By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
The sheriff is an outsized figure in the American
imagination. He is Wyatt Earp, shooting it out with outlaws at the O.K. Corral.
He is John Wayne, a lonely instrument of frontier justice. He is Rick Grimes,
the resourceful survivor of a zombie apocalypse in “The Walking Dead.”
Now, along comes Scott Israel to remind us, despite the
legend, how a sheriff can be a hack politician whose primary concern is
protecting his own political reputation and little fief.
The Broward County sheriff, whose disgraceful performance
in the Stoneman Douglas shooting has been a master class in evasion of
responsibility, is the latest entry in why we don’t trust our public
institutions.
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive and
catastrophic failure from beginning to end than that of the sheriff’s office in
the Parkland massacre. It ignored warnings that were specific and chilling
about the shooter, and at least one of its deputies waited outside the school
while the shooting occurred (and perhaps others did as well in the immediate
aftermath).
Sheriff Israel appropriately pronounced himself disgusted
with the deputy, who has lost his job. But asked in an interview with CNN’s
Jake Tapper on Sunday if he acknowledges that had his department acted
differently, the shooter might have been foiled, the sheriff responded with a
flip rhyme, “ifs and buts and candy and nuts.”
It’s not as though the sheriff, mindful of the need to
get a handle on his department’s conduct, has been quietly tending his own
shop. At the CNN town hall last week, he turned in a crowd-pleasing
performance. He opined about the new authorities that the police require and
joined in lambasting National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch to
cheers from the audience.
He was emphatic about everything not touching on what
officers under his authority did or didn’t do. When attention turned to that,
he suddenly became mincingly precise and demanded to know more detail about
reported warning signs.
When Loesch cited media accounts of 39 calls to the
police, Israel denounced the figure as categorically false. And the lawman was
right — it was at least 18 calls.
What were these warnings? In 2016, a caller to the
sheriff’s office said the perpetrator “planned to shoot up a school.” More
recently, last Nov. 30, a caller told the sheriff’s office that the shooter was
amassing weapons and “could be a school shooter in the making.”
The motto is that when we see something, we should say
something. In the case of the Parkland shooter, people said something, over and
over again, to little or no effect. The cliche after disasters is that no one
“connected the dots.” In the case of the Parkland shooter, the dots were
connected with bright lines.
Yet nothing happened, and the sheriff’s office had a
large hand in that. Israel’s performance at the CNN town hall was even more
shamefully dodgy when considering it is likely that he already knew one of his
deputies had done nothing to stop the shooter at the scene.
The sheriff’s theory of leadership apparently doesn’t
extend down to the people working for him. “I gave him a gun,” he said of the
deputy in another interview. “I gave him a badge. I gave him the training. If
he didn’t have the heart to go in, that’s not my responsibility.” The buck
doesn’t stop with the sheriff, in other words; it stops with whomever he
happens to give a badge and a gun.
Some supporters of gun control want to look away from the
failures of law enforcement to keep the focus on the guns. But this is foolish
for their own purposes — politically, there is no chance of significant new
laws if no one is held to account for glaring mistakes under the status quo.
If we take the imperative to do better seriously, Sheriff
Israel and all his bureaucratic excuses should get the hell out of town.
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