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. Stacy! Congratulations, you’ve been mentioned by Rush!

    With any luck, they’ll go visit the American Spectator, then come here and hit the tip jar!

  8. It would be so illegal, that there would be a massive investigation. if it was a lawyer, disbarred. and lawyer or not, likely charged with a crime.

  9. Investigated by whom? The DOJ? The state and city officials who wrecked the careers of good men who refused to cooperate with their corrupt show trial? Those people?

  10. Try this for racial equality – the same rules apply equally to everyone. If some groups are then disciplined more than others, that says something about the law-abiding nature of the various groups relative to each other. When the facts aren’t hidden behind a smokescreen of political correctness then we can make good choices based on those facts. Honest dialog – what a concept.

    Note that there is nothing inherently racial about this. If it wipes out the meal tickets of a bunch of race hustlers and guilty liberals, that’s just too bad. Want to be relevant, try doing something useful.

  11. It wasn’t just the pothead aspect that made him a “troubled” youth. High schools are full of potheads who don’t steal from each other or act like thugs.

    In America, potheads can go on to become President. Let’s just say that Mr. Martin had chosen a different path.

  13. That apparently all the vast majority of people who wear hoodies are now racist or something because now only black thugs get to wear them. Or something.

    Sorry. I just don’t get the hoodie obsession of these race hustlers. I’m not giving up my hoodie or peanut butter sandwiches.

    It’s bad enough that white people have been killed for wearing FUBU clothes.

  18. I’ve quit going to Breitbart, way too many autoplay vids. I’ve never been a Politico fan, so I’ve never seen their comments.

  19. By the way folks, yet another poorly covered topic in the media is the phenomenon of homemade drug cocktails involving drugs like cough syrup, skittles and fruit beverages like the Arizona brand Martin was carrying.

    I know most of you all have seen it mentioned, but no one has the complete rundown on the stuff like Doug Ross (the Economy Charts Boss). Go check out Doug’s article on “Lean”. It goes to Martin’s state of mind, and people are being all too dismissive of it, based on what is known about the abuse of these drugs.

    Martin was clearly a young man spiraling down a path of self-destruction. As Stacy’s article shows, he could have been saved if all of the people acting like they care about him today had actually cared about him before he was sent to live with his Dad’s girlfriend.

  21. Apparantly not, for either the media or the father who had blinders on about his son’s dangerous downward spiral.

  25. Eventually the only proper investigations will be done by citizens with torches and pitchforks, sadly.

  26. In a world of legal marijuana, pot wouldn’t be cool for the punks so they’d get into crack or smack or other such.

  27. We’re on three presidents in a row now that have admitted openly or tacitly that they’ve smoked pot.

    Heck, even Sarah Palin said she tried it once, when it was legal in Alaska.

  29. Frankly, I thought the stolen jewelry and possession of what was clearly burglary tools was more damning. Lots of potheads aren’t thieves.

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