A man armed with a 12 gauge flare gun that was loaded with a shotgun shell jumped the fence to enter the property of a Florida high school. He was confronted and stopped by an armed school guardian. My school district doesn’t allow teachers to be a part of this program.
I wonder why the man wasn’t arrested for possession of an unregistered NFA firearm?
Misdemeanors include: Domestic Battery, Petty Theft, Driving while license suspended (two convictions), DUI, possession of cannabis.
I have hesitated for awhile to talk about how I left my career as a Paramedic and became a teacher. A recent story that has made the news in Central Florida has convinced me that it is time. A man from Connecticut who was being investigated for Medicare fraud decided to try to kill himself and his entire family here in Central Florida during the holidays. He only did the job halfway, killing his wife, three kids, and the family dog. After a few weeks, the Feds showed up to arrest him and found the bodies.
That brings me to my own story. I had retired from the fire department and was working as a Paramedic performing critical care transports for a Medicare contractor. I was supposed to be transporting only the very sickest people. Instead, I was mostly transporting people who were either not sick, or who could have been well, but there was too much money to be made in keeping them sick.
We were lying about the services we were performing, and I refused to play along. There were other patients who were sick, and we were purposely keeping them sick so we could make more money. One patient was supposed to be receiving physical therapy so he could learn to walk again. The only problem is that, once he could walk without assistance, we would no longer get paid for him. So they made sure that he never managed to walk far enough to be cured. The physical therapy team was told to stop teaching him to walk before he could walk 30 feet without assistance, because that would mean he was no longer disabled and we would no longer get paid for his disability care.
We used forged paperwork. We got doctors to sign blank orders that we later filled in as needed. My coworkers and I were expected to invent the paperwork to make it all billable- you weren’t allowed to go home at the end of your shift unless the paperwork was done, even if that paperwork was a complete fabrication. My employer wasn’t alone. Most of the people I know in the health field are expected to do at least a little of this.
I refused to lie on my medical reports, and my bosses hated it. There was no way that I was going to help those people victimize my patients so they could make themselves rich doing it. I sure wasn’t going to lie and risk my license and my freedom to make someone else a millionaire while I was left looking guilty for $17 an hour.
Six months after I began working there, I was approached by state and Federal investigators. I told them everything that I had seen and agreed to cooperate. At their request, I began saving and forwarding documentation to investigators. The company found out and terminated me for “corporate espionage.” I was blackballed from the medical field and my name was mud. I had to change careers and became a teacher.
Over the course of the following six years, I was interviewed by the FBI multiple times. I had to hire a pair of attorneys, because you don’t get interviewed by the FBI unless your attorney is there. A couple of the interviews included the Assistant US attorney. Five years after I was initially contacted, the Feds showed up at my former employers’ offices with a search warrant and some subpoenas and began interviewing my former coworkers.
The investigation could only go back 5 years, and even with that my former employer was suspected of receiving nearly $80 million in fraudulently obtained Medicare payments. My opinion is that it was even more than that, perhaps as much as $200 million in the past 10 years. Still, there was evidence that this one company stole $80 million in a ten year period.
The employer worked a settlement with the Feds. No criminal charges, no admission of guilt, they had to reimburse Medicare for less than $6 million of what they were accused of stealing, and had to sign a paper promising not to do it again.
I was declared to be the whistleblower, and the reward money was just under $1.2 million. My legal bills ate up nearly half a million of that. The IRS got $250K. I lost the career that I had done for most of my adult life in exchange for $500K.
So after nearly a decade of investigation by half a dozen agents, attorneys, and contractors, and the government recouped less than $4.7 million of the over $80 million that was stolen, no one went to jail, the company got to keep roughly $74 million of their ill gotten proceeds, and no one can charge them with any fraud for anything that happened before 2015. I heard that the CEO got a bonus.
The only loser here was the US taxpayer. This is why Medicare for all won’t work. There is so much fraud, so much profit, and so little oversight, that most health care providers are busy stealing the government blind.
As for me, some of my old friends and coworkers have called me a snitch. I am still blackballed from the medical field. I did what I thought was right. I was not about to let them victimize people to become rich. What is right is right. What is wrong is wrong. So, to paraphrase those stupid kneelers: Sometimes you have to do what is right, even if it means losing everything.
Florida recently passed a law which expands the “Guardian Program” to include teachers. The program is designed to arm select school employees to receive special training. Any school district that establishes a guardian program gets additional funding and grant money in order to implement the program.
Now that the students are finished with their school year, teachers are in the midst of what is known as “post planning days” and learning about planned changes for the next school year. Thanks to the fact that the school district gets to pick who is a guardian, the system is going the way that ALL “may issue” programs go. What teachers are hearing about the Guardian Program is:
Although they can legally take part in the Guardian Program, teachers will still not be permitted to take part. Instead, administrators will be the only ones permitted to take part. Principals, superintendents, and some county level office staff will be the only ones permitted to take part. Anyone who is taking part will get a free gun, ammo, training, and a stipend for having the extra certification.
The school districts have turned this “may issue” system into a cash cow for earning grant money and redistributing some of that grant money to select, politically connected individuals. The guardian program has been corrupted to the point where it is completely useless.
Today the Florida Senate voted to remove the prohibition on teachers carrying firearms as a part of the Guardian program. This ends the law that armed school janitors and lunch ladies, but denied the same ability to teachers. Opponents claim that this places too much of a burden on teachers. I don’t see how, since the program is entirely voluntary, and should a teacher ever need to use their weapon to defend their students, it will be less of a burden than standing by as they watch someone murder their students or even getting murdered themselves.
As for me, I have already volunteered for the program. I hope that I am selected. I even used it as an excuse to buy a new handgun. I just bought a M&P 2.0 9mm Compact. I caught one on sale at my local gun store. They had them on sale for $379, and at that price they threw in 4 magazines and a $50 gift card.
I put a new set of Trijicon HD sights on it, and installed an Apex Action Enhancement kit. The new action lowered my trigger pull to what I measured to be 4.75 pounds and removed the grit from the trigger. The trigger now has a smooth pre-travel, and a clean, crisp break.
Now to wait for the House and my school district.
Taking a break from my trip report to talk about a news story that appeared in the Orlando Sentinel back in May:
Carver Middle School is an F rated school in the middle of the Pine Hills neighborhood, located west of Orlando, in Orange County. This school’s students tested in the lowest 3 percent of all students nationwide. In order to correct this, Orange county is attempting to lure the best teachers in the state to the school by offering an extra $20,000 a year to teachers willing to work there.
The problem is that the school is in a crime ridden, poverty stricken neighborhood. I have blogged about Pine Hills and its surrounding neighborhoods before. More than once. The school is 91% black, 6% Hispanic of any race, and less than 1% white. Seventy percent of the students receive free or reduced lunch.
Both the violent and non-violent crime rates in Pine Hills are double the national average. Police officers are shot and killed in the area of this school often enough that several streets in the area are named for fallen officers, and shootings happen there nearly every night. The local government repeatedly dumps millions of dollars into this blighted area in an attempt to “clean up” the crime problem, to no avail.
Currently, the teachers there are inexperienced first or second year teachers who transfer away at first opportunity. Teacher pay is tied to student performance, and combined with the crime in the neighborhood, teachers avoid the area like the plague.
Any teacher who accepts a job at this school is placing his or her life in jeopardy. A $20,000 bonus is not worth it, in my opinion. The plan likely will not work and be a waste of money, anyway. You cannot, no matter how good of a teacher you are, teach a student who does not want to learn. The crime problems need to be addressed, the gangs eliminated, the drugs under control, before you can convince the students to give up the thug lifestyle and learn.
In the year 2000, my car was burglarized. The police knew who did it. They got his identity from the fingerprints. They told me that he would not likely face charges, because the police department did not have the resources to deal with “minor” crimes like auto burglary.
In the year 2005, someone stole a check from my mailbox, forged my signature on it, and deposited it into their checking account. I got a copy of the check, and sure enough, there was the name and signature of the miscreant. The police again told me that they didn’t have the resources to pursue the criminal.
On the way home, I passed 5 cops writing traffic tickets. I lost a total of about $900 from those two crimes. I have lost more than that from the five traffic tickets I have received in my life.
The police write over 40 million traffic tickets a year in the US. The average officer writes $300,000 a year in traffic tickets. It is a $6 billion a year industry. The city of Atlanta has even admitted that police raises and pensions depend on how much revenue is brought in by traffic citations. So even though there may be no quota per se, you can bet that the police have a real motivation to write questionable tickets. The Atlanta police union admits to using traffic tickets to fund a raise for Atlanta cops.
Warning people of speed traps ahead has been ruled as protected speech, and has also been ruled as interfering with police business by the Seventh circuit. In that same decision, it also ruled that using traffic fines to generate revenue is legitimate police business, and interfering with that is a crime.
Florida, the state where I reside, makes $100 million a year from traffic tickets, and that doesn’t include the amount collected by state and county government from their share of those 4 million traffic citations. Hillsboro county got another $36 million. St Petersburg, a city within that county, got another $500 thousand. Hillsboro is only one of 67 Florida counties. There are only 15 million adults in Florida, meaning that one in four Florida drivers get a ticket each year.
The police are revenue generators, and are being used to squash political groups. They no longer are here to protect and serve the public.