SUNRISE, Fla. _ The Broward school district's controversial PROMISE program is flawed but likely had nothing to do with the Parkland school shooting, a state commission investigating the massacre concluded Tuesday.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission had conducted a review of gunman Nikolas Cruz's involvement in PROMISE, a diversion program intended to allow kids who commit minor offenses to avoid arrest.
The review found that there were no records to confirm that Cruz had attended the three-day diversion program in 2013, after breaking the handle of a restroom faucet. And it found there were no apparent consequences if he had in fact failed to attend.
But the commission, led by Chairman Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff of Pinellas County, said the district's handling of his offense appeared irrelevant to what happened later. Gualtieri said that even if Cruz had been arrested on the spot rather than referred to PROMISE, there would have been nothing to prevent him from buying a firearm four years later, given his status as a juvenile first-offender.
"I'm going to suggest to you that this is something we can make recommendations on, but overall, this is something we can put to rest and move on from," he said to the commission, which consists of law enforcement officers, public officials and parents of the murdered children.
Commission member Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, said he found the PROMISE program to be a permissive "train wreck" that allowed young offenders "bite after bite after bite of the apple." But he said he agreed that the handling of one incident in Cruz's past had no bearing on what happened at Stoneman Douglas.
"I don't think the event in and of itself _ breaking off a faucet _ had anything at all to do with the shooting later on," Judd said.
The commission voted to include several recommendations for PROMISE and other school-based diversion programs around the state, which will be included in its final report, due by the end of the year.
There were some skeptical voices. Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex was killed in the shooting, asked the school board representative at the meeting, chief academic officer Dan Gohl, why there had been 40 or 50 incidents involving Cruz if that didn't indicate a problem with the permissiveness of the PROMISE program.
Gohl responded that those were disciplinary incidents, such as swearing at a teacher, that didn't rise to the level of criminal offenses.
But Schachter questioned what the district had been doing, as Cruz committed infraction after infraction.
"This kid had a lot of problems, and you weren't helping him," he said.
Some commissioners expressed concern that PROMISE, in Cruz's case, was a lost opportunity to intervene. But Gualtieri said there had been extensive attempts to intervene by Henderson Behavioral Services, with many visits to Cruz's home.
He placed some of the blame on Cruz's deceased mother, whom he described as an "enabler" who disagreed with an attempt by a mental health counselor to stop him from buying a gun.
The committee voted to make five recommendations for reforming diversion programs such as PROMISE:
_ School-based diversion programs should only be established in collaboration with state attorney's offices.
_ A common state database should be created so an officer can find out immediately in a young person in one county has committed offenses in another.
_ Diversion criteria should be consistent among Florida's 67 counties.
_ Students should no longer have their records reset at the end of the year, as Broward allows.
_ Diversion programs should not interfere with the discretion of the law enforcement officer on the spot.
The commission is meeting for three days this week at the BB&T Center in Sunrise.
