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

  3. Yeah, I bloody hate those ads. With my virtual desktop it also ends up changing desktops on me which is seriously annoying.

  7. Just wanted to stop by and say thanks for featuring CTH’s work on this…very much appreciated!

  10. Testing. I posted a comment earlier today and had to log in for it to post but somehow, it never showed up.

    Or was it deleted?

    I dunno.

  13. Are you mocking black English? YOU CAN’T SAY THAT11!!11!!11

    But I see Holder wants to have a conversation about race again.

  14. That was one of Doug’s links. There’s more at Doug’s site.

    I got bit by Disqus throwing away my link. That’s happened to me a few times over the past two years. Even so, Disqus has been better behaved of late.

  16. That explains all the bald chickens, ducks, geese, and ptarmigan in your area then.

    (I threw in that last one just so I could spell ptarmigan.)

  17. Maybe it means you have a lottery to bring in one of each skin color group, and punish them collectively for the sins of the one.

    (Wow! I was just wisecracking, but that sounds exactly like something Van Jones would come up with.)

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