Reversing Broward County’s School-to-Prison Pipeline (2013)
26th February 2018
It would appear that there may be more to the recent school shooting than meets the media narrative.
“One of the first things I saw was a huge differential in minority students, black male students in particular, in terms of suspensions and arrests,” he says. Black students made up two-thirds of all suspensions during the 2011-2012 school year despite comprising only 40 percent of the student body. And while there were 15,000 serious incidents like assaults and drug possession reported that year, 85 percent of all 82,000 suspensions were for minor incidents—use of profanity, disruptions of class—and 71 percent of all 1,000-plus arrests were for misdemeanors. The last statistic, says Runcie, “was a huge red flag.”
Emphasis on the red: The implication is that this disparity didn’t mean that black students were more prone to crime, oh no; what it meant was racism and bias against black students.
Broward announced broad changes designed to mitigate the use of harsh punishments for minor misbehavior at the beginning of this school year. While other districts have amended their discipline codes, prohibited arrests in some circumstances, and developed alternatives to suspension, Broward was able to do all these things at once with the cooperation of a group that included a member of the local NAACP, a school board member, a public defender, a local sheriff, a state prosecutor, and several others. In early November, The Miami Herald reported that suspensions were already down 40 percent and arrests were down 66 percent. Yet these changes required years of advocacy. The hard scrabble road to Broward’s success also helps explain why zero tolerance policies have persisted.
In other words, the policy was that they backed off on punishing black student crime in order to improve their ‘optics’.
It is not a great mental stretch to suppose that the ‘red flags’ displayed by the school shooter Cruz were not acted on because of a deliberate policy in local government to turn a blind eye to such things when ‘minorities’ were involved. Presumably if the kid’s name had been Schmidt he would have been picked up and constrained in some way that might have prevented this tragedy.
The deeper problem is that when student criminals are dealt with outside of the criminal justice system, their names won’t show up on that perennial favorite, the Background Check. Hence people like this kid won’t have the bar to legally obtaining a gun that otherwise would work toward public safety.
Food for thought.