RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
April 15 to April 21
Featured Investigation
Broward County school policies making discipline more lenient, to reduce the so-called “school to prison pipeline,” have evidently made the schools and surrounding community more dangerous.
As Paul Sperry reports in his latest for RealClearInvestigations, Nikolas Cruz’s murder of 17 people at a Parkland high school in February was only the most extreme outcome of these policies. Sperry writes:
Broward County juvenile justice division records, federal studies of Broward school district safety and the district's own internal reporting show that years of “intensive" counseling didn’t just fail to reform repeat offender Cruz, who allegedly went on to shoot and kill 17 people at his high school. Records show such policies have failed to curtail other campus violence and its effects now on the rise in district schools — including fighting, weapons use, bullying and related suicides.
Meanwhile, murders, armed robberies and other violent felonies committed by children outside of schools have hit record levels, and some see a connection with what’s happening on school grounds. Since the relaxing of discipline, Broward youths have not only brazenly punched out their teachers, but terrorized Broward neighborhoods with drive-by shootings, gang rapes, home invasions and carjackings.
Broward County now has the highest percentage of “the most serious, violent [and] chronic” juvenile offenders in Florida, according to the county’s chief juvenile probation officer.
Sperry reports that Cruz was not the only active-shooter threat in the Broward school system, where “at least three other pupils have brought loaded firearms into schools” since 2015.
Sperry also reports that bullying is rampant in schools, which may be connected to suicide. A Centers for Disease Control survey found:
Broward middle schools showed 33.5 percent of the 1,503 students surveyed in 2015 had been bullied on school property. … In 2017 alone, there were at least 10 reported cases of students taking their own lives, along with “a tremendous increase in the calls on suicides," records show, prompting the district to implement "special response teams" to prevent more suicides. Even elementary school children are attempting suicide.
Nevertheless, school officials claim their efforts are a great success. Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie has said he has no plans to make changes in the program other than to “enhance” police presence on campuses to respond faster to potential school shootings. “We’re not going to dismantle a program that’s been successful in the district because of false information that’s been out there,” he said.
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Finally, Comey's Memos to Self
Through sustained pressure on the Justice Department, Congress obtained and then promptly leaked some 15 redacted pages of memos written by fired FBI Director James Comey about his White House dealings early in the Trump administration. In them, Comey describes President Trump as doubting the judgment of adviser Michael Flynn; asking about the possibility of jailing journalists; and dismissing "the hookers thing" and "the golden showers thing" in the lurid Steele dossier. Comey also notes that CNN had the dossier and was looking for a "news hook," suggesting that his briefing of the President was a pretext to justify publicizing it. These are the same memos from which Comey earlier leaked indirectly to the press and may have lied about. Now the Justice Department inspector general is looking into whether that information was classified. That means Comey could join his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, in hot water. It also emerged this week that the inspector general, who earlier found McCabe to have leaked and lied, has referred his case to a federal prosecutor. And speaking of federal prosecutors, Rudolph Giuliani, a former one, joined the Trump legal team, expressing the hope of ending the Russia probe in "a week or two." Not everyone shared the optimism of "America's Mayor."
Internal Warchdog Report Points to Effort to Quash Clinton Foundation Probe
Daily Caller
The Department of Justice inspector general report on the “lack of candor” by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe also documents the Obama administration’s effort to shut down the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The pressure supposedly came in an August 2016 phone call to McCabe from an unidentified Justice Department principal associate deputy attorney general. Loretta Lynch was attorney general at the time. She had been caught privately meeting with former President Bill Clinton in June 2016 on her government aircraft on the tarmac in Phoenix.
Framed for Murder by His Own DNA
Frontline, Wired, Marshall Project
In November of 2012, 66-year-old Raveesh Kumra was found dead in his home in the Silicon Valley enclave of Monte Sereno. A few weeks later, police arrested Lukis Anderson — a local 26-year-old who struggled with alcoholism and homelessness — and locked him up for murder. Anderson had no memory of committing the crime. And, it turns out, with good reason: His DNA had made its way onto the fingernails of a dead man he had never even met. A three-way investigative collaboration explores so-called secondary DNA transfer, a little-understood path to injustice in modern forensics.
Luring Women Into Unneeded Surgery
New York Times
A growing industry makes money by coaxing women into having surgery — sometimes unnecessarily — so that they are more lucrative plaintiffs in lawsuits against medical device manufacturers. Lawyers building such cases sometimes turn to marketing firms to drum up clients. The marketers turn to finance companies to provide high-interest loans to the clients that have to be repaid only if the clients receive money from the case. Those loans are then used to pay for surgery performed by doctors who are often lined up by the marketers.
$76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Bust
New York Times
Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000 who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year. They include Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as president of the Oregon Health & Science University in fall, who receives $76,111 per month, and Mike Bellotti, the University of Oregon’s head football coach from 1995-2008, who receives $46,000 per month.
How Liberty University Became a Lucrative Online Empire
ProPublica/New York Times Magazine
Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. 47 years ago in Lynchburg, Virginia, is nationally known as a bastion of conservatism. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Liberty has quietly become the second-largest provider of online education in the United States, behind the University of Phoenix. This, in turn, has helped spur a surprising development: Despite the school’s political ideology, Liberty students received more than $772 million in total aid from the Department of Education in 2017.
Living in America Without Broadband Internet
Motherboard
“By the time I’ve clicked to bid on cattle, the auction is over,” says a West Virginia rancher. “Five seconds is an eternity in an auction. It’s cost me a lot of revenue.” He’s among at least 24 million Americans, or about 8 percent of the country, who don’t have access to high-speed internet and must rely on pokey connections if they have any web access at all. They live in every state, mostly in rural and tribal areas, though the problem affects urban communities too.
Juxtaposition: Weinstein Pulitzer Praise … and Kendrick Lamar Lyrics
RealClearInvestigations
The New York Times and the New Yorker won a Pulitzer Prize this week for their coverage of sexual abuse on the same day that Kendrick Lamar became the first rapper to win the prestigious award. Here, presented as quotes without comment, are laudatory remarks about the sexual-misconduct Pulitzer juxtaposed with lyrics from Lamar’s prize-winning album, “Damn.”
