t change the point you’re making.
You raise the question of NCIC checks.
His school district had been subject to activist and (I repeat myself) Obama DOJ pressure due to black and Hispanic students being arrested in numbers disproportionate to their representation in the school population.
Since the district has its own police force, it was able to not arrest students suspected of crimes. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, nothing flagged on NCIC.
If the Trayvon Martin case is any guide, the district instituted a policy of falsifying reports and suppressing evidence in service of stopping the “school to prison pipline.” One wonders if Martin might have been better off in prison; George Zimmerman would probably have been better off if Martin had gone in to the system.
If the Broward County schools had not signed on to the social justice agenda as they did, would the Florida shooter have had enough of a criminal or mental health record to keep him from buying a long gun? We’ll never know.
“The left poisons everything it touches.” – Dennis Prager
New Zealand actually calls the homes and neighbors of applicants for firearms. I don’t like that but in that tiny homogenous country it wasn’t crazy. Clearly we don’t lack laws and controls, what we have are people in positions of authority that are afraid to exercise judgement and take responsibility in individual circumstances as you say. A disturbed kid is always someone else’s problem and who knows how disturbed anyone else is so doing nothing is a risk free strategy. Is there a fix for that? Not at a federal level, probably not at a state level except better national data bases.
I would add to comment #9 that along with the asinine school policies in Broward County the federal involvement through the IDEA Act has made it virtually impossible to expel a student that needs mental health treatment – the school then becomes his focus of resentment and interaction with society with results we have seen from Columbine to the present day.
Has there been any news about what ages the boys were when they were adopted? I wonder what their previous family life was like and whether their birth parents had mental issues or problems with the law.
I imagine the difference can be extremely jarring, and perhaps insulting.
Outstanding post. Thanks, Doug.
Oh, no.
Update/Note: Parkland’s police services are provided by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. It’s no doubt unrelated that the Broward County Sheriff has been blaming the NRA.
Credit where credit is due:The first effective responders to the shooting were officers from the Coral Springs Police Department; Coral Springs is on Parkland’s southern border
That sucker should be up on charges.
This didn’t help, link
The Broward school district’s police force is a subset of the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Here’s a straightforward account of how first the Miami-Dade schools and then the Broward County schools dealt with criminal activity by their students.
He states that the time delay in the video feed wasn’t an accident, either.
The federal government, in a commendable effort to spend taxpayer money wisely, demanded metrics from the district to justify ongoing funding. Metrics such as a year-over-year decline in students arrested. This took considerable effort, since