GOP Rep. Gimenez: Putting Armed Cops in Schools a Matter of ‘Political Will,’ We Did it and Better Equipped Police after Parkland

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends First,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), who was the Mayor of Miami-Dade County during the Parkland shooting, said that after the shooting, he ordered every school to have an armed police officer, better armed and equipped police, and created Priority Response Teams to respond to active shooters quickly.

Gimenez said, “[I]mmediately after Parkland, I ordered all police officers to make sure that every single school in Miami-Dade County had an armed police officer in it. That continues to this day. The state and the school boards did a great job in hardening all of the schools and the single point of entry. On top of that, every single police officer in Miami-Dade on the street has an assault rifle and enhanced body armor and we also created Priority Response Teams of 50 police officers that their sole mission is actually responding to active shooters and doing it in a very rapid manner and in a very aggressive manner. Because we know that minutes count in saving lives.”

He added that once officers were placed in schools, “nobody said a word about the cost, it cost about $20 million halfway through our fiscal year, but it didn’t matter. We needed to protect our children. That’s what we need to do, and that’s what we need to do around the country. We need to harden our schools and [have] armed guards, armed police officers at every single one of them to protect our children so that this doesn’t happen. And if it does happen, it means that something could fall through the cracks, but also, you need to have Priority Response Teams to get there quickly and put the shooter down.”

Gimenez further stated that putting police officers in every school is a matter of “political will, period. And I’m sure that the parents and the American people are willing to spend the extra money to put police officers in every single school, and that’s what needs to happen.”

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