I actually read this Washington Guardian piece early Saturday morning and have been waiting patiently to see something on this topic elsewhere, ideally, at a South Florida-centric news website or blog, or a decent segment on TV with some real depth.
Nope, it seems that few want to actually deal with the actual nuts and bolts of school security and the source of funding, they just prefer repeating the same old homilies and tut-tut how terrible it all is.
Even pre-9/11, living and working in Washington and going fairly regularly to some of the places I did for work or my own purposes because of where some friends worked, I was always VERY safety and security conscious about myself and the people I worked with, since we often worked VERY late in almost completely empty office buildings in a city that was among the most crime and violent-prone in the country.
I had no qualms about complaining to the property management company about aspects of building security that I found weak or unsatisfactory, and actually got building security people fired for their continual lack of attention to detail, and unwillingness to tell their friends to stop coming by and hanging out near high-security areas.
I took the approach that we could always find someone who understood our unique security circumstances and who'd pay more attention, so I never lost any sleep about getting someone fired for not doing their job the way we wanted it done.
We were the client.
The day in 1994 that the Oklahoma City Bombing took place at the Murah Federal Building, I was at the NLRB HQ on Vermont Avenue, N.W. doing some research and going over the recent filings and proceedings re the MLB lockout, even while ESPN was reporting on it just a few blocks away.
The difference in security in that building within one week was night-and-day.
During the nearly 15 years that I lived and worked up there, one of the regular features of local TV news reporting in Washington, D.C. were fairly-lengthy segments on the ease with which strangers/reporters could access and penetrate D.C. high schools without detection.
Seemingly once a week, someone at one of the four area TV stations showed how easily it could be done regardless of how much the School system spent on security.
And I hardly need mention that one of the biggest problems were the school's students themselves trying to finesse the security systems by creating pathways that allowed them to skip off campus without being noticed by authorities.
Frankly, I always thought that there'd be a mass shooting at one of those schools but it never happened, even while the drive-bys during afternoon football games were not uncommon.
I have no reason to think that the security down here is any different with respect to students actually watering-down whatever the schools put in place.
The Washington Guardian
Before Connecticut tragedy, administration eliminated emergency preparedness program,let school violence prevention programs lapse
John Solomon and Kimberly Dvorak
Updated 23:43 PM EST, December 14, 2012
Beneath the expressions of grief, sorrow and disbelief over the Connecticut school massacre lies an uneasy truth in Washington: over the last few years the Obama administration and Congress quietly let federal funding for several key school security programs lapse in the name of budget savings.
Government officials told the Washington Guardian on Friday night that two Justice Department programs that had provided more than $200 million to schools for training, security equipment and police resources over the last decade weren't renewed in 2011 and 2012, and that a separate program that provided $800 million to put police officers inside the schools was ended a few years earlier.
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