FBI details changes after botched Stoneman Douglas tips
The FBI has sent a letter to the state commission investigating the Stoneman Douglas massacre, detailing changes made since the agency fumbled two tips that the future shooter was planning acts of violence.
The letter does not say what went wrong or whether anyone has been disciplined. And it arrived too late for the commission’s planned Nov. 16 discussion of the FBI’s role in the matter.
But the commission’s chairman, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, said he considered the extensive changes detailed in the letter to be evidence that the FBI took its failings seriously and had moved quickly to fix them.
“I take it as an acceptance of responsibility by the FBI as a whole,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing, and I think it’s the right thing.”
The two tips, both eerily accurate about the plans of Nikolas Cruz, the future shooter, came from separate sources in the months prior to the Feb. 14 shooting that left 17 dead and 17 wounded.
In one tip received Sept. 25 of the prior year, the agency learned that someone with the username "nikolas cruz" had posted a comment on a YouTube video that said, "I am going to be a professional school shooter."
The agency closed the investigation after 16 days, after doing little to track down the poster, including failing to request the information from Google, which owns YouTube.
In the second tip, a Cruz family friend reported his disturbing web posts, his firearm purchases, his mutilation of small animals and her fears that he would be "getting into a school and just shooting the place up."
That tip was never forwarded for further investigation to the FBI South Florida office and the file was closed with the comment, “no lead value.”
FBI director Christopher Wray issued a statement two days after the shooting, acknowledging mistakes and saying the bureau’s officials “deeply regret the additional pain this causes all those affected by this horrific tragedy.”
In the letter to the commission, the FBI said it had reviewed the operations of its 24-hour call center and made extensive changes to make sure that serious tips about possible violence are investigated thoroughly.
The agency implemented a two-tier structure to route routine calls to one group of representatives so that the rest can be freed up to concentrate on more serious ones. Any tips that involve threatening words receive extra layers of review before being closed.
The agency added staff to its tips center and beefed up training, including sessions on school shootings, mental health indicators, how to query databases and procedures for referring matters to other law enforcement agencies.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office and school board took steps this week and last to hold individuals responsible for missteps that came to light after the shooting. Several administrators at Stoneman Douglas have been transferred, a Broward sheriff’s captain has resigned and a sergeant place on administrative leave.
But the FBI has repeatedly refused to say who made mistakes or whether anyone has been disciplined, citing a policy against discussing personnel matters.
Gualtieri said he would have liked to have heard more about what went wrong in this case, although he understand that the FBI was being sued by parents and may not be able to say much. And he said he took the bureau’s announcement of extensive changes to be an indication that the fumbled tips resulted from a problem with the system itself, rather than one or two low-level employees failing to do their jobs.
“The magnitude seems off the charts,” he said, of the FBI’s decision to reorganize and beef-up its organization for handling tips. “It’s extremely telling, the extensive infrastructure changes and the amount of resources they’re putting into their system.”