Posted on 03/02/2018 4:56:29 AM PST by Beautiful_Gracious_Skies
Like Wesley Mouch, the bumbling central planner in 'Atlas Shrugged,' Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel keeps messing up then demanding wider powers.
The shooting in Parkland, Florida, was supposed to be yet another morality tale about the evils of private gun ownership, showing us why we need to surrender our weapons to the state. It has ended up being a massive story about government incompetence and indifference, centering around Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. It just goes to show you. The moment I write something nice about the office of sheriff, a sheriff has to go and bring discredit to that office.
But here’s the aspect of the aspect of the story that stands out for me. It’s not just that Israel’s record of incompetence keeps piling up. It’s that he responds to the resulting disaster by asking for more power.
Literally, those are his exact words. In his first press conference after the shooting, he called for more police authority to put people in jail over “disturbing” social media posts, declaring, “We need to have the power.” He also asked for more money for sheriff’s departments.
As more information has come out, we have discovered that both local and national law enforcement received abundant tips about the shooter and failed to follow up on them or effectively use any of the power they already have. Yet they say they still they need more. At that notorious CNN town hall last week, Israel doubled down on that.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office, we received tips, numerous tips on this killer. We—some we answered by phone, some were out of state, some we went out there. Our command staffer is actually looking into some of these tips to make sure we did everything right. If we made a mistake, I’ll act accordingly and deal with it. The person responsible is the agent or the detective, or the person who received the tip and didn’t exercise their due diligence and took it where they needed to be. All that being said, what I’m asking the lawmakers to give police all over this country is more power. He reiterated the point later on, insisting that “the power of police is not as great as it should be.”
You know who Israel reminds me of? He reminds me of Wesley Mouch, one of the villains in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” the classic dissection of the big government mindset. Mouch is a DC hanger-on who fails upward into the position of chief economic planner, and every time his blundering interventions lead to disaster, he has the same response: “I need wider powers.” It’s his signature line.
In other news, I occasionally get people who tell me that Rand’s novels are not realistic. So why do people in real life keep auditioning for roles in it? I’m going to start calling Israel “Sheriff Wesley Mouch.”
The Parkland shooting was a failure of government at every level. The FBI received a tip that the shooter was photographing himself clothed in the garb of an ISIS fighter—and failed to follow up. The shooter was well known to local police to be mentally unstable and repeatedly threatening to kill people, and they pretty much ignored the problem. And that was all before the actual attack occurred and sheriff’s deputies waited outside rather than confronting the shooter.
But wait, it gets worse. Sarah Rumpf just did some invaluable reporting on Broward County’s slipshod approach to law enforcement in the schools. What she found is a scheme Israel pushed to reduce juvenile crime statistics in Broward County through the simple expedient of not arresting juveniles when they commit crimes. The theory is that going easy on minor and non-violent offenses would pull kids out of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and keep them from being permanently held back by youthful indiscretions.
In practice, it functions like broken windows policing in reverse. The idea behind the broken windows approach is that if you crack down on minor crimes, criminals are deterred from committing bigger ones. They are not emboldened by the “broken windows” of a neighborhood that has been abandoned by the police. Sheriff Wesley Mouch’s approach in Broward sent the opposite message, both to juvenile delinquents and to his own deputies, that anything goes because the police don’t really want to enforce the law.
This is the context in which the Parkland shooter repeatedly came into contact with the police and was simply bounced around inside the school system. As Rumpf sums it up:
Sheriff Israel said that he instructed BSO deputies to issue juvenile civil citations, not arrests; The BCSD’s own written policy encouraged handling even criminal activity ‘outside the criminal justice system’; The BCSD’s own written policy did not actually require arrests, even for felonies and serious threats to school safety; Cruz’s behavior included repeated disruptive behavior, violent outbursts, threats, and physical assaults on other students; and Cruz was never expelled or apparently arrested for this behavior. During Israel’s tenure in office, she calculates, juvenile arrests have decreased by nearly half—but there is no evidence that actual violent crimes by juveniles have decreased. They’re just not being arrested for it. So Israel needs “wider powers”—and, of course, more money from the government—so he can ignore more young criminals.
The power of government is limited partly because it should be limited to protect our freedom, and partly because government cannot centrally plan evil and insanity any more than it can centrally plan the economy. The FBI receives more than a million tips a year and isn’t always going to be able to winnow through them to determine which are real threats. A lot of people are constant troublemakers but never quite do anything for which they can be locked up or deprived of their civil rights.
Uses of force are complex and confusing events, and even armed and trained police can be paralyzed by fear or befuddled by the fog of war. All of that is true before we take into account the levels of incompetence and corruption that are normal for government employees with powerful unions and untouchable pensions.
All of this makes the case for why we need private ownership of firearms so we can defend ourselves. Because we sure don’t want to have to depend for our safety entirely on Sheriff Wesley Mouch.
"The FBI received a tip that the shooter was photographing himself clothed in the garb of an ISIS fighter—and failed to follow up. The shooter was well known to local police to be mentally unstable and repeatedly threatening to kill people, and they pretty much ignored the problem."
"Broward County’s slipshod approach to law enforcement in the schools....Israel pushed to reduce juvenile crime statistics in Broward County through the simple expedient of not arresting juveniles when they commit crimes. The theory is that going easy on minor and non-violent offenses would pull kids out of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and keep them from being permanently held back by youthful indiscretions."
It is a “broken windows policing in reverse. The idea behind the broken windows approach is that if you crack down on minor crimes, criminals are deterred from committing bigger ones. They are not emboldened by the “broken windows” of a neighborhood that has been abandoned by the police.”
“Sheriff Wesley Mouch’s approach in Broward sent the opposite message, both to juvenile delinquents and to his own deputies, that ANYTHING GOES BECAUSE POLICE DON’T REALLY WANT TO ENFORCE THE LAW.”
“Sheriff Israel said that he instructed BSO deputies to issue juvenile civil citations, not arrests”
I like the Wesley Mouch analogy.
It’s becoming clearer Sheriff Israel attended “The Rahm Emanuel School of Political Opportunism.” He’s exploiting the deaths of 17 teens for his own self-aggrandizement.......trying to show the world what a great guy he is.
Did you know Sheriff Scott Israel Spoke Arabic At Muslim Gathering? told the Muslims in the mosque he’s going to measure his success by how many kids he keeps out of jail, not by how many kids he puts in.
Does this simple-minded jerk ever say anything that is not a complete indictment of his cockamamie thinking, and the deadly policy decisions he has inflicted on those he is paid to protect?
Broward Sheriff Scott Israel is the arch-villain of this disturbing expose of a $750 million dollar county police dept with 6000 employees.
Israel instructs us as to how the brain-dead liberal mind
easily turns a civilized society into a free-for-all killing field.
Israel’s inaction signed the death warrant of 17 youngsters and heaped lifelong heartache on their family and friends.
This well-paid, self-aggrandizing little jerk has been on the public state countless times but has yet to acknowledge his abject failures in this massacre.
Israel and his department’s repeated failure to intervene in the violently downward spiral of the gunman was bad enough, but Israel-trained, gun-toting deputies’ refusal to enter the school until the shooting stopped (and 17 teens killed) is a stain that Israel’s TV-ready bravado can never remove. There will be little lamenting when Israel loses his job. (hat tip Michael Goodwin, NY POST)
petri dishes of social justice to fester into a vehicle they can use for gun control
The little jerk sheriff told Muslims he could "read the mind" of a lion (on a poster on his wall).......
but sheriff simpleton never did figure out the ominous signs of a troubled young man.
Libtards will be able to create their utopia if government is big enough and they have enough power. All they need is more redistributionism, more social engineering, and more government interventionism.
The Undersheriff of Broward County is a Muslim.
Out of the frying pan into the fire???
With Cruz dressing up like an ISIS member i'm sure a "hands off for our new jihadist" went out to the Broward boys. New converts are always appreciated at your neighborhood mosques. /S
Records show that BSO responded to at least 45 calls to Cruz’s home. The calls “included incidents in which Cruz “held a gun up to his mom’s head” (a felony),... imbibed gasoline,.... cut himself, and rubbed “his hands in glee thinking of the inheritance that he was going to get as a result of his adopted father dying.”
So now the NAACP sanctuary school Broward policy extends to the home as well as the school?
Commit a felony, no problem! As demonstrated, Broward children can hold a gun to their mother’s head and not get arrested!
So when an Orlando/Tampa/Miami punk holds his mama at gunpoint, he should tell the police that they can’t arrest him.
Sheriff Israel, the Top-Cop in Florida whose running the largest sheriffs office in the nation says, “It’s all okay!” “I got a free pass- a get out of jail free card, cause I’m under 18!”
ALsp culpable is the NAACP which helped Broward write those sanctuary city policies.......all of it with the unstinting approval of Obama.
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