FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ The FBI's quest to protect the public _ a job it bungled in the case of the Parkland school shooter _ has long depended on low-paid, overworked employees who were evaluated partly on how quickly they disposed of tips from callers.
The FBI has spread the message that "if you see something, say something," but then it mishandled two ominous tips to its national call center about Nikolas Cruz, the teenager who later gunned down 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 rifle.
Both tips suggested that Cruz was a school shooter in the making, but neither was sent to agents in South Florida to check out.
The episode has exposed serious questions about how the FBI's call center operates, years after it was established to try to head off deadly trouble before it happened. And it has left the FBI scrambling to plug holes that allowed Cruz to slip through despite warnings that he was a danger.
Theoretically, the national operation was supposed to free agents in the FBI's 56 field offices to focus on investigations, not sit in the office taking phone calls. FBI bosses also wanted a cheaper and more effective way to analyze information at one location, spot trends and then forward tips to investigators.
But the South Florida Sun Sentinel has found:
_ Call-takers, classified as "customer service representatives," are among the FBI's lowest-paid employees, despite serving as the first line of defense against killers and terrorists while handling thousands of calls a day.
_ Figuring out how they made decisions, including the botched Cruz case, has been impossible because no one was required to document precisely what information was considered.
_ The most-detailed tip about Cruz seems to have been ignored partly because an earlier tip, which received only a cursory investigation, had already been rejected.
_ With Cruz, the confusion is compounded because the call-taker and her supervisor give conflicting accounts of why the second tip was mishandled _ each pointing the finger at the other.
_ Now, FBI agents say they're being forced to chase pointless tips in an overly cautious system that fears a repeat of the Cruz debacle.
Senior FBI officials have admitted the FBI "committed serious, grave errors" with the Cruz tips, but they called the mistakes "judgment errors."
"The FBI could have and should have done more to investigate the information it was provided prior to the shooting," the deputy director of the FBI, David Bowdich, said earlier this year during congressional hearings on the Parkland shooting. "While we will never know if we could have prevented this tragedy, we clearly should have done more."
The FBI has since decided to assign more call-takers and supervisors at the call center in Clarksburg, W.Va.; step up training for staff and agents; hire contractors to process online tips; create a management team to review all calls about terrorism or threats to life; and re-examine tips received in the past couple of years and send any potentially useful information to field offices for follow-up.
FBI acting assistant director Jill Tyson outlined many of those changes in a letter Monday to U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who sits on the House Judiciary Committee. He provided a copy Tuesday to the Sun Sentinel.
Deutch has called repeatedly for the FBI to brief all victims' families about the improvements and to reveal whether any employee was disciplined _ a fact the FBI has refused to discuss.
"A terrible mistake happened," said Deutch, whose district includes Parkland. "They acknowledge it. We expect accountability."
Nancy Savage, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, called the handling of the Cruz case "egregious." She attributed it to inadequate staffing, failure to follow proper protocols and lack of experience by the call-taker and her supervisor, an FBI agent.
She considers the case a rare exception in a system that is overwhelmed with calls and emails, due to the explosion of social media and to the success of campaigns that encourage people to report suspicious behavior.
"They're doing phenomenal work at the call center and, personally, I think it's an improvement on what we had before," Savage said. "A bad judgment call here on something so significant is a call to action for the FBI, and they're certainly taking it very seriously. They're fixing it."
