Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Sheriff to step up training
Tony announces plans to coach deputies in how to respond to mass shootings
New Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony on Thursday said he will ramp up training for thousands of deputies, including how they respond to mass shootings.
He also announced that he will run for election in 2020 because “there is so much work to do” that he does not want undone by another administration.
Tony, 40, is one of the youngest sheriffs to lead the agency. He was sworn in on Jan. 11, the same day Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended former Sheriff Scott Israel.
DeSantis removed Israel amid criticism over the agency’s response to the Feb. 14, 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, when 17 kids and adults were killed and 17 were wounded.
Tony shared his plans for the agency during a meeting with reporters, and described feeling frustrated as he saw the response to the shootings at the Parkland school on television.
After 12 years with Coral Springs Police, he had retired as a sergeant in 2016 to start his own business, Blue Spear Solutions, which provides active shooter training and assesses threats to schools and businesses. He and his wife, Holly, his business partner, were in South Carolina at the time, setting up a training division.
On that Valentine’s Day, he watched his former Coral Springs police colleagues who he had trained respond to the emergency, and was proud of them.
As for eight sheriff ’s deputies who didn’t go in the building, Tony said, “Understanding that there is a lot of brave, dedicated men and women here, I was disappointed to know that a small fraction had failed the community and did not go in.
“And I knew then that I needed to come back home and try to help in any way, shape or form that would be possible,” Tony said.
He has a lot of work to do to restore public confidence in the agency, which has about 5,500 employees, 2,800 of them deputies.
Mental health care issues in society will contribute to future mass shootings, Tony said, “So my philosophy is to be prepared so you don’t have to get prepared.”
Before the shootings happened, there were numerous reports to authorities about the disturbing behavior of Stoneman Douglas gunman Nikolas Cruz.
“We had a lot of contacts, in terms of an organization,” Tony said. “How it was tracked, treated and investigated
was deficient. But at the same time, that does not fall exclusively on our organization, because there was measures outside of our organization that weren’t taken, in terms of follow-up for mental health care, what was tracked and developed on the school side of it.”
Coordination between entities that serve troubled kids “happens now, but it can be better,” Tony said. “It can be a lot better.”
Failures during the school shooting also included eight deputies who heard gunfire but didn’t go after the gunman, radios that didn’t allow police to communicate with each other and a two-step 911 system that routed calls, including from kids inside the school, from Coral Springs call takers to county dispatchers. That may have caused fatal delays in sending cops and paramedics to the scene.
“The communications systems are not controlled under my authority or purview, so that’s going to be a matter of ... dialog with the county administrators and talking with them about what we can do immediately to meet those needs,” Tony said. “There’s been months and months of conversation and testimony. What I’d like to see is that conversation turned into
something that’s actionable.”
He said there may not be enough cell towers, and that too many non-essential personnel use the radios. As for the cities of Plantation and Coral Springs that have their own 911 dispatch systems and must transfer some calls to the county dispatchers, he said, “The cities that remain outside of it have their justification for that.
“So we need to try to meet them in the middle in terms of how we can modify this thing so that it works in everyone’s interest. Especially when we know the next incident is gonna take place where the radios and 911 systems are gonna be just as important as they were then,” Tony said.
The most noticeable differences residents and staff will see in the sheriff’s office are “strong leadership from the top,” Tony said. “And that we’re going to be accountable from the top all the way down. And we’ll put in all the different policies and procedures that are needed to make sure we’re successful.”
Other agency goals: Building its own training facilities, something he called “essential.” Also, having access to cameras in schools.
“I’m very ambitious, so I’m never going to be satisfied,”
he said.
For the active shooter policy, which previously said deputies “may” respond to a gunman and was revised by the former sheriff to say deputies “shall” respond, Tony said he may fine tune it further.
“There can be zero interpretation on what needs to happen. … Fortunately for us, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to take the policies and language that works and put them into play.”
The sheriff’s office was also faulted for the active shooter training deputies received or for not providing that instruction more frequently. The agency said last year that it complied with national training standards. But Tony said a past problem was there were too few trainers, only a half dozen. He has created 25 trainer positions that will be filled and wants deputies to complete instruction each year, including for shootings.
“A simple solution like that goes a long way,” Tony said.
Of the deputies who didn’t stop the shooter at Parkland, three transferred to other districts, one retired, one resigned and three others are on restrictive duty while internal affairs investigates them.
The shootings at Parkland “hit home” for Tony, who knew murdered student Meadow Pollack, the daughter of his old gym buddy Andy Pollack.
Tony said he made himself available to cops and affected families to answer their questions about active shootings, and spoke with different state legislators about ways to prevent loss of lives in future mass casualty events. His efforts brought him to the attention of DeSantis, who appointed him to lead the sheriff ’s office, he said.
“There was zero expectation to be placed in this position,”
Tony said. “But I think as we got closer to where the governor was going to made a decision to remove the previous administration, it came up and I basically had about a week’s notice.”
Though Tony said Thursday, “I have the very great fortune that I wasn’t a politician” when he was tapped for the job, he said he will run for election in 2020, as a Democrat.
“Why would I run? The next year and a half of implementing policies, procedures, training, building new facilities, all these things are about breaking ground,” Tony said. “If I walk away from this place in 2020, then there is no guarantee that the visions and effort that I put forth will be sustained by the next administration.”
Calling himself “a cop’s cop,” he said as a child, he dressed in police costumes for Halloween.
Asked if Broward County children will be safe at school, Tony said, “Absolutely.”
On Thursday, the first anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shootings, Tony said he will attend events with students at the school.
He acknowledged that confidence in the sheriff’s office was “absolutely shattered. It’s going to take time to rebuild.”
He said that would happen with community involvement and transparency about the agency’s efforts to fix what he called its deficiencies.
“I don’t think this is something that is going to happen overnight,” Tony said. “We need to prove ourselves once again as an organization, to be that competent leader of law enforcement in this entire community.”