maddogs hideaway

Some deaths are more politically useful than others.

Twenty years ago this week, the Clinton administration ordered a tank assault  on the Mount Carmel community, killing 39 racial minorities, 26 of them black.  The Clintons and the media suppressed the racial data so rigorously that I doubt  even Al Sharpton knows about the black dead at Waco.

What they did not know was Martin’s background. Sanford Police Department  (SPD) investigator Chris Serino, for instance, said publicly of Martin, “This  child has no criminal record whatsoever.” He called Martin “a good kid, a  mild-mannered kid.” The media almost universally sustained this tragically false  narrative.

Martin had the seeming good fortune of attending school in the Miami-Dade  School District, the fourth-largest district in the country and one of the few  with its own police department.

For a variety of reasons, none of them good, elements within the SPD and the  Miami-Dade School District Police Department, or M-DSPD, conspired to keep  Martin’s criminal history buried.

See Jack Cashill’s  stunning work, in “Deconstructing Obama,” “First Strike,” “Hoodwinked,”  “Officer’s Oath” and more.

As part of its mission the M-DSPD was allegedly trying to divert offending  students, especially black males, from the criminal justice system. As the  Martin death would prove, the M-DSPD diverted offending students to nothing  beyond its own statistical glory.

The exposure of M-DSPD practices began inadvertently on March 26, 2012, when  the Miami Herald, the one mainstream outlet to do real reporting on the case,  ran a story on Martin’s background.

The Herald’s headline, “Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of  Trayvon Martin,” should have caused the other media to seek the truth about the  very nearly sanctified Martin.

It did not. What it did do was to cause M-DSPD Police Chief Charles Hurley to  launch a major Internal Affairs (IA) investigation into the possible leak of  this information to the Herald.

At the end of the day, Hurley rather wished he had not. The detectives  questioned told the truth about Martin and about the policies that kept him out  of the justice system. Hurley would be demoted and forced out of the department  within a year.

We now know what the detectives revealed thanks to a recently fulfilled  Freedom of Information Act request filed by the dogged researchers at a blogging  collective known as The Conservative  Treehouse. The “Treepers” have literally done more good work on the Martin  case than all the newsrooms in America combined.

On Feb. 15, 2012, 11 days before Martin’s death, the Miami-Dade County Public  Schools put out a press release boasting of a 60 percent decline in school-based  arrests, the largest decline by far in the state.

“While our work is not completed, we are making tremendous progress in moving  toward a pure prevention model,” Hurley told the Tampa Bay Times, “with  enforcement as a last resort and an emphasis on education.”

Hurley’s detectives, all of them veterans with excellent records, told a  different story under oath when questioned by Internal Affairs. They knew the  shell game was about to be exposed upon first learning that Martin was one of  their students and outside agencies would be requesting his records.

“Oh, God, oh, my God, oh, God,” one major reportedly said when first looking  at Martin’s data. He realized that Martin had been suspended twice already that  school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting  caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time  for getting caught with marijuana and a marijuana pipe.

In each case, the case file on Martin was fudged to make the crime less  serious than it was. As one detective told IA, the arrest statistics coming out  of Martin’s school, Michael Krop Senior, had been “quite high,” and the  detectives “needed to find some way to lower the stats.” This directive  allegedly came from Hurley.

“Chief Hurley, for the past year, has been telling his command staff to lower  the arrest rates,” confirmed another high-ranking detective.

When asked by IA whether the M-DSPD was avoiding making arrests, that  detective replied, “What Chief Hurley said on the record is that he commends the  officer for using his discretion. What Chief Hurley really meant is that he’s  commended the officer for falsifying a police report.”

The IA interrogators seemed stunned by what they were hearing. They asked one  female detective incredulously if she were actually ordered to “falsify  reports.” She answered, “Pretty much, yes.”

Once the top brass understood that the Martin case had the potential to  expose the reason for the department’s stunning drop in crime, they told the  detectives “to make sure they start writing reports as is; don’t omit  anything.”

“Oh, now, the chief wants us to write reports as is,” said a Hispanic  detective sarcastically, “and not omit anything, as we have been advised in the  past?”

The IA investigation delved into the paranoid concern that the M-DSPD was  sharing information about Martin with other relevant police departments as it  routinely did in other multi-jurisdictional cases.

The one detective who sent information to the Sanford PD came under heavy  fire. He was appalled. “Currently, our department is functioning and operating  out of fear,” he told the IA. “It is tragic to see that I’ve been disciplined at  the direction of Chief Hurley.”

As it turned out, Hurley need not have worried about the SPD. As the  Conservative Treehouse reports, the information sent by the M-DSPD “disappeared  down the rabbit hole and was not included in the final victimology report filed  by Sanford Detective Serino.”

Serino was the Martin-friendly detective who had insisted that Martin “has no  criminal record whatsoever,” calling him, “a good kid, a mild-mannered kid.”

In Hurley’s defense, school districts across the country had been feeling  pressure from the nation’s race hustlers to think twice before disciplining  black students. Last year, the White House formalized the pressure with an  executive order warning school districts to avoid “methods that result in  disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

Jesse Jackson brought this nonsense home to Sanford during a large April 1,  2012, rally. He implied that Martin had been profiled by his high school for  being a black male and suspended for the same reason. “We must stop suspending  our children,” Jackson told the crowd.

In a way, Jackson was right. Martin should not have been suspended. He should  have been arrested on both occasions. Had he been, his parents and his teachers  would have known how desperately far he had gone astray.

Instead, Martin was “diverted” into nothing useful. Just days after his  non-arrest, he was allowed to wander the streets of Sanford high and alone  looking, in Zimmerman’s immortal words, “like he’s up to no good or he’s on  drugs or something.”

At the end of the day, Martin had avoided becoming an arrest statistic, only  to become a statistic of a much graver kind.