Governor Ron DeSantis's Florida, at the state and local level, is setting some precedents that other states would be smart to follow. In areas from driver's licenses to working with federal immigration authorities to taxes and regulatory policies attracting business, Florida has been winning for a few years now.
Another example of that winning comes to us from St. Augustine Beach, Florida, where local authorities were able to preempt another violent teen takeover by employing some novel social media monitoring.
A Florida police department is taking a victory lap after thwarting an unsanctioned "teen takeover," marking the latest move from law enforcement working to combat the viral events sweeping the nation.
Authorities with the St. Augustine Beach Police Department shut down an unsanctioned event scheduled for Thursday at a local pier after they used electronic monitoring to identify the plan before it dissolved into chaos.
"We’re a beach town, so we’ve always had spring break crowds that show up – but nothing that’s been organized like this with the sole intent of just causing disruption," St. Augustine Beach Police Chief Daniel Carswell told Fox News Digital.
The gathering was initially scheduled for 2 p.m. Thursday, according to the event flyer shared by the department.
Local authorities would indeed seem to have handled this attempted, well, riot handily. But what happens next time?
In the days leading up to the unsanctioned event, the St. Augustine Beach Police Department used social media to spread the word that the viral takeover had been canceled.
"All we can do is what we did, which was putting it out there that this is not a sanctioned event. If you come with the intention of causing chaos or causing disruption, there's going to be zero tolerance."
The department also deployed additional officers to the pier in the event attendees still showed up – a move that could mean local law enforcement agencies are left understaffed as they devote manpower to the unsanctioned takeovers.
Cool tactics and a neat new monitoring system, but it's not addressing the root cause of this problem. Until that's done, the punks who attempted to organize a riot will try again, with other means, with other methods, with ways to dodge social media monitoring.
Read More: Pirro Goes Nuclear: Parents Could Now Face Prison Over DC Teen Riot
About Time: Parents Who Drop Kids Off for Teen Mobs Now Face Fines, Classes, or Prison
Back in my days as a corporate hotshot (yes, really), one of my specialties was Corrective & Preventive Action (CAPA) systems and practices. In such a system, the two primary efforts are aimed at finding the root cause of a problem and making changes to systems/processes/procedures to deal with that root cause. What St. Augustine is doing here is a correction; they are dealing with an individual event, and that's not only necessary, but in this case, smartly done. But as a nation, we need to start looking into the root causes of events like this, and all the events involving feral teens terrorizing citizens, communities, and businesses. A ruthless examination of facts is in order, including such things as levels of parental involvement, the examples set by these young punks' parents, the criminal justice systems in the jurisdictions involved, and so forth. Nothing can be off the table. The root cause of this must be found, and a corrective action applied.
Until that happens, this whole thing is just a communities-vs.-goblins arms race, and it won't end well.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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