Daniel Greenfield November 28, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog
After
failing to deal with months of violent riots in Portland, Oregon
Governor Kate Brown announced that she instead wants the police to go
after families celebrating Thanksgiving.
When
asked whether Oregonians should call the police on their neighbors if
they have more than 6 people in their homes for Thanksgiving, she replied, “This is no different than what happens if there's a party down the street... they call law enforcement."
Except law enforcement has no interest in replying.
The
Marion County Sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes the state
capital, declined, stating, "We cannot arrest or enforce our way out of
the pandemic."
When Governor Cuomo of New York, whose order forcing nursing homes
to accept infected coronavirus patients may have killed as many as
11,000 senior citizens, tried to enlist law enforcement in his crackdown
on Thanksgiving, the sheriffs of New York also wouldn’t do it.
The
Steuben County Sheriff's Office assured that "the men and women of the
Steuben County Sheriff’s Office will not be peeking in your window or
attempting to enter your property to count the number of persons at your
table on Thanksgiving."
"I can't see how devoting our resources
to counting cars in our citizens' driveways or investigating how much
turkey or dressing they've purchased is for the public good,” the
Saratoga County Sheriff's Office objected.
“This national holiday
has created longstanding family traditions that are at the heart of
America, and these traditions should not be stopped or interrupted by
Governor Cuomo’s mandates,” the Erie County Sheriff's Office declared.
"With
regard to the Thanksgiving Executive Order, the Fulton County Sheriff's
Office will NOT be enforcing it," another office stated, "So don't feel
a need to hide cars, cover with leaves or walk 3 blocks so your house
doesn't become a target of the Governors EO."
Democrats and their
media have blamed this rebellion on Republican sheriffs in conservative
areas, but Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr is a black Democrat
and his office still opted out of the "enforcement of Thanksgiving gatherings".
While Governor Cuomo fumed that this Irish Democracy was, "frightening to democracy", a Buffalo print shop began selling stickers of Cuomo's giant head peering into windows.
Next door in New Jersey, Governor Murphy threatened to be, “as all over it as we can be."
Then he was caught on a viral video dining out with his family. Meanwhile, the Howell Township police chief stated,
“I wasn’t going to have my police officers going knocking on doors and
ruining somebody’s holiday just to check how many people are inside
their house.”
The law enforcement rebellion wasn’t new in California. It had been going on for some time.
After
Governor Newsom issued his latest curfew, the sheriffs of Los Angeles
County, Orange County, Riverside County, Sacramento County, Tulare
County, Fresno County, El Dorado County, and others announced that they
would not be enforcing it with either tickets or arrests.
And no one would be tampering with Thanksgiving.
"The
Sacramento County Sheriff's Office will not be determining—including
entering any home or business—compliance with, or enforcing compliance
of, any health or emergency orders related to curfews, staying at home,
Thanksgiving or other social gatherings," the Sacramento County Sheriff stated. “We will not dispatch officers for these purposes."
“From
the very beginning, we have not enforced these orders. We are not going
to make criminals out of normally law-abiding citizens," Fresno County
Sheriff Margaret Mims said.
In Ohio, some sheriffs were willing to be the Thanksgiving police, while others weren’t.
"It's
not knocking on people's doors on Thanksgiving and saying, 'You've had
more than eight or 10 people,' and it's not to make criminals out of
everyday working people," Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said.
The
law enforcement uprisings in New York, California, Oregon, and Ohio are
part of a larger trend with local police departments indicating that
they don’t want to be the mask police.
A study in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Online found that only
10% of police departments surveyed were acting as the mask police while
70% encouraged following the rules. This attitude by law enforcement
forced some of the biggest cities in the country to bypass the police
and utilize other means of enforcing their lockdowns and arbitrary
decrees.
In Los Angeles, violators were threatened with having
their water and power shut off. In New York City, a legion of city
inspectors were pulled away from other duties to swarm Orthodox Jewish
areas in Brooklyn after Governor Cuomo announced a crackdown on
religious Jews.
The use of inspectors rather than police has
become a widespread and illegal tactic for targeting small businesses,
but has reached its limit as most businesses can’t survive if they close
down.
The early months in the pandemic saw a boom in
surveillance technologies, including drone flybys and infrared remote
scans, but most police departments didn’t want anything to do with them.
A
small number of police departments adopted the drones and made
headlines for all the wrong reasons. Not only did most people hate them,
but they also proved to be useless. Police departments that tried using
the drones to break up large gatherings found that people wouldn’t
listen. And the surveillance capabilities of the drones had been vastly
overhyped.
As the Black Lives Matter riots broke out, police
departments shifted away from coronavirus enforcement to cope with the
violence and avoid being caught up in viral videos. It was around this
time that the increased crime rate brought on by the riots and the mass
jailbreak of prison inmates to protect them from the virus tied up the
resources of underfunded departments.
Coronavirus enforcement,
something most departments and officers didn’t want to do anyway, was
the first casualty of the new dangerous environment brought on by the
BLM riots.
Law enforcement had only been able to commit the spare
resources to coronavirus enforcement because of a drop in crime rates
early in the lockdowns, but once crime rates soared and cities and
counties hit highs that hadn’t been seen in decades or generations, all
of that ended. The budget cuts brought on by the collapse of small
businesses and police defunding also left local law enforcement without
enough resources to even answer calls, let alone play mask police.
And
most law enforcement personnel are resentful of having been hung out to
dry, robbed of resources and political support by Democrat governors
and mayors, and then told to enforce widely unpopular shutdowns and mask
fines by those same politicians.
Democrat politicians can’t defund the police and expect them to shut down Thanksgiving.
“It’s
ironic on the heel of these cries to 'defund the police' and limit
their response to what some perceive as non-emergency calls that the
police department is now being asked to police family gatherings during
the holiday season,” the president of Akron’s police union objected.
Not
all law enforcement personnel have opted out of coronavirus
enforcement. Elected sheriffs have the easiest time shrugging crackdowns
away. Urban police chiefs appointed by mayors can’t put out dismissive
press releases as easily, but they have made it a very low priority.
The
struggle to enforce coronavirus lockdowns and codes without much
support from police departments is a sign of just how challenging the
post-police vision of the Democrats will be.
Democrats have
turned to inspectors to fine small businesses and pull their licenses,
but the inspectors are running into angry small business owners and
patriotic crowds.
The Anne Arundel County Health Department was
forced to cancel evening enforcement and daytime enforcement in rowdier
bars. It also had to stop sending
female inspectors. After Democrat Milwaukee health inspectors faced a
backlash for harassing a pro-Trump rally, they no longer go anywhere
without a police escort. That defeats the purpose of police defunding.
The
bigger purpose of police defunding is to fundamentally shift
enforcement priorities from fighting crime to pursuing social agendas,
and while police departments dutifully rack up hate crime citations and
participate in community policing events, their mission hasn’t changed.
The
coronavirus lockdowns succeeded in dividing the country and destroying
small businesses on an unprecedented scale, but they failed to turn
America into East Germany. Instead the fault lines of the pandemic
revealed that much of the country would not go along with the crackdown.
And the men and women of law enforcement, for the most part, did the right thing.
Even
in difficult times, that ought to give us hope for the future of our
country. And this Thanksgiving, it is another thing about this great
nation to be thankful for.
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
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