No Tip Will Go Un-screened, by Our Crack Staff of Investigators

 

Another school shooting and the litany begins again. Bad Guns! Crazy People! Why does what happened in Florida have to have a single causative factor? Let’s expand it, what do all these mass shooting events have in common? Guns and individuals pursuing a private agenda that can only make sense in their twisted minds. Parkland-school-shooting-people-saw-something-and-repeatedly-said-something-to-no-avail.

“We have uncovered at the Broward Sheriff’s Office that we’ve had approximately 20 calls for service over the last few years regarding the killer,” Israel told reporters. “Every one of these calls for service will be looked at and scrutinized.”

Police were called to the home of Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Florida high school, on 39 occasions over a seven-year period, according to a new report.

I don’t know the law enforcement situation in that area of Florida. These two paragraphs are not particularly helpful. Keep in the back of your mind that Cruz’s brother is also a wacko and currently incarcerated for a mental health commitment. Does Broward County SO police the whole county? Is there a City PD? Does the Sheriff’s Office staff a mental health unit? How many calls are duplicated? The City responded (They assign a case number) and request the SO Mental Health Unit, assuming one exists, (SO assigns a case number). So what do these numbers mean? Did the municipality answer twenty calls for service separate and apart from the SO? How many of the calls involved potential violent conduct? Knowing that the Cruz brothers shared a gene pool more akin to a cesspool, how many involved one brother or the other or both? The numbers don’t do much without a narrative.

Finally, there’ s the FBI. The FBI is very good at conducting certain kinds of investigations, but they don’t know shit about police work. If they argue that it’s all one in the same, they are just making my argument for me. From what little I have seen of the informant, who spoke with the FBI, my guess is he gave them actionable intelligence, that was never properly followed up. By actionable, I mean that the agents could have made a probable identification of the suspect and called Broward County. That conversation had it happened would have a more robust response.

The problem with “Hotlines” is that there is no cull factor. For every good call with actionable intelligence that leads to an arrest, there are tens of thousands that are a waste of time.

Everybody in the San Antonio Narcotics enforcement community dealt with one particular individual at one point in time or another. I’ll call him Juan Moretime. Some agencies had a duty agent. The duty agent fielded all calls where there was no request for a specific investigator. This included the volunteer informant call, anonymous calls and anything in between.

Juan Moretime usually called when he was drunk beginning at 8 in the morning and continuing until 5 in the afternoon.

Juan,”My neighbor is a dope dealer, come arrest him. I want to be anonymous.”

Agent, “What’s his name?”

Juan,”I don’t know.”

Agent, “What’s he dealing,”

Juan, “Dope.”

Agent, “How do you know?”

Juan, “I just do.”

Agent, “What is his address?”

Juan, “Next to me.”

Agent “What’s your address?

Juan, “I ain’t gonna tell you.”

This would be considered a legitimate call that the Duty Agent would be required to document. In a less formal environment, say at my task force, I would tell the caller his information was too much for us to handle and refer him to the FBI ASAC San Antonio and don’t take anybody else.

For those of you not up on search and seizure law. The previous conversation in got nowhere near what is required for probable cause. It has been ten years since I tracked the status of the latest search and seizure case law. Things have apparently changed during the tenure of Eric Holder. It appears that Juan Moretime could have met the probable cause standard if the object of his tirade was republicans, and would lead to their embarrassment.