Police across Florida must have plan in place to deal with active shooters, safety panel says. And it intends to ask for a mandate

A safety commission wants to make sure that if there’s ever another mass shooting in Florida, the police will know what to do.

So the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Safety Commission will ask Florida’s Legislature to require police departments statewide to have those guidelines in place.

“There are more school districts and more police agencies in this nation that aren’t prepared than are prepared,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, and a member of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Safety Commission, said at a recent meeting. “A disproportionate number of agencies across the nation are not prepared … for the next active shooter.”

Policy and training has been a focus of the MSD Safety Commission, which was formed in 2018 to investigate failures that led to the Parkland school shooting tragedy that year.

Among their initial findings: The Broward Sheriff’s Office was unprepared for the high school massacre, in part because training occurred only every three years. In contrast, Coral Springs Police, which took over the scene even though it wasn’t their jurisdiction, had regular training.

Of the state’s nearly 400 law enforcement agencies, “we have agencies in Florida that don’t have a policy,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, the commission’s chairman. “No matter your size, you should have a policy commensurate with your capabilities. Four years after MSD and 23 years after Columbine, and a myriad of other events, we still have agencies that don’t have policies.”

In the upcoming session the safety commission will ask legislators to create a mandate for such a policy, “but not tell them what has to be in the policy. It’s not one size fits all.”

And the commission will offer guidelines so agencies without one can use it as a template to come up with their own, and the agencies that already have an active-shooter blueprint can use it as a “barometer to evaluate their current policies and whether their current policies are best practices and keeping with current trends.”

The executive director of the MSD Active Assailant Response Committee, Chris Nelson, told the safety commission that “it only takes one agency not being prepared for another Uvalde or MSD.”

The safety commission will continue to meet and make recommendations until 2026.

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In other action, the MSD commission also will request that the state Legislature establish a statewide database for SESIR, which stands for School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting System, since not all school districts and charter schools properly report crime.

In 2019, the Florida Legislature passed a law saying the commissioner of education could order a school board to withhold a superintendent’s salary for false reporting.

But problems still linger.

“What we have found unequivocally is there is inaccuracy in reporting — some underreporting, some overreporting,” Gualtieri said. There are “unquestionably inconsistencies and inadequacies in the reporting so you can’t rely on it to judge the crime and other serious incidents on campuses of Florida’s 4,000 schools.”

In addition to one centralized database where districts follow the same reporting rules, the commission will ask for money for training so districts know how to properly report.

A revision of SESIR rules will “eliminate any confusion and hopefully mitigate any ambiguity to cause underreporting and overreporting because of misinterpreting what definitions are,” Gualtieri said.

“Once and for all it needs to be fixed,” he said. “Inaccurate reporting doesn’t allow parents to judge school climate … and doesn’t allow the schools to make changes.”

In Broward County’s most recent SESIR tracker from Aug. 16 to Oct. 31, there were 2,556 reports of 22 types of crimes or incidents. Fighting was the most common culprit, with more than 700 cases. There was one case each of burglary and sexual assault.

Dillard 6-12 in Fort Lauderdale had the most reported cases in that time period, with 63 incidents ranging from campus disruptions and physical attacks. South Broward High in Hollywood followed with 57 cases in that timeframe, including weapons possession and drug sales.

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Twitter @LisaHuriash