SUNRISE, FLA. (WSVN) - The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission held a meeting to get briefed about ongoing 911 issues in Broward County.
Almost five years after the Parkland shooting, 911 issues in Broward County between Coral Springs, Parkland and the Broward Sheriff’s Office were still front and center at Wednesday’s MSD Commission meeting.
Members of the commission said they want Broward County to hand over control of the 911 central communications system to BSO.
“There has to be a sense of urgency and prioritization to make these changes,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, the commission’s chair.
The commission was formed after the 2018 shooting and is made up of experts across the state to look at what went wrong in Parkland that tragic day that left 17 dead and 17 injured and how to fix it.
One main issue was that communication that day failed. Radios failed, law enforcement agencies could not communicate with each other, and the radio tower frequencies as well as technology were outdated.
When students called 911, the calls went to Coral Springs instead of its own law enforcement agency, BSO. The two agencies have different technologies that don’t share information.
“If here are still these call transfer problems, and they’re still going to impact life safety, people are going to get injured and die if we don’t fix this like what happened in Parkland,” said Max Schachter, father of Parkland shooting victim Alex Schachter.
To fix this issue, Coral Springs purchased something called a hub to marry the different software. The county has yet to test it.
Schachter discussed the hub with Coral Springs Police Chief Bradley McKeone during the commission meeting.
“The hub is the potential solution to this call transfer issue, and it’s been over two years of you trying to get the county to test the hub to make sure that it will work, if it’s a possible solution, and that’s where we stand currently, right?” said Schachter.
“We still stand on having an agreement in place to actually do a formal test of the hub solution, yes,” said McKeone.
“It seems like there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on; there has been over a period of time,” said Gualtieri. “We’ve been dealing with these exact same issues for five years, and the improvements that need to be made haven’t come fast enough.”
The main issue is that Broward County controls the technology and not BSO. BSO wants control of that technology, so they can make changes to that technology to work with Coral Springs and vice-versa.
But Broward County commissioners said the county doesn’t think BSO can handle central communications and vice versa.
In a May 10, 2022 meeting, Commissioner Mark D. Bogen did not mince words about the matter.
“They say the same [expletive] every year,” he said.
But Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony was not having it.
“How many times have you had to extract somebody from a burning building or put your ass on the line when someone’s getting shot at?” said Tony.
“The biggest issue is egos, and people can’t get along, and it’s really ridiculous,” said Schachter.
The MSD Commission is fed up with the excuses, saying too much time has passed with no results. They are now demanding some action.
“Give the whole thing to BSO, let the sheriff be responsible, for either make it work or not,” said Gualtieri, “and if it doesn’t work, then you have one person that you can go to and say, ‘You didn’t make this work.’ Right now, it’s all over the place.”
The MSD Commission has sent a letter to the county recommending that they hand over all the controls for the 911 communications so that there is accountability, responsibility and that one agency will finally fix the problem.
However, if that doesn’t happen or an agreement is not made by the next time they meet, the MSD Commission said it will subpoena all of the commissioners, the mayor of Broward County and BSO to answer these concerns and come up with a solution that will fix these issues.
However, Coral Springs Police officials said they will have a result by Feb. 14, 2023, the five-year anniversary of the MSD massacre. They said they will be testing the hub, even if that means they have to go to another county to do so.
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