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Please do send the emails. I'm not going to log in here on the off-chance there's a post (I almost never visited the Patreon site either.

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It seems like you're missing the point to come down on this as "strongly disputing" the Daily Wire, although they certainly should have done this research themselves. The main and worst facts of the story still seem correct - the only change is a possible miscommunication, and at worst misrepresentation in the heat of the moment about how much was the police department involved. It seems pretty feasible that Smith didn't perceive a School Resource Officer as "the real police," or that it was explained to him incorrectly. I doubt a lot of people who didn't go to a 4 year college during/after the Title IX Dear Colleague era spend a lot of time thinking about what is a mandated reporter. The negative press around SROs in reporting about school gun violence probably doesn't help their reputation either, thinking of the infamous Broward County story. I can easily see Smith interpreting that the "mall cop" of the school was "handling it". The simplest story still seems to be that Smith shows up at school, perceives the case is being mishandled (which, how could you not if you're in this position), and loses his temper, at which point the school is not interested in a calm conversation about next steps.

This also doesn't explain the superintendent's comment about no assaults taking place in the school bathrooms, which seems like the highest level of either incompetence or cover-up. If anything, it makes it worse since these logs confirm the assault was documented and was going through the school's incident process. So how could the superintendent not know?

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Oct 19, 2021Liked by Jesse Singal

Thank you for the update! This part of the story did strike me as possibly the result of a miscommunication with the parent. FWIW, all school employees are mandated reporters, not just the SRO.

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Leaving aside the Daily Wire's fishiness after you reached out, it seems to me that this could easily be a misunderstanding on Smith's part and an obfuscation (or laziness) by DW.

Saying that they were looking into it in-house may ignore the legal responsibilities of an SRO but may well align with a parent's understanding of school personnel. An SRO seems quite different than detectives from the county sheriff's office. Perhaps Smith made a mistake as to the significance of the SRO, which the media covering it (DW, given that legacy media is asleep at the wheel) should've picked up on. It seems reasonable to me for a parent to worry--particularly if the administration failed to express sufficient concern--that the school would sweep it under the rug to keep it from going public.

Moreover, the original entry in the log is ambiguous as to the timing of some key events--did the student tell the administration "a couple of hours ago" (before the 1:30 log entry) or did the alleged assault happen "a couple of hours ago" with the student reporting closer to 1:30? After that, a supervisor was requested at 2:21pm, and it looks like the student's family didn't leave until 3:45. The story says the student didn't go to the hospital until "that night." There are a lot of delays in there. Critically, we don't know what school administration said to Smith--perhaps they were apathetic or otherwise unbothered.

Ultimately, I don't see this document as a smoking-gun against Smith's account. The DW's coverage was perhaps a bit too credulous, but that seems par for the course these days.

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I think you are overly self-conscious on corrections to the point of being detrimental. While, I appreciate a need to be precise and accurate, your corrections on the whole tend to be small but often, the latter of which lends to an impression that you are often wrong and thus shouldn't be trusted.

In this specific case, no one is going to blame you for recounting in a podcast what the Daily Wire reported if what the Daily Wire reported turned out to be wrong or not the whole story - especially when you said you were going to be doing your own reporting on it.

This would be different if it were a written article, but I believe you would have worded things differently in a written article anyway. "Live" spoken word gets a grain of salt that a published written work that has gone through drafts and edits doesn't. If you wanted to hold to the same standard of that kind of reporting, you'd have to put much more production into the podcast with pauses while you guys do research, re-recordings and edits, which would change the free-flowing nature of the podcast. But it's up to you.

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Waiting 50 minutes to call an ambulance after a child was sexually assaulted is totally unacceptable. It’s absurd to suggest that time could have been used to sit them each down to find out what happened. If she said she was raped, that’s for a hospital to determine not a principal. Rape isn’t just sex you didn’t ask for, it’s violence. She almost certainly was injured and required immediate medical attention and they should have called an ambulance right away.

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I worked in a Virginia high school for four years, and it took me a little while to realize SROs were "real" police, partly because there are also, under VA code, "school security officers." The SROs wear the local law enforcement agency's standard uniform. The SSOs wear a different uniform and are not armed, they receive training and certification, but are not sworn officers. They look like actual cops unless you look closely.

If someone mentioned an SRO to you, and if you'd never seen the actual SRO, you might think the unarmed SSO was the SRO. Contributing to my confusion was the fact that someone on staff pointed to one of the SSOs and said "he was a janitor here up until last year." I said, "then he became a cop?" and they said, "oh, he's not a cop."

*Then* I saw the actual SRO, asked "what are the cops doing here?" and was told "oh, that's Officer Brown, our SRO." "Oh, then what's Mr. Henry?" "He's one of our SSOs."

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This is a good example of why mainstream media (and liberal news outlets) should do reporting and digging on these stories if only to prevent the right from misinforming people because they seem very upset when the right misinforms people.

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Thank you for following up on this, Jesse! It's good to have this clarifying information. I really love it when you guys do some independent digging and would love to see more of it for stories like this.

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So, in response to the update info from the police logs I have to disagree with Jesse and side with the Daily Wire (ouch!). A rape cannot be properly investigated by one non-specialisy cop and more officers outght to have been called. Here's why: in any sexual assault there are at least 3 crime scenes (victim's body, suspect's body, location of incident) which need to be immediately secured and examined in order to prevent evidence being lost through destruction or contamination. No one should go from one scene to another because it risks contamination which can make it impossible to prosecute a case. In this instance at least 3 officers were needed to just secure the scene, plus a seperate forensic unit to examine the bathroom and two more to examine the suspect and victim. The victim was examined at the hospital, but where was the suspect while all this was going on?

So I agree with the daily wire that the school officer should have called for more backup. I wonder whether the father also thought so and whether the school preferred to keep it quiet by just having the school officer deal with it 'in house' and that may be what caused the disagreement?

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I don't fault you for your original take. It's the risk of reporting on something "live". There's always a chance new facts will come to light later that could change everything or nothing. The most important thing is your follow-up and public acknowledgment about what changed. Instead of acting those idiots at The Daily Wire digging doubling down just to get outrage clicks...

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Also, I know it’s a very distant C-plot in this story, but no one at any point did any land acknowledgements. That should get somebody put on some kind of list, I think.

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A couple of points: 1) it's shitty Rosiak didn't credit you. That sucks and I hope he makes it right. 2) regardless the official employer of the SRO, I find it entirely consistent to consider having the SRO handle it woefully inadequate and consistent with "handled in house".

Like other readers have stated, this doesn't change the substance of the story. That said, you did excellent work here and it advances the story. (But seriously, that sucks Rosiak did that.)

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Regarding the essence of a new development in a story, I personally think that your headline is backstepping almost too much. Reading only the headline, it sounds as if the rape allegations came under question, not some detail regarding basically the meaning of "in-house". I might have added "contradicts some procedural Details of police involvement" Just for the headline-only reader 😉

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So glad that you followed up to check. The Daily Wire's reporting was (and is) slanted.

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