Public push needed for reforms

Florida’s law is clear. Guns can’t be sold to people under longterm psychiatric treatment. Yet an investigation by the Sun Sentinel discovered the law is routinely flouted, ignored or carelessly administered.

Also, Florida’s juvenile justice system is supposed to safely shelter youthful offenders and give them a start on rehabilitation. Yet a years-long examination of the system by a team of Miami Herald reporters uncovered case after case of brutality, sexual abuse, excessive force and coverups of improper behavior by a poorly trained, underpaid staff.

Both projects are an example of journalism in the best tradition of the muckrakers of legend, reporters who exposed society’s ills and triggered widespread reforms demanded by an angry public . ...

We shouldn’t need a newspaper investigation to tell us it’s wrong to pit kids against each other to maintain order in a perverted detention system. We shouldn’t need a newspaper investigation to tell us that a law to keep guns out of the hands of mental patients is all but ignored. The laws and rules are sound and, for the most part, unambiguous.

Take the gun law, for example. Ten years ago, the Florida Legislature banned the sale of guns to people forcibly committed to a mental institution. It expanded the ban four years ago to include those voluntarily committed, a good-sense expansion of a goodsense prohibition.

All the law required was for doctors and hospitals to notify the authorities of the patient’s status, thus adding the name to the no-gun list. And it required a clerk to put it there. Nothing complicated about that.

Since passage, 140,000 names were added to the list in Florida, dramatically fewer than Texas, with twice the number; New York, three times; and California, five times . ...

Marion Hammer, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, acknowledges the law’s need, a rare move for the pro-gun organization. “If you’re a danger to yourself and others, you have no business getting out and being able to purchase firearms,” she told our reporter.

The problem isn’t the law, it’s people not following it, she said. That’s what makes this lapse in compliance so shocking. A law so sensible that even the NRA supports it, is undermined by sloth, procrastination or indifference.

And it takes little imagination to see the flaws in a system that allows detention officers to abuse their charges — sexually, physically and psychologically — or to understand that broken surveillance cameras do no good or that guards fired from an adult facility for incompetence will likely do no better with juveniles. Revelations in The Herald’s investigation cover the gamut, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, a system so shot through with indifference it deadens the soul.

Newspapers have historically filled the role of the disinterested observer, exposing wrongdoing when it can be found, urging the public to support law or policy remedies and hoping for a good outcome. But in the end, it is the citizenry that demands change if it thinks it warranted. It is the citizenry that must shout “this cannot stand.”

The gravest enemy of democracy is indifference, indifference from those who serve us, compounded by indifference from ourselves. Newspapers, challenged as we are by countless forces and buffeted by shouts of “fake news” from our president, continue to expose society’s ills and will continue to do so as long as we can.

But the people must do their share.