Miami-Dade Schools Could Have Saved Travyon Martin’s Life by Arresting Him

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Leniency is not always mercy when dealing with juvenile delinquents, and I say this on the basis of my own experience of having been a teenage dopehead in the ’70s. My hoodlum buddies got away with a lot of stuff, but we also caught a time or two, and Sheriff Earl Lee was not the kind of man a dopehead hoodlum could take lightly.

Anyway, I hadn’t followed every detail of the Trayvon Martin story, which meant I missed one of the biggest untold aspects of the story: How a see-no-evil policy by Miami-Dade Schools resulted in Trayvon getting off lightly — suspended from school for criminal acts that should have gotten him arrested.

The Last Refuge has been trying to call attention to this story for months, but of course, the mainstream media wouldn’t touch it because it looked like a story about demonizing the dead kid. (Mark Steyn had some harsh comments about the beatification of St. Trayvon, if you’re interested.) But I never noticed this angle until Pamela Geller blogged it Sunday and, the more I read about it, the more I realized that this isn’t so much about Trayvon being a hoodlum. No, this is a story about bureaucrats trying to game the system, and pretend that there was less crime in the Miami-Dade schools than there actually was. The villain in this story isn’t a racist, just a disgraced cop:

The February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martion might never have happened if school officials in Miami-Dade County had not instituted an unofficial policy of treating crimes as school disciplinary infractions. Revelations that emerged from an internal affairs investigation explain why Martin was not arrested when caught at school with stolen jewerly in October 2011 or with marijuana in February 2012. Instead, the teenager was suspended from school, the last time just days before he was shot dead by George Zimmerman.
Trayvon Martin was not from Sanford, the town north of Orlando where he was shot in 2012 and where a jury acquitted Zimmerman of murder charges Saturday. Martin was from Miami Gardens, more than 200 miles away, and had come to Sanford to stay with his father’s girlfriend Brandy Green at her home in the townhouse community where Zimmerman was in charge of the neighborhood watch. Trayvon was staying with Green after he had been suspended for the second time in six months from Krop High School in Miami-Dade County, where both his father, Tracy Martin, and mother, Sybrina Fulton, lived.
Both of Trayvon’s suspensions during his junior year at Krop High involved crimes that could have led to his prosecution as a juvenile offender. However, Chief Charles Hurley of the Miami-Dade School Police Department (MDSPD) in 2010 had implemented a policy that reduced the number of criiminal reports, manipulating statistics to create the appearance of a reduction in crime within the school system. Less than two weeks before Martin’s death, the school system commended Chief Hurley for “decreasing school-related juvenile delinquency by an impressive 60 percent for the last six months of 2011.” What was actually happening was that crimes were not being reported as crimes, but instead treated as disciplinary infractions. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. Leniency is not always mercy, and going to jail is better than getting shot.

UPDATE: The Last Refuge today published a recap of their excellent work in chronicling the Miami-Dade School Police cover-up.

What is interesting is that the Miami Herald, which first broke the story in March 2012, has failed to follow up on Frances Robles’ original report, and we naturally suspect political correctness as the explanation. Maybe you could talk to Frances Robles on Twitter.

She’s now with the New York Times.

 


139 comments

  1. But since it does not fit the narrative it is obviously raaaaacist to even mention traytables CRIMINAL past. Do I celebrate traytables ventilation and subsequent inhumation, no. But I’ll damn sure celebrate Zimmermans exoneration.

  2. One of the things reported here was that Trayvon had actually been suspended three times, but his father only knew about two suspensions. That means Daddy’s little angel was concealing the suspension from his family by getting up and pretending to go to school each day and possibly intercepting school communications with his parents. Trayvon was not the innocent little boy the media tried to portray him as.

  4. The simple message of the Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman obeyed the law. Martin, the prosecution and Martin’s supporters didn’t. Therefore Zimmerman is the villain. What other lesson can we take from this?

  6. I’m still convinced “someone” (Corey’s office) will leak the jurors’ names and addresses sooner rather than later.

  8. Leak and then come out and apologize while showing their addresses on the screen at the same time. You know, just to show how contrite they are for leaking them in the first place.

  10. The fact is, in a dishonest effort to give the appearance that there was reduced crime & less young black males were being arrested, the unintended consequence was the suspension – instead of arrest – of a student that indirectly resulted in his death.

    Was it wrong for TM to attack GZ? Of course. But going back to where it begins (In aviation, we refer to it as The Accident Chain) is the pencil-whipping & substantive policy changes to manipulate the data that has broader social implications – the crimes committed by young black males.

  14. So…let me get this straight. We have “zero tolerance” policies wherein an Eagle Scout and academically talented student forgets to remove his rifle from his car, tells authorities immediately, and is expelled, etc.

    But actual, verifiable criminal offenses (repeat offenses, to boot) are now simply issues of “school discipline”?

    This country is so unbelievably messed up.

  15. The judge who presided over the trial is the one who can decided whether or not their information is released. Her expression as the verdict was handed down wasn’t exactly cheerful, so it will be interesting. I believe Zimmerman’s attorneys felt the names shouldn’t be released for at least 6 months. My money says they don’t make it 6 weeks. I read a breakdown of their profiles — most of them have families (at least one with school aged kids), all come from diverse backgrounds. My hope is that they soon all have one thing in common: they own and know how to use a firearm for self-defense. After the threats hurled at them via Twitter, they’d better be prepared for the worst. Especially if their info is released sooner rather than later.

  16. I vaguely remember reading an article a couple of years ago that Obama’s Administration coming out with a rule that forces the schools to basically ensure racial equality in discipline. If that is true, wouldn’t that mean that schools will not be able to discipline a Black student until a White or a White Hispanic commits a similar crime?

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