Sheriff Scott Israel’s performance has been disgraceful.
The sheriff is an outsized figure in the American imagination. He is Wyatt Earp, shooting it out with outlaws at the O.K. Corral. He is John Wayne, a lonely instrument of frontier justice. He is Rick Grimes, the resourceful survivor of a zombie apocalypse in “The Walking Dead.”
Now, along comes Scott Israel to remind us, despite the legend, how a sheriff can be a hack politician whose primary concern is protecting his own political reputation and little fief.
The Broward County sheriff, whose disgraceful performance in the Stoneman Douglas shooting has been a master class in evasion of responsibility, is the latest entry in why we don’t trust our public institutions.
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive and catastrophic failure from beginning to end than that of the sheriff’s office in the Parkland massacre. It ignored warnings that were specific and chilling about the shooter, and at least one of its deputies waited outside the school while the shooting occurred (and perhaps others did as well in the immediate aftermath).
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