July 16, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:47
4145 Florida School Shooting Exposed | Andrew Pollack and Stefan Molyneux
On Wednesday February 14th, 2018, a 19-gunman opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and wounding 17 survivors. In 2011-2012, Broward County Public Schools had 1,056 total student arrests – 71% for misdemeanor offenses. These were the highest overall numbers in the state of Florida. After concerns over “students of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students” being “disproportionately impacted by school-based arrests” – the PROMISE program was created in 2013. Standing for Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports & Education – the PROMISE program was specifically implemented in an effort to "eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline."After the implementation of the PROMISE program, Broward County Public School arrests dropped from 1,056 students in 2011-2012, to only 392 during the 2015-2016 school year.Mr. Andrew Pollack is the founder of Children’s Lives and School Safety (CLASS) and the father of 18-year-old daughter Meadow Pollack was tragically killed in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.Website: http://www.americansforclass.orgTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/andrewpollackflYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
I'm here with Mr.
Andrew Pollack. Now, he is the founder of Children's Lives and School Safety.
The acronym is CLASS, and he's the father of 18-year-old Meadow Pollack, his daughter, who was murdered in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on February 14, 2018.
The website is americansforclass.org, and you can follow him on Twitter at Andrew Pollack, P-O-L-L-A-C-K-F-L. We'll put the links to those below.
Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thanks, Stefan, for having me on.
So, Father to Father, just first up and foremost, massive waves of sympathy for what you have had to endure and, of course, what you will continue to have to endure, the loss of your beloved daughter for your life.
Can you help people sort of understand that moment and what came afterwards?
Because this is, as we both argued, the price of political correctness, and it is an incredibly high price to pay.
Yep, Stephan, I can tell you that you can't put a number on the pain level that I endure every day.
From February 14th, and today is actually the 14th.
It's five months since my daughter was murdered at that school.
And the day that it happened is so clear in my head, like it happened 10 minutes ago.
Every detail of that day, I'll never forget.
And it's never going to go away.
You know, what happened to my daughter, I wish that I could have took the bullet that day because a big part of me died that day also with my daughter.
I'm not the same guy.
I feel bad.
I'm married. I'm just a different guy since this whole horrific event happened.
It just changed my life.
I'll never be back.
Yeah. So, you've gone into some detail on your website about what happened in the school that day because a lot of people have a very sort of confused understanding and you've obviously looked into a great deal of detail.
What is it that you want to get across to people about what happened in the school that day that's not well understood?
Well, there's a lot of things.
There's a lot of incompetence.
The monitors that failed my daughter that day.
A driver, a taxi driver, actually picked up, we call him 181958, that's his prison ID number, picked him up at his house with a rifle bag and drove him to the school with a rifle bag while school was still in session.
So that's hard to believe.
And then a monitor was at the gate.
He watched them walk in, out of the car, into the school and didn't do anything.
A monitor. He recognized him.
He says, that's crazy boy.
Okay, recognizes crazy boy.
His name's Andrew Medina.
He's incompetent.
My dog Sonny right here would have done a better job at the gate than Andrew Medina.
So he let him walk in to the school, threw an open gate, didn't stop him.
He goes and gets the deputy that's working at the school that day.
And that deputy, he drives him to the building and Where my daughter is in that building.
And he hears, he actually hears the shots when he's at the door.
He hears the shots that killed the coach that went in unarmed, Aaron Feist.
He hears the shots at the door and then retreats, Stefan, behind the wall.
So it's just so much incompetence.
And then another monitor hides inside a closet.
Hides inside a closet and doesn't call a code red.
So, it's things I have to live with for the rest of my life.
But I'm going to expose it all.
But that's one thing.
But why this whole thing happened is something that a lot of people have been talking about.
And it happened, it got infiltrated into Broward County, and that's political correctness.
As I dove into this event that happened, and I'll never forget, that killed my daughter, it went...
It's unbelievable what the research that we did and what unfolded and what we came up with, what our conclusion is, that happened and led up to that event.
And that's political correctness.
And how did that play out in the backstory?
Because these things, they always appear to come out of nowhere because they come bungeeing in through the media.
But the number of dominoes that have to fall for something like this to occur, I don't think people recognize how far back these errors accumulate.
Well, it started actually with the Obama administration when Eric Holder was the attorney general and Duncan was Department of Education secretary.
So they had a genius idea to end the school to prison pipeline.
And they called it the Promise Program.
So by my luck, Obama actually went to school with the superintendent that ended up in Broward County.
He's from Chicago.
His name is Superintendent Runcie.
He actually came to Broward County from Chicago.
Where he introduced this PROMISE program and they wanted to end the school to prison pipeline because there were so many kids getting arrested.
So they thought that there was racial bias going on in Broward County and they decided let's not arrest these kids.
They introduced, just to give you an idea, they introduced this, I think, in 2013, Stefan, there was over 6,000 Promise Program incidents.
That's like even misdemeanors, you know, that they say are non-violent, but they could reword it to any way they want.
So in 2013, there was over 6,000.
In 2017, after this culture of leniency, you know, became popular in Broward, there was only about 1,800 reported incidents.
So, miraculously, they dropped the crime rate 66% by introducing this program into Broward.
So what it creates, if I could explain it to everyone out there, it creates a culture of leniency within the school system, and it even infiltrated the sheriff's department because the sheriff in Broward, Israel, He wanted to get involved with it because he looks like he's doing the best sheriff's job in the country.
He reduced crime in Broward County by 30% just by not reporting crimes.
And that's what this political correctness and liberalism, their liberal way of life, what they brought into Broward.
And by this culture of leniency of not reporting crimes...
Kids don't get reported and that's how this kid fell through the cracks and was never arrested and led to him being able to buy a rifle and being able to murder my daughter that day.
Well, and some of the stuff that he had done, it wasn't like petty shoplifting and so on.
I mean, he'd pulled guns on people.
He'd made threats. I mean, there was a lot there to go after him for the protection of the community.
But again, they'd rather change the numbers than change their minds.
Well, what happens is, too, so the teachers, they'll get a student, right, in their classroom, and they're like, why bother reporting it?
Because nothing's going to happen.
You know, there's no consequence for this child.
So, we all know that it's okay to give, we would definitely be in favor of giving a kid one chance.
You know, one bite of the apple's okay, but in Broward County, there's multiple bites of the apple with no consequence and no accountability.
So I'm in a battle now.
I was just like semi-retired, and now I'm in a battle against this political correctness in Broward.
Two of the parents are running for school board, and I have a candidate running because the current school board and superintendent don't see a problem with these leniency policies, which actually kills me because I know what it did to Broward and how it affected my life and my daughter.
And it seems like there was not just incompetence, but such chaos within the school.
You got the third floor bathrooms are locked, which means that there's less chance for children to find a place because they're concerned or worried about kids smoking or something like that.
And the fire alarm goes off simultaneous with the sort of code red communication system so no one can actually hear that there's a shooter in the school and nobody's watching the monitors that are supposed to be there for everyone's security.
What happens, Stefan, is how the whole system failed my daughter too, another failure of incompetency.
When you shoot a rifle, it's going to have smoke.
Smoke lets out.
So a lot of people are under the false pretext that he pulled the fire alarm.
He never pulled the fire alarm.
When he was shooting, he shot 90 rounds off on the first floor.
But when he shot that off, it set the smoke alarms off.
But my daughter sent a text to her boyfriend while she was on the third floor.
She heard those shots going off.
She texted her boyfriend and the teacher, another one who's, you know, I don't know how much I could blame her, but she lets my daughter out because of the fire alarm.
With the 90 rounds that just went off, she lets my daughter out into the hallway to get shot where she got shot nine times.
So not many people know that three of the Teachers on the third floor actually held their kids into the classrooms, even with the smoke alarm going off, the fire alarms.
My daughter's teacher just...
I just got a bad deal that day, and she let my daughter out into gunfire, thinking it was more important, because the smoke alarm was going off, to let her out into the hallway with why this guy already had shot 90 rounds.
So that kills me.
And then, you know, my daughter also...
Stefan, she actually got shot four times first, and then she crawled back to the room where she couldn't get in.
They locked her, and she couldn't get into the room, and she covered the freshman, Kara.
She covered her, and then this thing came up and shot her another five times, and it went through my daughter.
I killed Kara also, so...
So she was trying to get into a classroom where the door was locked.
The teacher wouldn't let her in. And then who knows what could have happened if she'd been let in.
And then she tries to cover up a freshman to perhaps protect that freshman from additional.
And then she shot more, five more times, if I remember rightly.
If you could imagine, this deputy, well, my daughter's covering Kara in the hallway because the detective, I didn't watch the videos yet.
I don't know if I'll be able to watch it.
But the detective watched it and he said, Andy, your daughter was covering the freshman and then she got shot another five times and killed both of them.
So the courage of an 18-year-old girl vastly outstripping the paid and professional courage that is absent from the adults whose sole job it is to keep the children safe.
That is appalling beyond words, Andrew.
I mean, I don't even know what to say.
To kill everything, to make it even worse.
So this guy's able to retire and get his pension after derelict of duty.
$8,700 a month.
No accountability.
We're not doing his job.
We got a wrongful death suit against him.
Just to expose him.
You know, the coward that he is.
Which I exposed him once before.
I made national news exposing him.
And you know what's troublesome too with With the sovereign immunity, even the FBI, Stefan, was alerted to this guy.
I know of two times, twice.
It could have been more. And no one was held accountable.
You know, if you have your company and you put one of your supervisors out there and he drops the ball and something happens, they get fired, you know, in real life.
The FBI, I think these agents are still working.
They're still with their kids. And they didn't do their jobs by following up.
So a lot of people have been incompetent, but I'm just trying to expose them.
That's my thing right now.
One of the things that came out of this, I'm sure you're aware, is this anti-Second Amendment movement.
And to me, the fact that these people relied on the state to protect them and the state did not protect them.
Means that I don't know why you'd say, well, we need to disarm everyone because the government's just going to keep us all safe and the government is the only group that should have the guns.
This seemed to me would be the example that, I mean, if the teachers were armed, they wouldn't be hiding in the closets.
They wouldn't be hiding behind locked doors.
They could have done something about this.
So this idea that this can be used somehow to go against the right of citizens to own arms is, to me, very counter-evidence, counter-intuitive, counter-rational.
Well, one of the main reasons that I became an advocate was after my, when I saw, when my daughter was murdered and I turned the news on, every channel was talking gun control to me.
Even Fox, you know, that's my go-to channel.
And they're talking about gun control.
I'm like, why are they talking about gun control when this kid was able to walk right off the street into the school with a rifle and start shooting these kids?
So, to me, the worst thing someone could say to me is start talking gun control to me after what happened to my daughter because I take offense to it.
To me, it's a distraction from what we all could do.
We could argue guns.
You could get a liberal in front of you and you could argue guns for 300 years.
Me and you will be long dead and that conversation will still be going on about guns.
So my thing was, why should we talk about guns when we could get together?
Let's just fix the schools.
You know what I mean? I don't want to hear about the guns.
Let's do a perimeter, single entries, let's arm some security, let's get the veterans, let's put them to work, and let's make the school secure like a courthouse or like a federal building.
Okay, so let's go through some of the suggestions that you have.
About what steps can be taken to maximize the chance that this never happens to another child, another family?
Well, something, you know, a lot of people talk, Stefan.
I'm not a guy that just talks.
So something that I'm very proud of, I was on Fox today on Cavuto at 1140.
We put that guardian, there was a guardian program that was named after Aaron Feiss, and that's about arming personnel and placing them at the schools.
So I've been working hard at it since February 14th.
I actually left Broward County, where I live, and went to a county three hours north of me, it's called Polk County, where there's Sheriff Grady Judd, a great sheriff, Superintendent Jacqueline Bird.
I met with them, I spoke with the school board, and they voted to pass this program, because it was voluntary, to arm personnel to work at the schools.
To me, it's five months now since my daughter's murder.
We already got the bill passed.
In Polk County, we started an academy of 120 individuals, 30% of them, Stefan, are veterans.
The other 30% are retired law enforcement and then civilians.
It's something that I was very proud of because in Polk County, these guardians, which we call them, will be all Ready come the start of the school year to make those kids and teachers safer.
So that's something that I've been a part of, and it's happening in different parts of the county.
And I went and visited Bradford County.
I don't know. Where do you live, Stefan?
Canada. Canada.
Okay, so you don't know all these counties, but there's different counties in Florida with different views.
So in those counties, their views are...
Their ideology is like mine and they put the kids and the teachers' safety in front of their political agenda.
In Broward, I'm finding it, the school board puts their political agenda in front of their kids and the best interest for the children and the teachers.
So talk also about the school safety volunteer network that you're suggesting.
Okay, so that's something we did with the Guardian program.
What I'm doing now also, It's what's called, I don't know if you heard about it in Canada, it's called Neighborhood Watch.
Oh yeah, it's in Canada.
So what we started, because a lot of parents want to get involved right away, you know, since this happened, how could we help, Andrew?
What could we do in our community?
So we came up with a program that's going to be called Class Watch, where parents, grandparents, uncles could go to the school as volunteers at drop-off, We'll have coverage at drop-off and at dismissal.
So parents are just going to be there at deterrence or grandparents with a vest on as deterrence at drop-off and dismissal.
So that we're already implementing in Broward County.
And I'm going to try that to spread throughout the country where parents...
Because parents need to be more involved in the schools.
If you're going to just talk or hit the like button on Facebook, that doesn't do it.
You've got to get involved, Stefan.
And that's what I tell them.
Don't sit back.
Don't talk. You've got to do.
So that's what I'm doing.
You know what I mean? I'm doing.
In Broward County, we have the curriculum.
We're working with the Charter Schools USA, and we're going to be doing that in Broward.
But that's something parents can do.
And another big thing is, I'm in a big school board race now.
Because we have the school board now in Broward.
That doesn't have a problem with these leniency programs.
They're okay with it. They're okay with a kid committing 10 misdemeanors in a school year and never having a consequence, except maybe going for in-house suspension.
Maybe they give them a coloring book or something like that, you know?
But I'm not okay with it.
And you know what? So I have a candidate running and I'm actually out there door knocking.
I don't have to, you know what I mean?
I owe it to the people of Broward.
I'm going to give it, and to my daughter, That her death didn't just go in vain, that I'm going to flip that school board.
And every door that I knock on, I want everyone to know that they're happy when we come and we tell them, listen, there's no accountability in Broward County.
It's simple. We want to hold kids accountable.
That's it. And they agree with us.
It doesn't matter what party you're affiliated with.
I'm going to get him out to vote, and we're going up against the big DNC machine, the District 6 that my candidate's in.
It's so strange to think that a child faces more consequences for not studying for a math test than for committing some serious crime, or for the people in charge of the entire system for failing to protect the children.
Well, that's true, man.
I never thought about it that way.
The kid has more consequence in failing his math test than committing crimes in the school.
Or even all the administrators that dropped the ball and even let this 18-19-58 go to school with my daughter.
Because I'm going to expose that too.
Because they let that, you know, as much as I'd like to put a bullet in this thing's head, they let that thing down too by just letting them into school with not being supervised.
You know what I mean? They did him a disservice because that thing shouldn't have been in at that school.
And I'm going to find the people and I'm going to hold them responsible for letting that thing back in the school.
Because now he's in prison for life.
Maybe he gets the death penalty.
Right? So he shouldn't have been in that school.
And they all knew it.
He shouldn't have been out in society at all.
Whether he went to a school, whether he went to a mall, whether he went to a playground, whether he went to a concert hall, whether he went to a movie theater, this guy was a time bomb.
Now, of course, you can say, well, it's easy to say that in hindsight, but no, even looking beforehand, all the threats, all the dysfunction, all the fascination with weaponry, pulling guns on people, and come on, I mean, this is not somebody who's going to have a good prognosis, and people who say, well, we shouldn't Have these numbers go, well, look, if the kids are doing the crimes, then the kids have to take consequences.
There's no question of that.
This is even crazy.
I don't even understand it.
So they let the kid come to school, but he wasn't allowed to come to school with a backpack.
Could you imagine that?
We don't trust you to come with a backpack, you know, so you can't bring your backpack, but we'll let you come to the school anyway.
So that was another thing that is just unfathomable.
You know, you can hide a knife without a backpack.
You can do a lot of – we've seen this in China.
You can do a lot of damage just running around with a big knife.
So this is all – and it's all these tiny little Band-Aids on these big giant social wounds.
You cannot solve – People's childhoods by giving them leniency as adults.
It's a nice theory. Oh, we'll show the love and we'll show the kindness and we'll give them extra breaks and suddenly they'll just turn around.
I don't really see it happening too much.
And the old school, perhaps even Old Testament way of dealing with these kinds of transgressions.
I mean, look at New York, right?
New York in the 70s versus New York in the 80s and 90s.
I mean, when you start to enforce the laws, society gets a whole lot better.
And when you don't, it just gets worse.
Yeah, that was Mayor Giuliani.
Yeah. He did a good job cleaning up New York City.
I lived in New York when he did that.
Cleaned up a lot of organized crime.
He cleaned up the streets. He did a great job, Giuliani, when I lived there.
Really made going to the city easier, nicer.
And then the city gets better or the society gets better and then everyone gets lazy and sentimental and all of the policies that produced all of this safety get relaxed and everyone is like, oh, but the poor children and the numbers are bad and it's racism and so on.
And then they let...
The nets slip and these kinds of people get through.
I had this conversation with my friends, the other guy, I go, why stop when they're 18?
So why is it acceptable when they're, like, if you do this to these children when they're young, they're not going to be role models once they turn 18.
They need a good, you know, they need to learn a lesson.
You know, that's the only way in life.
You got to be held accountable.
Look, I'm not ashamed of it.
I got in trouble. I was stupid.
I did something stupid when I was 17.
I learned my lesson.
I never got in trouble again from 17.
But that's life.
A lot of people, you've got to learn a lesson.
And my parents taught me a lesson.
Well, it's one of these tragic realities of modern American society that the only people who can regularly get away with crimes are people protected by sentimentality like minorities and the Clintons.
And that's an unholy bargain to get into.
So, what would you like people to take out of...
Our conversation, Andrew.
I mean, obviously, we want to get people to americansforclass.org and also Andrew Pollack, P-O-L-L-A-C-K-F-L is the Twitter handle.
We'll put that below. What are the to-dos that you want people to start getting up and getting done as a result of this conversation?
If I could talk to all the parents that part of my organization is going to be strengthening PTAs and PTOs, parents need to know what's going on with their school boards, okay?
That is so important.
It's more important if you're a family living in a community than who's in the White House.
The White House can't do anything for you in your community because I've been to the White House a couple of times.
I happen to have good conversations with the president.
I met with his cabinet makers.
I met with senators. They can't do anything for you where you live.
So it's so important.
The school board, where I live, We're good to go.
What the deal is, just go look at the school board, how they're registered.
You know what I mean? And just see it.
Because it's so important.
I can't even... Whoever votes in a school board election?
I never voted in a school board.
Most people don't even know when they are.
Exactly. And they put it...
If you can believe it, it's August 28th.
Who votes in Florida in August 28th?
So they make it August 28th.
And I'm telling the parents in Broward, like we're out there.
My son's out there, Hunter.
He's out there with the troops door-knocking right now.
They're at an event. Every night we're out door-knocking because it means so much to my family, for my daughter, to overthrow the school board and put some people in there that really care.
They'll put their kids first and the teachers before their political affiliation.
So that's what I would tell your listeners and the parents.
If you have children...
Don't just think they're going to school and the curriculum's great and there's no criminals because this program is in 60 other counties throughout the country.
So I've been trying to open up more communication with Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, because I really want her not to promote any of these type of policies.
Because there's still people pushing for these type of policies in bigger government.
So that's what I would tell all your listeners.
Go see the school board.
Go attend a school board meeting and see what's going on and ask if they have any of these programs with these leniency programs.
Broward used to be no tolerance, you know.
And then they changed it.
And then, like, the sheriff got on board.
And now, this sheriff's hiding now.
The sheriff we got in Broward.
But it's so important for the parents to know what their school board's doing.
That's what I would tell them.
And homeschool, if you can.
Yeah. Homeschool and virtual school.
Yeah. It's so tough.
I wouldn't send my kid.
I don't have a kid now because of what happened to me.
But I wouldn't send my kid to a school if there was no...
If I didn't like the security, go to the school during the day after you drop your kid off.
See how secure it is. You know, private schools, if you could afford it, they're set up, they're doing the right thing, no bureaucracy.
You know, you go to a Jewish school down here, you can't get in.
You know, they got to go through two armed guards, gates, you know, down here in Broward I went, spoke.
But private schools are getting in the program more, but not everyone could afford a private school.
True that. Virtual school, nothing wrong with it.
Right, right. Well, listen, I just again want to extend my enormous sympathies for what you and your family has had to suffer and endure.
You know, when these terrible things happen, the best we can do is try and turn them into radiating goodness and virtue going out into the world.
And it sounds like to me Andrew, you're doing the very best out of a terrible situation.
If your daughter can see what you're doing from wherever she is, I'm sure she's approving what you're able to do to keep other children safe.
Just wanted to remind people, it's americansforclass.org.
We'll put the link to the Twitter below.
Please stay in touch if there's anything I can do to help get the word out.
I'm very happy to do it. And I really, really appreciate your time today.
