The government failed on Florida school shooting

A month before the Valentine’s Day shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the FBI received a tip that the suspect, a 19-year-old former student at the school, had a “desire to kill,” access to firearms and could be plotting an attack on a school.

The FBI released a statement after the shooting admitting that the tip was not shared with the bureau’s Miami office, as it should have been, and was not investigated.

Last September, the FBI received a tip about a comment posted on a YouTube video by someone using the shooter’s name online. The comment read, “Im going to be a professional school shooter.” The FBI investigated but did not determine who made the comment.

This case is only the latest example of a deadly disconnect in federal law enforcement between procedures and reality.

The FBI also had warnings about the perpetrator of the 2016 massacre in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub and the shooter at the Fort Lauderdale airport last January. The bureau had information about the gunman in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, and about one of the two brothers behind the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon.

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said his office had received more than 20 calls about the Parkland gunman over the past few years. CNN later found records of 45 calls to the sheriff’s office over the past decade related to the shooter, his home or his brother. Why, in the post-9/11 world, is information about dangerous individuals not being shared between law enforcement agencies in a way that would red-flag threats and protect communities from the next mass killer?

This dysfunction has now brought lifelong grief to the families of 17 more people who will never come home.

Perhaps a high-level commission or special Congressional committee is needed to investigate exactly why law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, are allowing tips, clues and information about deadly threats to languish unnoticed and unconnected in somebody’s in-box.

Do medical privacy laws prevent the sharing of information about a dangerous and mentally ill person’s plans or capabilities? Is there a fear of lawsuits over wrongful accusations? Is information not communicated because of a technical incompatibility between databases? Is the problem bureaucratic inertia powered by public employees who think it’s someone else’s job?

We’d better figure it out, and quickly.

— Los Angeles Daily News,

Digital First Media