Originally Posted by
rob_s
Having previously lived in that county, and having done construction work at probably more than a dozen schools there in the early 2000s, a few comments...
In Palm Beach County, one county to the north of Broward, the school, district has its own sworn police force. So when you go to work there, you know what you’re getting into. In Broward, the always-power-hungry SO provides the school resource officers to the school district. Understanding that in Florida the school districts span the entire county, and IIRC at one time that made Broward the largest school-managing body in the country. Each county school district can decide to use the SO or have their own department, or even rely on the local PDs for their SROs, IIRC. for those that are using the PD or the SO, one of those officers/deputies went to work for their respective agencies planning on “babysitting kids”.
What I saw in SROs back then was two main types: one was the guy that wasn’t really any good at anything else, maybe even realized himself that he was cut out for policing, so they stuck him there until he quit or retired. The other was a guy that they figured out did well with kids, liked working with them, and was a good fit for the job. I met a lot more of the former than the latter.
A lot of the former also get stuck at schools like Douglas. That would have been thought of as a kush gig, with little to no real trouble, even post-Columbine. Nobody would ever have expected what happened there to happen. Not saying they shouldn’t have prepared for it, but they clear,y weren’t expecting it. So to think that the brass stuck a guy that maybe wasn’t entirely cut out for policing to begin with at the school to camp out is very plausible. Hell, he may have even been quite affable and liked by the rich kids for letting them get away with hiding a little grass in the $80k car they parked on campus every day.
Having graduated from a northern Florida high school myself, our district also had SOs as SROs. The first one we had was a DICK. He was clearly the type not cut out for policing, but once he got a bunch of kids under him he took it out on them/us. The second guy, Deputy Rory, was awesome. And I say this as a former “bad kid” that got pulled out of class by him on the reg. Sometimes for things that happened at school, and sometimes for things I might know about that were happening or happened outside of school. If LE figures out that a kid might be involved in something they were investigating, the SOP seemed to be at the time to be to contact the SRO at the school, and have them make first contact with the kids since they likely already knew him. Rory always treated me and mine fairly, and we always knew what we had or hadn’t actually done. But Rory was no bitch. While I wasn’t the best behaved, my crew wasn’t terribly violent, and rarely so in a way that got the attention of the cops and never towards adults. But we saw him fuck some motherfuckers up, right on campus, when he needed to. Body slams into a wall and then the ground and cuffed. In an age before cell phone videos made those kinds of things seem “bad” on the internet.