The police force serving Broward Schools is getting smaller and more focused, months after a failed effort to greatly expand its size and scope.
The department, long known as the Special Investigative Unit, is also changing its name to the Broward County Schools Police to reflect a new mission that’s more about protecting schools than investigating employees.
“That really sends a message to the public and to our schools that we do have a police department that supplements and supports our schools,” Superintendent Howard Hepburn told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
The police department, which is probably best known for investigating employee misconduct cases, is handing over that function to the district’s human resources department.
The six detectives who now do investigations, as well as a sergeant who supervises them, will remain with the district, but they’ll now report to a new professional standards and labor relations division overseen by longtime administrator Ernie Lozano. The department also has three civilian employees who will be involved in investigations, Lozano said.
Eventually, the professional standards department may replace some police positions with civilian positions, if the district determines most investigations aren’t criminal in nature, Lozano said.
The police department, which will now have 24 employees instead of 31, will focus on overseeing armed guardians who protect schools, providing school resource officers to a few schools, coordinating security for school and district events, responding to threats reported to schools and assisting with behavioral threat assessments for students who may be at risk of harming themselves or others, said Jaime Alberti, chief of safety and security for the district.
“There’s a misconception that SIU is strictly an investigative arm, that it does nothing but investigations, and that’s not accurate,” Alberti said.
The new smaller police department is a stark contrast to a proposal in January that would have increased the size of the department tenfold, to 377 members, with a chief, 362 officers, six captains and eight civilian positions.
That proposal, which the School Board unanimously rejected, would have created a police department similar to those in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade School districts, which use their own personnel for school resource officers. In Broward, the Sheriff’s Office and city police departments supply school resource officers for most schools. The school district’s guardian program also provides armed protection for schools without a police officer or for those who need additional armed security.
Although the full-scale police force idea was scrapped, district officials decided the current department needed to undergo changes, including the way employee investigations are handled.
Employee discipline in the past has been inconsistent, officials said. In some cases, a principal or their supervisor would investigate an employee, with the assistance of the district’s human resources department. When the investigation had the potential to be criminal, the matter was usually turned over to the Special Investigative Unit.
But the lines became blurred, with SIU frequently investigating matters that weren’t criminal, such as whether an administrator made racist and inflammatory remarks and whether a former chief communications officer organized a rally for an embattled superintendent during work time.
And with multiple departments investigating different employees and determining whether there was just cause, the discipline was often inconsistent.
During a recent School Board meeting, the majority of board members decided not to fire an employee accused of violating a state law banning transgender girls from playing girls’ sports, in part because the district had been more lenient with employees accused of more serious offenses.
For example, a guidance counselor accused of fraud got a three-day suspension, a teacher assistant accused of child abuse got a one-day suspension and a safety specialist got 10 days over accusations of indecent conduct with staff. The School Board voted 5-4 to give the employee in the transgender athlete case a 10-day suspension.
Hepburn told the Sun Sentinel the new professional standards department should enable less subjectivity and more consistency in discipline.
“I didn’t want principals having to make these tough objective decisions when they have to worry about running the school, engaging with the teachers, and engaging with their communities, engaging with their students and their parents,” he said. “So we want to create a separate department who can do that work, concentrate on it and come up with objective measures and objective criteria that can lead to objective decisions.”
The district’s police department also faced major criticism in October, when a detective arrested a longtime volunteer during a heated board member for what he said was battery on a law enforcement officer. A district-hired consultant determined the arrest wasn’t warranted, and the State Attorney’s Office declined to file charges.
Hepburn told School Board members in a recent memo that the district has taken steps to improve since that incident, including de-escalation training for all sworn officers and implementing new procedures in the board room.
“I believe the actions taken have addressed the concerns raised, and the necessary procedural enhancements have been put in place to prevent future occurrences,” Hepburn said in the memo.
