Did white privilege protect Nikolas Cruz?

[Mary Ann]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210308898

applegrove (81,040 posts)


Did white privilege protect Nikolas Cruz?
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/27/did-white-privilege-protect-nikolas-cruz/

By Chauncey Devega at Salon

"SNIP......


The woman said Cruz had the mental capacity of a 12- to 14-year-old and had been kicked out of school for throwing chairs at students and teachers. She also provided the FBI with the user names for at least three of Cruz's Instagram accounts, where he wrote that "he wants to kill people" and posted photos of mutilated animals.

The FBI admitted last week it had failed to act on that tip.

........

CNN also reported that the Broward County sheriff's office had received 23 calls related to Cruz or his brother over the previous decade. These included "information from a neighbor's son that Cruz planned to 'shoot up' an unknown school" and a different call from someone who reported that "Cruz was suicidal and could be a 'school shooter in the making.'"

The many ways that white privilege and the color line intersect with guns and masculinity in the tragic case of the Parkland massacre could be a chapter in a textbook for an Introduction to Sociology course.

It has been repeatedly documented by social scientists and other researchers that police and other law enforcement officers are much more likely to be extremely aggressive, escalate to physical force, act in a more lethal manner and to be "proactive" when interacting with black and brown people as compared to whites. This pattern is true even when police interact with black people -- especially black men -- who are unarmed. In general, America's police take perceived threats to public safety from whites much less seriously than they do from nonwhites (as well as Muslims).


......SNIP"

Of course the DUmp is swallowing this BS theory whole, with one notable exception:

Lee-Lee (5,215 posts)

6. More likely that a policy to avoid arresting juveniles in that county did

Seems that there was a joint program beeeen the schools and the BCSO to not arrest juveniles for crimes- often even felonies- whenever possible.

The more I look the more I see that references in articles from before the shooting where the model is held out as an example of how to reduce how many kids are in the juvenile justice system, places where the Sheriff himself brags about ordering his deputies to use civil citations and other programs instead of criminal tickets or arrests, and agreements signed between the schools, BCSO and other agencies that pretty much laid out not using criminal charges whenever possible as a way to reduce the number of criminal charges.

It wasn’t long ago Broward County had the highest rate of kids put into the juvenile justice system, and it seems their response to it was not to reduce that but looking at the underlying causes and addressing why the behaviors were happening but instead to take the easy way and just quit arresting offenders under 18. Because it seems their focus wasn’t on actually reducing the amount of crime committed by youth but by making it look like they did by making the stats on it look better.

It would be like a police department ordering officers to not make DUI arrests unless the person was at .16 BAC instead of .08 and then bragging they reduced drunk driving because the number of arrests were down. When in reality if anything it probably rose because the drunks knew they could get away with it and not get arrested.

What shielded him was a really, really bad policy out in place. There were good intentions- to reduce the number of kids in the juvenile justice system. But they did that the wrong way. The right way is to attack the systemic underlying reasons for behavior that get kids put into the system to stop the behavior. Instead they had a policy to simply not issue criminal citations or make arrests for the behavior but to use “alternative” methods outside the criminal justice system.

And that may have been a good approach for some kids. But it’s not for all, and policies that mandate ignoring or not charging criminal behavior in youths just to make your statistics look better can end up with what we have here, where they had multiple chances to charge him criminally and even one of those interventions into the criminal justice system would have likely stopped this from happening.

I have no idea how Lee-Lee has managed to accumulate over 5,000 posts. She (?) claims to have been a LEO, and almost always defends cops.

I read the article on Salon, and the comments were a hoot. Some people over there have been able to see through the PC BS.

[SVPete]

I'm just going to "recycle" my post from the previous DU-racebaiting thread. DU's thread discipline - having just one or two threads on a single topic - seems to be virtually non-existent.

  The Broward County Sheriffs had no idea that morning whether the shooter was white or chartreuse, because they didn't enter the damn building, DU-Moron!  

  Coral Springs PD officers had no idea as to the shooter's ethnicity, they just went in on arrival.

   The shooter's name is Cruz, DU-Moron! To the FBI, Sheriff's Department, school system educrats, social workers, and other bureaucrats that made him Hispanic, DU-moron!  

[FlaGator]

No. The Obama/Holder policy of reducing the arrests of public school students protected Nikolas Cruz.

[Old n Grumpy]

Yup, it's all the white mans fault. If the school board dain't change their policy about reporting troubled youth this would not have happened. 

Yuor chocolate savior started all this by declaring everything done to minorities racist. 

[Movie buff- The Sequel]

This just drives home what I've been saying all along, that the best way to prevent future mass shootings is a twofold strategy:
1) A massive nationwide campaign to educate the public on the warning signs that a person may be at risk of committing a violent act, with a MAJOR focus on the importance of acting on it if they see someone demonstrating several of those signs, by notifying the appropriate law enforcement agencies. "If you see something, say something" on steroids, if you will.
2) (And this, if it were in place earlier, is what would have stopped Cruz) Impose greater, stricter standards of accountability on law enforcement agencies to swiftly and appropriately respond when they receive such reports.
I have to agree with Lee Lee (She'll probably be tombstoned for her reply), the policy was well- intentioned but a bad idea. At the very least, there should be an exemption from that policy if it's believed the youth in question is dangerous/ violent and poses an immediate threat to others.

[SVPete]

Improving accuracy:

No. The Obama/Holder policy of reducing the arrests of black and Hispanic public school students protected Nikolas Cruz.

[thundley4]

I still have my suspicions about several of the last few mass shootings. LIHOP?