The sheriff acknowledged on Sunday that the deputy’s inaction might have cost lives.
“Do I believe if Scot Peterson went into that building, there was a chance he could have neutralized the killer and saved lives? Yes, I believe that,” he told the host of the program, Jake Tapper.
Deputy Peterson’s actions are not the only ones in question.
The sheriff’s office is also investigating whether other deputies who arrived on the scene failed to enter the high school immediately. Officers from the Coral Springs Police Department, who were the first to respond to the shooting, told CNN that at least three Broward County deputies had hung back during the response. Standard police protocol for dealing with an active shooter requires officers to try to confront the shooters as quickly as possible.
Sheriff Israel said on Sunday that his deputies arrived four minutes after Mr. Cruz had left the freshman building where the massacre took place. But Mr. Tapper noted that the deputies did not know at that point that Mr. Cruz had already left, and should have proceeded as though the shooting were still underway.
“We will investigate every action of our deputies, of their supervisors,” the sheriff said, adding that Coral Springs police officers will give witness statements to investigators from his office. “If they did things wrong,” he said of his department’s personnel, “I will take care of business in a disciplinary manner.”
Sheriff Israel, who effusively praised his deputies in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, had insisted in a news conference on Wednesday that his deputies had not delayed their entry into the school. He appeared at a town-hall-style event that evening, broadcast on CNN, during which he criticized the National Rifle Association aggressively and urged state lawmakers to give police more power to commit the mentally ill to hospitals involuntarily.
He did not mention Deputy Peterson’s inaction on that broadcast, even though, as he told Mr. Tapper on Sunday, he had seen video footage earlier that day showing that the deputy had stayed outside.
The sheriff said on Sunday that his office waited until Thursday, the day after the broadcast, to corroborate that the deputy had not entered the school and to notify families of the victims about the finding.
“I’m not on a timeline for TV or any news show,” he said.
Sheriff Israel said he has asked the Police Executive Research Forum, based in Washington, to conduct an independent after-action report on how his office responded to the shooting.
He rejected suggestions that his office had missed repeated signs that Mr. Cruz was a threat to Stoneman Douglas High, even though at least 23 calls involving Mr. Cruz were made to deputies over the past decade. The sheriff’s office is investigating how two of those calls were handled, and has placed the two deputies who responded to them on restricted duty.
Sheriff Israel indicated that he was unaware until after the shooting that there had been a long list of calls directly involving Mr. Cruz.
“I can only take responsibility for what I knew about,” the sheriff said. Almost none of the incidents involved offenses that would merit an arrest, he said, adding: “our deputies did everything right.”
“Our deputies have done amazing things,” he said.
It does feel rather odd that we're not allowed to be sold more than two packs of pills but when it literally saves lives you'd feel a bit of a dick for objecting.
