4 senators vote to reinstate Scott Israel
A majority had urged Senate to permanently oust suspended sheriff
TALLAHASSEE – Family members and friends of people killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre have become powerful national voices on gun violence and school safety, and outspoken at home about what they see as the imperative of making sure Scott Israel doesn’t return as Broward sheriff.
But even as they won a pivotal vote against Israel on Monday night, they were unable to sway four state senators from Broward County.
State Sens.
Lauren
Book,
Oscar
Braynon II, Gary Farmer and Perry Thurston all voted to reinstate Israel as sheriff.
The four senators, all Democrats, voted with the rest of their party to return him to office. The Republican majority on the Rules Committee voted to make Israel’s suspension permanent, foreshadowing the likely outcome Wednesday when the full Senate votes.
Book’s was one of the most closely watched votes. Her district includes Coral Springs, home to many people directly affected by the 2018 massacre at the Parkland school, and she is a member of the state commission that has been studying what went wrong and how to fix it.
Before casting her pro-Israel vote, Book said it was a difficult decision. “It’s not lost on me that
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these families want accountability and consequences,” she said, as family members who had just called for Israel’s removal watched.
Book said Tuesday the 10 hours of legal arguments and public testimony at the Rules Committee was a “rough day, obviously. A lot of testimony, a lot of emotion.”
She said she’s been a supporter of Parkland-area families, but also has different perspectives from
Suspended Broward Sheriff Scott Israel listens Monday to a discussion about his performance during a Senate panel meeting in Tallahassee.
elsewhere in Broward.
“I’ve always told them I would sit with an open mind and listen and understand. I’ve been an advocate of theirs and continue and will continue to be an advocate for them, and I know that they’re not particularly pleased,” she said. “But you also heard from a lot of people in Broward County. You have to listen and balance all of those things and all of those parts.”
Book’s rationale, unlike other senators, was that she was especially interested in accountability for Scot Peterson, the deputy assigned to the high school, whose failure to do anything to stop the shooting had led to widespread condemnation of his cowardice.
Removal of Israel means he would be deemed responsible for what happened at the school, Book reasoned, making it harder to make charges stick against Peterson, who faces several criminal charges related
to his failure to act.
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed at the school, said that reasoning made no sense to him.
“She’s just a Democrat and she’s voting partisan. She put her party ahead of the safety of the community. She’s despicable, disgraceful, shameless — just like Israel. They’re cut from the same cloth,” said Pollack, who is a Republican.
“She sat on the [Stoneman Douglas] commission. She saw the videos. She watched the evidence. She knows how many failures there were. She is privy to more evidence than any other senator here. For her to vote to reinstate that guy, she is everything I said,” Pollack said.
During the Rules Committee marathon, Farmer and Thurston made it clear they had problems with the way the case against Israel was proceeding.
Explaining their votes, they said it was important to consider all of Broward, whose residents elected Israel as sheriff, rather than just the voices that want him permanently removed.
“My experience and the conversations I have had and the feedback I’ve gotten from the majority of Broward County feels a little bit differently than the Parkland families. They are still hurting, and understandably so, and with that comes a certain perspective, and I understand that and I respect that,” Farmer said Tuesday.
But, he said, the belief that different leadership would have meant a different 10:00am-5:00pm Cost: result on the day of the Parkland shooting is not enough to justify the removal of an elected official and overturning the choice of Broward voters.
“Holding people accountable and accountability is very important, but to me, the way in this instance you hold Sheriff Israel accountable would have been to vote him out of office. Not to take the extraordinary step of an executive removal,” Farmer said.
Proximity makes a difference in how people view Israel.
Heather Chapman of Parkland, a Democrat active in efforts to combat gun violence, said she was frustrated that her party’s senators were “not thinking about the whole community, the whole county.”
Marty Ireland feels differently. The Plantation Democratic activist and former president of the National Association of Letter Carriers branch 2550 is a constituent of Book’s. “She made a tough but correct decision,” he said via text message.
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed at the school, was fuming at Farmer and Thurston over that reasoning on Tuesday.
“Senator Thurston and Senator Farmer really got to a place about making it Parkland versus the rest of the county. I am livid,” Guttenberg said. “For the two senators to drive that narrative, that is political and it is disgusting. You can make it clear: I am beyond angry about it.”
Still, as Guttenberg met with senators on Tuesday, he said he was hoping to
“remove some of the caustic emotion out of it.” He said he was still trying to round up votes — including Democrats — to vote in favor of permanently removing Israel.
“I want bipartisanship in the vote [on Wednesday],” he said after emerging from one senator’s office. “I’ve met with several people, giving me hope.”
Braynon didn’t explain his vote during the Rules Committee’s debate. But he was among the solid Democratic bloc of votes for reinstating Israel.
The fifth senator who represents part of Broward is Kevin Rader, whose district includes the Parkland high school. He’s not a member of the Rules Committee so he didn’t have to cast a vote on Monday and hasn’t publicly said what he’s going to do on Wednesday.