Most sheriffs in the United States are elected to the office. The
practice dates to the seventeenth century, when English colonists in
Virginia instituted a tradition from back
home.
(Whatever Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have wished to
imply,
in February, when he called the office of sheriff “part of the
Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement,” he was not wrong.) Those
who defend the practice say that it helps insure that sheriffs are
beholden to citizens; critics say that it results in unqualified
candidates who are more concerned with
popularity than with doing the job well. In 2010, William P. Cahill, a former professor
of education at Florida Atlantic University, and Robert M. Jarvis, a
professor of law at Nova Southeastern University, published “Out of
the Muck: A History of the Broward Sheriff’s Office,
1915-2000,”
which provides some evidence for the opposition: the lively and
sometimes unsavory chronicle of sheriffs in Broward County,
Florida—which has the largest fully accredited sheriff’s office in the
country, with some six thousand employees and an annual budget of more
than eight hundred million dollars—features bootleggers, bribery, and Al Capone. The
book’s postscript goes up through the 2008 election, when Al Lamberti,
who was appointed to the position after federal corruption charges
brought down his predecessor, held off a Democratic challenger named
Scott Israel.

Israel was elected four years later, and he was still in office on Valentine’s Day, when a nineteen-year-old named Nikolas Cruz took
an AR-15 to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which is located in
Broward County, and killed seventeen people. Israel was praised in the
immediate aftermath of the shooting—“What a great job you’ve
done,”
President Trump told officers gathered at the sheriff’s office on
February 16th—and, the following week, he won over many proponents of
gun control with his performance at a CNN town hall, where he challenged
the N.R.A. spokesperson Dana Loesch and called for additional measures
restricting the sale of firearms. (Israel has long supported gun-control
measures; in 2015, he wrote an editorial opposing open-carry
legislation.)

Then news broke that a sheriff’s deputy had not entered the school’s
freshman building as Cruz went on his shooting spree; that a captain
from the sheriff’s office reportedly ordered officers to set up a
perimeter rather than go inside; and that, over the previous decade, the sheriff’s
office had received at least twenty-three worrisome messages about
Cruz and
his family. On Monday, a Broward County Circuit judge ruled in favor of
media organizations that sued the Broward Sheriff’s
Office to obtain surveillance video from outside Stoneman Douglas. The
twenty-seven-minute tape, which begins just after 2:22 P.M. on February
14th, was released on Thursday. Most of the footage offers an
east-facing view of the building where the shooting took place. An
officer can be seen in the distance, for the seven-minute duration of
the attack, standing beside one of the building’s exits.

Particularly for those who oppose gun control, Sheriff Israel has become
a handy scapegoat—the conservative columnist Michael Graham argued that
he could supplant Nancy Pelosi as the G.O.P.’s “favorite Democrat to
vilify.”
But, even among those who agree with Israel on guns, criticism has
grown. The crime rate in Broward County dropped during Israel’s first
term, and he won reëlection handily in 2016. But, during the last two
weeks, in conversations with multiple former colleagues and associates
of Sheriff Israel, I was told again and again that, since taking office,
Israel has failed to engage sufficiently in the essential if unglamorous
work of overseeing law enforcement in a large and complex U.S. county,
and that he was overly focussed on the politics of prolonging his tenure.
(Israel’s public-information officer, when presented with a list of
claims made by people I’ve spoken to, described them as “shameful,
baseless, and patently false.”) Those concerns have deepened since the
Stoneman Douglas shooting. Jeff Bell, president of the Broward County
Sheriff’s Deputies Association and a deputy, who has been with the
B.S.O. for twenty-two years, said, “We feel like we’ve been deserted. A
ship at sea, just drifting. No sense of direction whatsoever.” A former
senior employee of the B.S.O., who asked not to be named, told me, of Israel, “If
he survives this, morale will never be the same. And it’s already as bad
as it’s ever been.”

Some of Israel’s harshest critics are among those who worked to get him
elected. Before seeking the office, Israel, who’s from New York, had
been chief of police for tiny North Bay Village, in Miami-Dade County.
He had also been a Republican—he switched parties in order to run in
Broward, which is historically Democratic. Judith Stern was Israel’s
campaign manager in 2008. “We had a lot of work to do to get him
appropriately ready as a candidate,” she told me. “He wasn’t a brain
guy. He was a cop who was generally liked by other cops. So we made sure
to surround him with real law-enforcement pros, to educate him.” But
Stern ultimately came to believe that Israel was opportunistic and
would say what people wanted to hear in order to get elected. Stern,
like Israel, is Jewish, and she was surprised, she said, to
learn that he did not regularly attend synagogue. “I’m like, ‘That jerk.
I’ve been going around talking to rabbis about your Jewishness!’”
(Broward has one of the largest Jewish
communities in the U.S.) Stern described Israel as someone who “believes in his own
ego. He told me he was like a rock star. When you’ve got Roger Stone
pissing in your ear saying, I can take you places, that’s when you come
out telling the press, after a mass-shooting, I’m an amazing
leader.”

Roger Stone, the political
consultant and conspiracy
theorist who has worked for Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, among others, didn’t start
saying nice things about Israel until 2012, when he assisted on Israel’s
second, successful run for sheriff. In 2011, he called Israel “an
unqualified punk, a racist, and a
thief.”
(He supported Lamberti in 2008.) The next year,
he helped get Israel elected. After he won, a former B.S.O. commander
named Sam Frusterio, who acted as Israel’s campaign treasurer during his
first bid but supported his opponent in 2012, filed an ethics-committee
complaint against him for illegal acceptance of gifts. Israel and his
family had taken a cruise to the Bahamas on a lavish yacht that belonged
to a construction-company founder and owner of strip clubs who’d donated
a reported $245,000 to Israel’s campaign. Israel told
the Sun-Sentinel, “I’m a man of honor, I’m a man of courage, I’m a
man of
decency.” The Florida Commission on Ethics determined there was probable cause in
the case, but declined to take action because Israel lacked political
experience and had relied on the advice of his lawyer. Israel
characterized Frusterio, at the time, as a disgruntled former
employee.
Frusterio, who is now seventy-two and living in Bluffton, South
Carolina, told me that his concerns about Israel began during the first
campaign. “As time went on, I realized this guy was power-hungry and
didn’t care who he stepped on or what he did to get there,” he said.

The former senior B.S.O. employee, who worked at the sheriff’s office
for decades, had other complaints about Israel. “We never talked about
crime,” he said. He added, “We had monthly crime meetings with the
district folks, but Israel never sat in and talked to us about it—not a
burglary, not a robbery—never.” Instead, he said, Israel preferred to
discuss community events. “He wanted to make sure we had all the parades
and block parties covered. Even during hurricane season, the guy never
sat us down and said, ‘O.K., where are we with the hurricane plan?’ ”
Israel, he said, “was more interested in branding, putting his picture
on the side of trucks. He’d say, ‘I’m the most visible sheriff ever.’
I’d be visible, too, if I never came in the office. The guy didn’t spend
twenty hours a week there.” A deputy who currently works at the B.S.O.
also could not recall “ever hearing Israel talk in detail about crime.”

Other people who worked in the sheriff’s office described Israel as “a
hothead” and “crazy,” someone who would scream at them one minute and a
few minutes later act as though nothing had happened. “We all felt like
we were walking on eggshells with Israel, because you never knew what
mood you were going to get,” Phyllis Massey Lind, a former B.S.O.
executive assistant who worked for Israel and who still lives and works
in Broward County, said. Lind told me that the two sheriffs who preceded
Israel seemed much more confident in their work.

“This Sheriff has refused to accept responsibility numerous times, in
numerous settings,” Lamberti, who lost to Israel in a four-way race in 2012, told me. “Leadership 101 is: the
boss is responsible for everything,” Lamberti added. “The very first
lawsuit filed, his name is going to be at the top. When I was Sheriff,
an inmate in the jail didn’t like the food and I got sued for that.”
Scot Peterson, the deputy who was outside of Stoneman Douglas during the
shooting, has disputed Israel’s characterization of his actions that
day,
though, so far,
audio and video seem to back up Israel’s account. Lamberti emphasized that a sheriff is accountable for whatever his deputies do. “The deputies are
your alter ego,” he told me. “They’re basically the Sheriff. So you are
responsible for everything that happens in the organization, including
what they do. I was sued when a speeding deputy of mine injured someone.
It’s vicarious liability.” (In 2014, two deputies who served under
Lamberti surrendered to federal authorities after an investigation into
a massive Ponzi scheme; the Sun-Sentinel, in an editorial, called it a
“stain on the administration of former Broward Sheriff Al
Lamberti.”)

Multiple people told me that Israel had a poor track record when it came
to hiring. “He surrounded himself with unqualified people,” Judith Stern
said. In 2014, the Sun-Sentinel reported that Israel had made Scott
Stone, Roger Stone’s stepson, a detective, despite the younger Stone
seeming to lack basic qualifications for the
job.
Israel later dismissed the idea that the appointment had anything to do
with a political relationship. “If his name was Scott Jones, he would
still be there,” Israel said. Two years later, the Sun-Sentinel published a story about the many people Israel had hired for new
“community outreach” positions who had also worked on his campaign.
“What have I done differently than Don Shula or Abraham Lincoln or
Martin Luther King,
Gandhi?”
Israel said at the time. “Men and women who assume leadership roles
surround themselves with people who are loyal.”

Florida’s House of Representatives has approved an
investigation into how the Broward Sheriff’s Office conducted itself before, during,
and after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas. (The Broward County School
Board, Broward County government, city of Coral Springs, and Palm Beach
Sheriff’s Office are also being scrutinized.) The public-information
officer for the B.S.O. informed me that the sheriff’s office was “fully
coöperating,” and that it believes the process “will insure
transparency and public accountability.”

In the meantime, in an apparent response to some of the criticism it has
received, the B.S.O. has set up a “fact check” Web site, which currently
addresses seven claims about its response, “to assist the public and
media in receiving accurate information.” This site, in turn, has been
fact-checked by PolitiFact Florida, which concluded that the site was
“missing some important
details,”
and that some facts were “in dispute.” The B.S.O., for instance, asserts
that there was “nothing to arrest Cruz over” in any of the calls that
the office received about him. But two of these calls, received in
February of 2016 and November of 2017, are still under internal
investigation and review.

“In defense of the guys who take the calls, there’s thousands of them,”
Lamberti told me. “You just have to identify which are serious and which
are bogus. We have to do better at that, in my opinion.” Nearly everyone
I talked to was unsurprised by Israel’s apparent resistance, in the wake
of the Parkland shooting, to take similar responsibility. (When the CNN
host Jake Tapper asked Israel, on February 25th, whether his office
could have done anything to prevent the shooting, Israel replied,
“Listen, if ‘if’s and ‘but’s were candy and
nuts,
O. J. Simpson would still be in the record books.”) Through the public-information officer, Israel said, “I am responsible for the safety of
the nearly two million residents of Broward County, for the almost 5,400
employees of the Broward Sheriff’s Office and for ensuring that if any
failures occur, they are appropriately addressed so they never happen
again.”

The former senior employee pointed to another major incident, from
January of 2017, when a man with a gun killed five people at Fort
Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. It remains one of the
deadliest airport shootings in U.S. history. The perpetrator was
arrested in under two minutes, but, as the Sun-Sentinel reported, “a
flurry of false reports of gunshots ninety minutes later—many of them
coming from law enforcement
officers, within earshot of passengers—sparked an uncontrolled, mass evacuation
from all four airport terminals.” A report compiled by an independent
consulting company later concluded that “the Broward Sheriff’s Office
didn’t take adequate control of the
response.”
Law enforcement, the report said, “lacked clear instructions, objectives
and roles.” Israel disputed the report before reading it. “Lessons
should have been learned,” the former senior employee told me. “But they
weren’t. They just aren’t under Israel.”

Lamberti said that it was essential that sheriffs’ offices study what
has gone wrong in the past. After other mass shootings, he said, “we
always tried to send people out there, get people on the phone. To learn
from these things.” Procedures changed after the Columbine shooting, he
noted, because it was all over so quickly. Now, he said, “you go in and
engage the shooter immediately, with ideally four officers. But you go
in with one, if necessary. You don’t wait.”

“This school shooting was a failure of protocol and procedures,” he
added. “The red flags were there. The signs that were out there about
this guy. We didn’t connect the dots. It makes me feel like we probably
could have done more. There were some failures involved, certainly, and
they were paid for with kids’ lives.”