A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Obama’s No Fool: Blocking Non-Existent “School to Prison Pipeline” Paved Way for Parkland Shooting March 2, 2018

Obama may have been lazy, corrupt, and incompetent, but he was no fool.  Quite the contrary, he knew exactly the effect his policies would have, and a high-profile shooting or two may well have been seen as desirable for achieving one of his highest policy objectives – denying those backward hicks any guns to cling to.

The Obama administration posited a belief that schools referring children under their care to local law enforcement for crimes committed in their schools somehow constituted a “pipeline” from the schools to prison.  They were most concerned about locales with a huge number of incarcerated men – inner cities and other communities with “disproportionate” numbers of residents in prison. Rather than understanding this phenomenon from its root cause in, it must be said, generally leftist social policies, but from some invisible incipient racism still lurking in American society, the administration decided to try to encourage school districts to change their disciplinary practices to make it all but impossible to expel or suspend a student, or to bring law enforcement into truly egregious acts that broke the law.

Well, facing at least a tacit threat to their sacred federal funding, numerous American school districts immediately changed their disciplinary policies to fall in line with the Obamanation’s wishes.  And lo and behold, it turns out that very heavily left-wing Broward County, Florida, was one of the first to fall into line.  Thus, even though he committed numerous violent acts that should have resulted in his being charged with and probably convicted of several crimes, Nikolas Cruz never once was charged and thus was able to lawfully purchase the firearm he used to commit his insane atrocity.

Yes it may be a bit conspiracy oriented to think Obama saw that far ahead and actually desired this kind of outcome, to whip up such a frenzy of anti-gun sentiment as we see now (in at least a portion of the American populace, but I sense the majority is still strongly supportive of the 2nd Amendment), but he certainly desired chaos and destruction, all of which serve leftist ends of ever-growing statism.

At any rate, it’s amazing that inanimate black objects are being blamed for the sins of many, many failed bureaucrats and deranged policies:

Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient.

Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida’s Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence. The aim was to slow the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

“He had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the [NCIS] system,” veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello told RCI. “He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement.”

Disclosures about the strategy add a central new element to the Parkland shooting story: It’s not just one of official failings at many levels and of America’s deep divide over guns, but also one of deliberate federal policy gone awry.

In 2013, the year before Cruz entered high school, the Broward County school system scrapped and rewrote its discipline policy to make it much more difficult for administrators to suspend or expel problem students, or for campus police to arrest them for misdemeanors– including some of the crimes Cruz allegedly committed in the years and months leading up to the deadly Feb. 14 shooting at his Fort Lauderdale-area school.

To keep students in school and improve racial outcomes [meaning raising the minority graduation rate], Broward school Superintendent Robert W. Runcie — a Chicagoan and Harvard graduate with close ties to President Obama and his Education Department — signed an agreement with the county sheriff and other local jurisdictions to trade cops for counseling. Instead of the criminal justice system, students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, were referred to counseling, which included participation in “healing circles,” obstacle courses and other “self-esteem building” exercises. [Because if there is one thing we all know millennials desperately need, it’s to think even more highly of themselves]

Asserting that minority students, in particular, were treated unfairly by traditional approaches to school discipline, Runcie’s goal was to slash arrests and ensure that students, no matter how delinquent, graduated without criminal records.

Instead of howling to burn Dana Loesch to death, or murder Marco Rubio, maybe those devastated beings of Broward County should turn their attention to their incompetent sheriff, department of human services, and school superintendent.