“Justice Shrugged” | Trump Indictments

Published August 15, 2023August 15, 2023 by Papa Giorgio

I have some time on my hand [literally] to read a lot of articles due to an operation. One of the best I have come across yet is over at REAL CLEAR POLITICS, titled, “Justice Shrugged: The Persecution of Donald Trump” — which came via JJ Sefton’s “Morning Report.”

I will add some media before and link other articles worth your time — after this…

TURLEY DERSHOWITZ

Here is the article:

Here’s what I dream of Donald Trump saying when he stands trial on bogus charges proffered by his political opponents: “I do not recognize this court’s right to try me … I do not recognize my action as a crime.”

Those are the fighting words of industrialist Hank Rearden when he was put on trial for ignoring an unjust law in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.” Although the circumstances of the cases differ, Rearden is a perfect avatar of Donald Trump, as both larger-than-life men are persecuted by the justice system for seeking to pursue their own self-interest and for refusing to surrender to government oppression.

Self-interest is central to the Objectivist philosophy of Rand, who grew up in Russia and witnessed first-hand the oppression of free thought and free enterprise following the 1917 Communist revolution. Her masterpiece, “Atlas Shrugged,” is the ultimate roadmap to how American democracy can be subverted by leftist bureaucrats and a corrupt media to destroy some individuals and intimidate the rest.

In the novel, Rearden has created a unique metallic alloy that carries his own name. Rearden Metal is far superior to steel and was in high demand by contractors, but tyrannical government regulations prohibited Rearden from selling to customers of his own choice. He ignored the government’s warnings and sold to one of the few honest businessmen left in the country. That meant he had broken the law, and because of his stature and reputation for excellence, the government prosecuted him as a warning to others that they dare not pursue their own self-interest, too.

Rearden epitomizes the essence of individualism, striving to achieve his goals despite societal pressure. As an industrialist, he prioritizes his innovation and accomplishments, unapologetically pursuing personal success. His trial underscores the struggle between individual rights and the perceived interests of society, reflecting Rand’s championing of individualism.

Similarly, Trump’s refusal to accept the election results turns on his deep sense of individualistic ambition, his willingness to challenge societal norms, and his determination not to surrender his principles, even at the expense of public ridicule, political persecution, and now potentially years in prison. But you can’t view the 2020 election in a vacuum. Trump was no different than Rearden in fighting what he knows is a rigged system. For the preceding five years, Trump had been the victim of a series of vicious attacks by the Deep State and the media who never really accepted him as president. So Trump had no reason to accept the election results parroted by the same actors who had already tried to destroy him multiple times.

And now, two and a half years after the 2020 election, as Trump has a fighting chance of returning to the White House in the greatest political comeback in history, his enemies have come for him again, with three separate indictments and soon to be a fourth.

The four-count indictment most recently brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith is intended to make a victory in 2024 nearly impossible. The Deep State in this case represents the entrenched bureaucracy of the federal government as well as the individual states’ election officials. This is the same Deep State that gathered up 51 national security officials to sign a statement prior to the 2020 election that falsely claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of Russian disinformation.” It had none of them. No wonder Trump was disinclined to accept their conclusions that the election was secure and fair. Trump sought to prove his concerns about the legitimacy of the 2020 election by pursuing a vigorous legal strategy as was guaranteed to him under the First Amendment’s right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice is determined to deny that right to Donald Trump, and by extension to the rest of us. You either agree with the government’s interpretation of election results or else you risk going to jail. The indictment brought against Trump acknowledges that everyone has a First Amendment right to speak their minds and even to “formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means,” but it then avers that Trump’s right to believe he won the election is abrogated by a string of court losses and equally pessimistic assessments from so-called experts.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the Department of Justice has overstepped. The four counts in the indictment are based on what prosecutor Jack Smith calls three conspiracies: “A conspiracy to defraud the United States” by seeking to stop the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021; “a conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified; and “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

INTERLUDE

RPT NOTE: Much like the Stalinist Court Trials, evidence typically allowed for a defendant to use was in fact not allowed: “The trials successfully eliminated the major real and potential political rivals and critics of Joseph Stalin.” In similar fashion, the J6 Committee “hearings” refused anyone who would bring countering testimony or challenge their charges. And now any evidence that would have been available to Trump from those hearings was reportedly destroyed – that should have been kept per the law!

CONTINUING

All of these alleged conspiracies and the resulting four charges are directly related to the joint congressional session on Jan. 6, when the Electoral College votes were opened and debated to determine whether they should be counted. Moreover, when Jack Smith announced the indictment, he suggested that Trump was responsible for the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on that day, yet none of the charges hold Trump responsible for the violence. Every charge in this dubious indictment could have been brought even if the protesters had marched “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol as Trump had requested. The charges in the indictment have nothing to do with the violence; they only relate to Trump’s insistence that he won the election, and that he would do whatever it takes to prove it.

In other words, these are not real crimes like insurrection or sedition; they are thought crimes. Smith’s “conspiracy” charges simply reflect that Trump consulted his lawyers to develop a legal strategy on how to right the wrong that he perceived. In its substance, from paragraphs 8 to 123, the indictment merely alleges over and over again that Trump refused to accept the conclusions of others that the election of Biden was legitimate, and that he had help from like-minded attorneys. How infuriating that must be to prosecutor Smith, who believes with all his heart that no one could doubt the veracity of what government officials (like him!) tell us.

But millions of us did doubt the official story of a Biden victory. In the weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020 election, I wrote about problems with the election on Nov. 6, Nov. 13, Nov. 23, Nov. 30, and Dec. 7. If I had been able to ensure that Trump had read those columns at RealClearPolitics, I might be under indictment for conspiracy now, too. Then on Jan. 2, 2021, I wrote a column called “Our Electoral Crisis: The Call of Conscience on Jan. 6.”

In that preview of the challenge of electoral votes from disputed states, I wrote, “There is no reason to expect that the Jan. 6 session of Congress will result in certification of President Trump as the victor of the 2020 election. Despite the extensive evidence of fraud that has been amassed, this vote will be an exercise in raw political power, not an expression of blind justice. Probably the best that Trump supporters can hope for is a fair hearing before the American people regarding the reason why doubts exist as to the legitimacy of Biden’s apparent victory.”

Because of the riot at the Capitol, even that small hope was dashed, as most of the congressional debate about fraudulent activity in swing states was canceled when the joint session resumed late in the evening. It is important to note that Trump was the political victim of Jan. 6, not its beneficiary. Because of the violence, he lost his last opportunity to have a public debate on the voting irregularities that made millions of us believe the election returns were compromised. Yet Jack Smith would have you believe that it was Trump’s plan all along to shut down the electoral count that day as part of a plan to overturn the results. It’s just a fairy tale told to Trump-hating liberals to make them feel better.

MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle summed up Smith’s theory of the case in a segment on “Morning Joe” the day after the indictment was unsealed. “It’s one thing to have beliefs. We all have beliefs,” Barnicle said. “Donald Trump had the belief that he won, and he can articulate it as long as he wants, but he does not have the right to transform that belief into illegal conduct.”

What that means is that we all have First Amendment rights to be wrong, but we do not have a right to persuade others that we are right. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step toward totalitarianism. What we are seeing in Jack Smith’s indictment is the attempt to criminalize what I would call “other thought,” the insistence that you will make up your own mind and pursue your own truth regardless of what the government tells you. This is an attempt to codify the suppression of ideas that we saw the Deep State impose on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in 2020. You have the right to think whatever you want, but as soon as you share thoughts that dispute the official narrative, you can be silenced, and in Trump’s case locked up in a federal penitentiary.

Well, he wouldn’t be the first person to be jailed for “other thought,” and you don’t have to turn to Russia or China for examples. How about Henry David Thoreau, who spent a brief time in jail in 1846 for protesting the Mexican-American War and wrote about his beliefs in “Civil Disobedience”?

“Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already,” Thoreau told us. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

That certainly will be true should the unthinkable happen and Jack Smith achieve his goal of imprisoning Trump. In a very real sense, the indictment is less an accusation against one man than a ham-handed attempt to enforce group-think on any Americans who resist the imperial decrees from Washington, D.C. Consider this passage from “Atlas Shrugged” in light of the hundreds of Jan. 6 convictions that turned ordinary Americans into felons:

“Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against … We’re after power and we mean it … There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

One of the most striking parallels between the Trump and Rearden cases is the complicity of the mass media in promoting hatred for the defendants. The legacy press has been trying to destroy Trump for seven years now, starting with the Russia hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment hoax, the Trump taxes hoax, and the classified documents hoax. It didn’t matter what topic came up; the media turned it into another reason to hate Trump. Most recently, they have drummed up the “fake electors” narrative as proof that Trump intentionally tried to steal the election.

That is essentially the linchpin of Smith’s case. When Trump’s team put forward alternate electors on Dec. 14, 2020, they were following the entirely legal precedent that Democrat John F. Kennedy used successfully in the 1960 election, when Hawaii’s result was in doubt until after Dec. 14. The reason that date is so important is because the U.S. Constitution mandates that all electors must give their votes on the same day. If Trump’s lawyers were able to prove fraud after Dec. 14, but his electors had not voted on that day, then their votes would be lost forever.

Trump is an obstacle to the Deep State that seeks power over people, just as Hank Rearden was an obstacle to the economic tyranny of “Atlas Shrugged.” Rearden was not a person of quite the stature of Trump, but more of an Elon Musk – a self-made man of unthinkable wealth who didn’t follow anyone’s rules but his own. But that last quality is shared by all three men, and perhaps that more than anything is what has made them all targets.

Here’s how Rand described the media’s assault against Rearden as his trial began, and how their campaign to marginalize him had failed because the regular people oddly identified with the millionaire industrialist just as Trump gains popular strength with each new indictment thrown his way:

The crowd knew from the newspapers that he represented the evil of ruthless wealth; and … so they came to see him; evil, at least, did not have the stale hopelessness of a bromide which none believed and none dared to challenge. They looked at him without admiration – admiration was a feeling they had lost the capacity to experience, long ago; they looked with curiosity and with a dim sense of defiance against those who had told them that it was their duty to hate him.

That’s how the trial started, but by the time Rearden spoke in his own defense – or rather spoke to demolish the prosecution’s false claims – the crowd was in full support of Rearden in his battle against the nameless, faceless bureaucrats who had regulated the country into despair. When he turned to the crowd in the courtroom:

He saw faces that laughed in violent excitement, and faces that pleaded for help; he saw their silent despair breaking out into the open; he saw the same anger and indignation as his own, finding release in the wild defiance of their cheering; he saw the looks of admiration and the looks of hope.

As the crowd surged around him, he smiled in answer to their smiles, to the frantic tragic eagerness of their faces; there was a touch of sadness in his smile. “God bless you, Mr. Rearden!” said an old woman with a ragged shawl over her head. “Can’t you save us, Mr. Rearden? They’re eating us alive, and it’s no use fooling anybody about how it’s the rich that they’re after…”

It is just that same magical connection which happens between Trump and his supporters at a MAGA rally, and that is why Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and President Joe Biden want to put Trump behind bars. He gives people hope, and hope is dangerous when you have a plan to subjugate them. To succeed, tyranny needs willing victims, and Trump – like any Ayn Rand hero or heroine – fights back. That’s the true reason his enemies hate him.

“We fight like hell,” Trump said on Jan. 6, not in regard to violence but in regard to protecting our country from the thugs who would transform it into a dictatorship. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

That’s the fighting spirit which makes me know my dream of Trump rejecting the court’s authority, like Hank Rearden did, will never come to fruition. While it would have a hint of poetic justice, that’s not what Trump is after. He wants real justice, political justice, freedom for all, and that means he has to stand up, stand tall, stand firm. When he says that the government is coming through him to get to you, he’s not joking……

Obama’s School Policies Dire Consequences (Required Reading)

Published April 18, 2018April 18, 2018 by Papa Giorgio

(JUMP to UPDATE)

I just wish to note that this is another prime example of the Left (Democrats) creating a problem through this Obama administration policy, and then when it fails (to the tune of kids killed), guns and the NRA are blamed. The Broward County police had 45-contacts with Cruz (calls or face-to-face — not to mention the FBI dropping the ball multiple times), and yet Dick’s Sporting Goods refuse to carry a sporting rifle and Delta Airlines nixed its discount to NRA members over 13-customers complaining. Here is a novel idea, refuse discounts to anyone involved in this insane Obama Admin policy, or, don’t sell a gun to school administrators who implemented this policy — which is the root of the problem. Or “a symptom” of the larger issue, culture thinking it can guide society without a healthy respect for God:

“…we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

John Adams, first (1789–1797) Vice President of the United States, and the second (1797–1801) President of the United States. Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6.

Here is the article JOHN & KEN were reading from via REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS:

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 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 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.

The new policy resulted from an Obama administration effort begun in 2011 to keep students in school and improve racial outcomes (timeline here), and came against a backdrop of other efforts to rein in perceived excesses in “zero tolerance” discipline policies, including in Florida.

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. Students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, would now be disciplined through participation in “healing circles,” obstacle courses and other “self-esteem building” exercises.

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.

The achievement gap “becomes intensified in the school-to-prison pipeline, where black males are disproportionately represented,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to continue to arrest our kids,” he added. “Once you have an arrest record, it becomes difficult to get scholarships, get a job, or go into the military.”

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel backed Runcie’s plan to diminish the authority of police in responding to campus crime. A November 2013 video shows him signing the district’s 16-page “collaborative agreement on school discipline,” which lists more than a dozen misdemeanors that can no longer be reported to police, along with five steps police must “exhaust” before even considering placing a student under arrest.

In just a few years, ethnically diverse Broward went from leading the state of Florida in student arrests to boasting one of its lowest school-related incarceration rates. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions also plummeted.

[….]

In January 2014, his department issued new discipline guidelines strongly recommending that the nation’s schools use law enforcement measures and out-of-school suspensions as a last resort. Announced jointly by Duncan and then-Attorney General Eric Holder, the new procedures came as more than friendly guidance from Uncle Sam – they also came with threats of federal investigations and defunding for districts that refused to fully comply.

In 2015, the White House spotlighted Runcie’s leading role in the effort during a summit called “Rethink School Discipline.” Broward, the nation’s sixth largest school district, is one of 53 major districts across the country to adopt the federal guidelines, WHICH REMAIN IN EFFECT TODAY DUE TO ADMINISTRATIVE RULES DELAYING A PLAN BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO WITHDRAW THEM.

[….]

“Broward County adopted a lenient disciplinary policy similar to those adopted by many other districts under pressure from the Obama administration to reduce racial ‘disparities’ in suspensions and expulsions,” said Peter Kirsanow, a black conservative on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington. “In many of these districts, the drive to ‘get our numbers right’ has produced disastrous results, with startling increases in both the number and severity of disciplinary offenses, including assaults and beatings of teachers and students.”

For example, in St. Paul, Minn., a high school science teacher was “beaten and choked out” by a 16-year-old student, who allegedly came up behind him, called him a “f–king white cracker,” and put him in a stranglehold, before bashing his head into a concrete wall and pavement. The student, Fon’Tae O’Bannon, got 90 days of electronic home monitoring and anger management counseling for the December 2015 attack.

The instructor, John Ekblad, who has experienced short-term memory loss and hearing problems, blames the Obama-era discipline policies for emboldening criminal behavior, adding that school violence “is still rising out of control.”

In Oklahoma City, which softened student punishments in response to a federal race-bias complaint, “students are yelling, cursing, hitting and screaming at teachers, and nothing is being done,” an Oklahoma City public school teacher said. “These students know there is nothing a teacher can do.”

In Buffalo, New York, a teacher who got kicked in the head by a student said: “We have fights here almost every day. The kids walk around and say, ‘We can’t get suspended – we don’t care what you say.’ ”

Kirsanow said that in just the first year after the Obama administration issued its anti-discipline edict, public schools failed to expel more than 30,000 students who physically attacked teachers or staff across the country. Previously, “if you hit a teach, you’re gone,” he said, but that is no longer the case.

No district has taken this new approach further than Broward County. The core of the approach is a program called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education), which substitutes counseling for criminal detention for students who break the law. According to the district website, the program is “designed to address the unique needs of students who have committed a behavioral infraction that would normally lead to a juvenile delinquency arrest and, therefore, entry into the juvenile justice system.”

The expressed goal of PROMISE is to bring about “reductions in external suspension, expulsions and arrests.” Delinquents who are diverted to the program are essentially absolved of responsibility for their actions. “This approach focuses on the situation as being the problem rather than the individual being the problem,” the website states.

Additional literature reveals that students referred to PROMISE for in-school misdemeanors – including assault, theft, vandalism, underage drinking and drug use – receive a controversial alternative punishment known as restorative justice.

“Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done,” the district explains. Indeed, it isn’t really punishment at all. It’s more like therapy. Delinquents gather in “healing circles” with counselors, and sometimes even the victims of their crime, and talk about their feelings and “root causes” of their anger.

Students who participate in the sessions and respond appropriately to difficult situations are rewarded by counselors with prizes called “choice rewards,” which they select in advance. Parents are asked to chip in money to help pay for the rewards.

Listed among the district’s “restorative justice partners” is the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Deputies and local police officers, as well as court officials, routinely attend meetings with PROMISE leaders, where they receive training in such emotional support programs.

The program also includes a separate juvenile “system of care,” rather than the regular court system, where delinquents and parents are counseled about the consequences of getting caught up in the criminal system.

Broward’s launch of the new initiative synced up with a discipline policy shift advocated by the Justice Department. “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” asserted Holder in January 2014.

At a press conference in 2015, Duncan described his “good friend” Runcie as courageous for implementing a “new system” to “keep kids in classrooms and out of courtrooms.” “It’s difficult work,” the then-education secretary said, “challenging centuries of institutionalized racism and class inequality.”

Duncan noted that Runcie had partnered with a psychology professor, Phillip Atiba Goff, who has been working with both Broward educators and police officers to become more aware of their “implicit biases” toward minority children.

“Implicit bias exists in all of us,” Runcie said in late 2016, “and we have to be courageous enough to confront it if we are going to meet our goals.” District records reveal Runcie has been putting school leaders and school support personnel through intensive training in “implicit bias, black male success strategies [and] Courageous Conservations about Race.”

[….]

A little more than a month before the Feb. 14 shooting, the FBI hotline received a tip about Cruz being a potential school gunman, but it failed to take action. If he had been previously arrested and booked for the on-campus misdemeanors, the FBI intake specialist handling the call would have seen his violent history in the federal National Crime Information Center database, which includes all state arrests, convictions, warrants and alerts.

“Once the agent, or any officer, entered his name in the NCIC system, his history would have been viewed,” Biasello said.

Though he said the call was “specific and urgent” enough to pass the information on to the bureau’s Miami field office, “the message might have been taken more seriously and escalated up the chain of command if the search turned up a police record.”

Another tip from last September, warning the FBI that a “Nikolas Cruz” had boasted on YouTube he was “going to be a professional school shooter,” also fell through the cracks due to a paucity of information in the system. A spokesman for the Miami division explained that “the FBI conducted database reviews [and] checks but was unable to further identify the person who actually made the comment.”

THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE RECEIVED AT LEAST 45 CALLS RELATED TO CRUZ AND HIS BROTHER DATING BACK TO 2008 – including a February 2016 call from a neighbor warning he made a threat on Instagram to “shoot up” the high school, and another last November advising he was collecting guns and knives and appeared to be “a school shooter in the making.” Though deputies visited Cruz at his home, they did not try to recover his weapons, despite requests from relatives who feared he planned to use them on his classmates.

Their inaction reflects the Broward department’s embrace of the school district’s approach to student crime. Even in response to a major crime scene, Sheriff Israel agreed to defer to school officials when “feasible” and employ “the least punitive means of discipline” against the perpetrators.

The Broward school board also revised agreements between the district and the school resource officers assigned by the sheriff to ensure that they no longer intervene in misdemeanor incidents to cut down on the number of “arrests for school-based behavior.” (The board also signed an agreement with Fort Lauderdale police to reduce officer involvement in such campus offenses.)

At the 2013 signing ceremony on school discipline, Sheriff Israel lauded the new goals. He vowed to “demolish” the pipeline allegedly funneling students to jail by changing the “culture” of school-related law enforcement.

“WE’VE GOT TO DEMOLISH THIS CYCLE FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO THE JAILHOUSE,” HE SAID, ECHOING RUNCIE, WHO STOOD BEHIND HIM. “OUR KIDS NEED TO BE IN SCHOOLS, NOT JAILS.”

ADDED ISRAEL: “AT THE BROWARD SHERIFF’S OFFICE, WE’RE CHANGING. WE’RE CHANGING THE CULTURE, AND WHAT WE’RE DOING IS WE ARE GONNA MAKE OBSOLETE THE TERM ‘ZERO TOLERANCE.’”………………………..

(READ IT ALL!)

UPDATE

Here is an UPDATE relayed to us by BREITBART:

A new investigation reveals that while the Broward County schools superintendent and school board are touting fewer arrests of minority students, the most recent state data actually shows the district has the highest rate of weapons-related incidents in South Florida.

Research conducted by Paul Sperry for RealClearInvestigations (RCI) shows while Broward County Public Schools, under the direction of superintendent Robert Runcie, has embraced Obama-era, social justice school discipline policies aimed at ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” for minority students, data indicate the school district has grown increasingly unsafe over recent years.

The school district has drawn intense scrutiny since accused shooter Nikolas Cruz killed 17 individuals two months ago at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Despite an extensive history of violence and threats, Cruz was never expelled from the district or referred to law enforcement for arrest, factors that prevented a background check from flagging authorities who might have blocked his ability to obtain a firearm for his rampage.

RCI reports Cruz was not the only violent young person who failed to be reformed through “restorative justice” counseling offered through the Obama-era school discipline framework:

Records show such policies have failed to curtail other campus violence and its effects now on the rise in district schools — including fighting, weapons use, bullying and related suicides.

Meanwhile, murders, armed robberies and other violent felonies committed by children outside of schools have hit record levels, and some see a connection with what’s happening on school grounds. Since the relaxing of discipline, Broward youths have not only brazenly punched out their teachers, but terrorized Broward neighborhoods with drive-by shootings, gang rapes, home invasions and carjackings.

“Broward County now has the highest percentage of ‘the most serious, violent [and] chronic’ juvenile offenders in Florida, according to the county’s chief juvenile probation officer,” Sperry writes. “Since 2015, at least three other pupils have brought loaded firearms into schools and threatened to go on shooting sprees.”

Like Runcie, the district’s Chief Public Information Officer Tracy Clark, denies the district has grown unsafe as a result of the social justice disciplinary policies.

“In fact, our district’s overall disciplinary incidents have dropped since we adopted the new policy and wraparound supports to students with behavior issues,” Clark said, according to RCI.

[…..]

The district’s PROMISE program was likely one used as a model program for the Obama administration’s national school discipline initiative mapped out in a 2014 Dear Colleague letter. The directive coerced schools into reducing reports of arrests, expulsions, and suspensions of minority students in order to avoid federal investigations and the withdrawal of federal funding.

Runcie came to Broward County from Chicago where he worked for Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan when Duncan headed up Chicago Public Schools. The first year after Runcie put PROMISE in place in Broward, the school district’s arrest rate dropped 66 percent – since schools were instructed not to refer assaults and other crimes committed by minority students to law enforcement.

However, RCI reports:

Prosecutors and probation officers complain that while overall juvenile arrests are down, serious violent crimes involving school-aged Broward youths – including armed robbery, kidnapping and even murder – have spiked, even as such violent crimes across the state have dropped.

Juvenile arrests for murder and manslaughter increased 150 percent between 2013 and 2016. They increased by another 50 percent in 2017. County juveniles were responsible for a total of 16 murders or manslaughters in the past two years alone, according to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

RCI adds that thousands of Broward students who were arrested “had their records deleted in the system as part of a program to end ‘disproportionate minority contact’ with law enforcement, blindfolding both street cops and school resource officers to the criminal history of potential juvenile threats.”

“[T]he actual police reports are being destroyed,” Broward juvenile prosecutor Maria Schneider stated at a recent Juvenile Justice Circuit Advisory Board meeting.

Two weeks after Cruz’s rampage, retired Broward School Resource Officer (SRO) Robert Martinez, agreed the school district wanted to keep arrest numbers down and encouraged SROs not to make arrests, reported WSVN.

“He [Martinez] said removing a dangerous teen like Cruz from a school can take up to two years due to all the red tape that was added to the process by Runcie’s new discipline policies and programs,” the news report continued.

“We know that when Cruz committed felonies he wasn’t arrested,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow and education policy expert Max Eden tells Breitbart News. “We hear, from a retired School Resource Officer, that the school board and police department verbally instructed SROs to not arrest for certain felonies in addition to PROMISE misdemeanors. It appears Cruz was shielded from felony arrests by a program designed for re-integrating students post felony-conviction.”

Indeed, while Runcie has asserted his PROMISE program is not connected to the shooting because Cruz did not participate in that program, RCI reveals Cruz was enrolled in the Behavior Intervention Program, an initiative that Eden describes as “PROMISE on steroids for felons.”

As RCI previously reported Broward’s Behavior Intervention Program is intended for “students who exhibit severe, unmanageable behavior that cannot be adequately controlled in a traditional school setting.”

Students referred to the Behavior Intervention Program are those “returning from residential Juvenile Justice Programs,” including students “convicted of a serious crime such as: rape, murder, attempted murder, sexual battery or firearm related,” and those whose behavior off campus would qualify them for expulsion….

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“Justice Shrugged” | Trump Indictments