No one who follows the blogging collective known as the “Conservative Treehouse” will dispute my claim that its most prominent blogger, “Sundance” by name, is America’s best reporter. I got to know Sundance doing research for my book on the Trayvon Martin shooting, If I Had a Son. So instrumental was the research of Sundance and his colleagues that I made the “Treepers” the protagonists of the book.
Sundance’s research into the political dynamics of Martin’s Miami-Dade school system led him to expand his research into neighboring Broward County years before the Parkland shooting. We communicated the day after that shooting. We had a shared sense of what had gone wrong. I detailed some of this last week in an article on what one public interest magazine called the “Broward County solution.” In Broward County, they call it more modestly the “PROMISE Program.”
In November 2013, Sundance first reported that Broward County was “willing to jump on the diversionary bandwagon.” As an attached Associated Press article noted, “One of the nation’s largest school districts has reached an agreement with law enforcement agencies and the NAACP to reduce the number of students being charged with crimes for minor offenses.” The goal, as the article explained, was to create an alternative to the zero-tolerance policies then in place by giving principals, not law enforcement, the authority to determine the nature of the offense.
In a collaborative agreement among school officials and law enforcement, the presence of the NAACP might seem anomalous, but not in the Obama era, where considerations of race routinely shaped educational policy. “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,” Broward’s recently hired school superintendent, Robert Runcie, told the American Prospect. A black American, Runcie assumed that the differential was due largely to some unspoken institutional bias against minorities. As he saw it, these suspensions played a major role in the so-called “achievement gap” between white and minority students.
The first two “whereas” clauses in the collaborative agreement deal with opportunities for students in general, but the third speaks to the motivating issue behind the agreement: “Whereas, across the country, students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ students are disproportionately impacted by school-based arrests for the same behavior as their peers.”
The spurious “same behavior” insinuation would put the onus on law enforcement to treat black students more gingerly than they would non-blacks. To make the issue seem less stark, authorities cloaked the black American crime disparity with EEOC boilerplate about “students of color” and other presumably marginalized individuals. Although nonsensical on the face of it – one is hard pressed to recall a crime spree by the disabled – this language opened the door for Nikolas de Jesus Cruz. An adopted son of the late Roger and Linda Cruz, the future school shooter had a name that fit the “metrics” of the collaborative agreement, regardless of his DNA.
It is not hard to understand why Broward County officials would be eager to adopt this program. Miami-Dade had been receiving all kinds of honors for its efforts to shut down the dread “school-to-prison” pipeline. On February 15, 2012, Miami-Dade County Public Schools put out a press release citing a commendation the Miami-Dade Schools Police (M-DSPD) had recently received. The Department of Juvenile Justice had singled out Miami-Dade for “dramatically decreasing” school-related “delinquency.” Said M-DSPD Chief Charles Hurley, “Our mantra is education not incarceration.”
Seventeen-year-old Miami-Dade student Trayvon Martin got neither incarceration nor education. Eleven days after this self-congratulatory press release, Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, 250 miles from his Miami home. For all the attention paid to the case, the media have refused to report why Martin was left to wander the streets of Sanford, high and alone on a Sunday night during a school week.
Sundance, who lives in South Florida, broke this story through old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. He writes, “Over time the policy [in Miami-Dade] began to create outcomes where illegal behavior by students was essentially unchecked by law enforcement.” Sundance was alerted to the problem during the investigation into Martin’s death when six M-DSPD officers blew the whistle on their superiors, the most notable of them being Chief Hurley. The whistleblowers told of cases of burglary and robbery where officers had to hide the recovered evidence in order to avoid writing up the students for criminal behavior. “At first I didn’t believe them,” writes Sundance of the whistleblowers. “However, after getting information from detectives, cross referencing police reports, and looking at the ‘found merchandise’ I realized they were telling the truth.”
