Police communication failure:

The Coral Springs police chief said Thursday that a “communication failure” led police to believe they were tracking the Parkland school shooter in real time on security cameras, when in fact they were seeing a 20-minute delay. Nikolas Cruz was already out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but police searching the building thought he was still there because the person reviewing the security cameras failed to advise the Coral Springs police of the tape delay.

Poor communication — not a technical problem — left police trying to track the Parkland school shooter on video surveillance when he had already left the building, the Coral Springs police chief said Thursday.

Police searching for Nikolas Cruz desperately needed to know where he was at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, as students cowered behind locked doors. But their colleagues looking at security monitors in another building fed them wrong information because they didn’t realize — or didn’t convey — that they were watching a recording rather than a live feed, Chief Tony Pustizzi said.

The “communication failure” led police to believe they were tracking the shooter in real time, when in fact they were seeing footage from 20 minutes earlier, the chief said.

Cruz had already killed 17 and fled.

A search followed, and Cruz was captured walking down a residential street more than an hour after the shooting the afternoon of Feb. 14.

Pustizzi said the security camera mix-up was not caused by malfunctioning equipment.

“That 20-minute delay did cause some confusion,” Pustizzi said at a news conference, where he addressed a South Florida Sun Sentinel news article published Wednesday about the camera problem.

The chief stressed that the delay did not put any lives in danger.

The Broward County Public Schools issued a statement Thursday saying the “surveillance system definitely has the ability to view the cameras in real time. It also has the ability to view the recorded footage and replay footage from earlier in the day.”

Pustizzi explained that officers who went in the school building wanted “as much intelligence as possible.”

Representatives from the Broward Sheriff’s Office, Coral Springs police and school security were reviewing images from security cameras in a room near the principal’s office in the main building — some distance across campus from the so-called “1200 building,” where the attack occurred, the chief said.

“The officers that are in the school trying to find him were given inaccurate information unintentionally,” the chief said, calling the problem “just miscommunication.”

It led to police announcing into their radios that the gunman was on the second floor, when it wasn’t true.

“They are monitoring the subject right now. He went from the third floor to the second floor, the third to the second floor. … They’re monitoring him on camera,” an officer said on police radio transmissions recorded by Broadcastify, an audio streaming website, at 2:54 p.m.

In fact, Cruz was already long gone — he had escaped the school’s freshman building 26 minutes earlier and was sitting at a McDonald’s a mile away, a timeline released by the Broward Sheriff’s Office shows.

The chief said the delay “never put us in a situation where any kids’ lives were in danger or any teachers’ lives were in danger.”

As police swept through the building looking for Cruz, medics with special training for high-risk situations followed behind, tending to the wounded.

Other officers ran in, grabbed kids and ran out, Pustizzi said.

In the weeks to come, Coral Springs police will conduct an internal review, the chief said.

He said Coral Springs police responded quickly, and were first inside the building.

The chief praised the professionalism and dedication of teachers who — faced with gunshots — shielded children.

“Talk about heroes,” he said.