“Folks let me be very clear,” prefaced Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey in a video. “You are not coming into my schools and killing our children.”
Schools in Brevard County Florida will soon be receiving a substantial hardening upgrade following the tragedies that occurred in schools across the country last school year. School resource deputies will be equipped with a tactical uniform that will better prepare them for an immediate threat. The uniform’s most prominent feature is the collapsible rifle that straps to the officer’s chest.
Before this change, deputies had to leave the building to retrieve their rifles from their patrol vehicles. Now, they will be armed with a rifle at all times.
“This new styled uniform and tactical preparedness gives our team members the advantage and ability to instantly address the threat with the level of force necessary to eliminate the shooter and save the lives of innocent children and teachers,” said Ivey.
Last year alone, there were 193 accounts of gunfire on pre-K-12 campuses, according to an August report from Everytown for Gun Safety. Among those incidents, 59 people were killed and 138 were wounded.
More from DA: How this criminal ransomware group is creating headaches for schools
Parents have shown strong support for armed police officers on school campuses, according to the preliminary results of the PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools released in August. 82% of parents strongly/somewhat support armed police in schools.
The American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the union favors both armed and unarmed security officers in schools, as opposed to armed teachers. “While these poll results show high support for armed police officers in schools, AFT’s recent polling indicated that school staff favor both armed and unarmed security in their building,” she said in a statement.
However, Ivey prefers to take a fire-beats-fire approach. “I firmly believe that if you do not meet violence with violence, you will be violently killed,” he said. “My first goal to win the battle is by making sure our schools are hard targets so that anyone with evil in their heart will think twice about coming on to one of our campuses and trying to harm a child or one of our teachers.”
