FBI tip staff overworked, underpaid, paper finds

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The FBI’s quest to protect the public — a job it bungled in the case of the Florida school shooter — has long depended on low-paid, overworked employees who were evaluated partly on how quickly they disposed of tips from callers.

The FBI has spread the message that “if you see something, say something,” but then it mishandled two ominous tips to its national call center about Nikolas Cruz, the teenager who later gunned down 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, with an AR-15 rifle.

Both tips suggested that Cruz was a school shooter in the making, but neither tip was sent to agents in South Florida to check out.

The episode has exposed serious questions about how the FBI’s call center operates, years after it was established to try to head off deadly trouble before it happened. And it has left the FBI scrambling to plug holes that allowed Cruz to slip through despite warnings that he was a danger.

Theoretically, the national operation was supposed to free agents in the FBI’s 56 field offices to focus on investigations, not sit in the office taking phone calls. FBI bosses also wanted a cheaper and more effective way to analyze information at one location, spot trends and then forward tips to investigators.

But the South Florida SunSentinel has found:

• Call-takers, classified as “customer service representatives,” are among the FBI’s lowest-paid employees, despite serving as the first line of defense against killers and terrorists while handling thousands of calls a day.

• Figuring out how they made decisions, including the botched Cruz case, has been impossible because no one was required to document precisely what information was considered.