Sacramento Sheriff on Not Enforcing COVID Curfew: Making Cops ‘Instruments’ of ‘Oppression’ Damages Community Relations

On Saturday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said that he won’t enforce the state’s coronavirus curfew or any current or future coronavirus orders. Jones explained that his department still has “the same types and amounts of calls for service as we always have” to deal with and he doesn’t want his sheriffs “to be instruments of…oppression. I want folks to call us when they need help, knowing that we are going to show up and make their lives better and make the situation better, and this is the opposite of that.”

Jones said, “Well, we won’t be enforcing that, or any of the other orders that are in existence now or might be coming. A couple of reasons for that: Really one is practical. We still have the same types and amounts of calls for service as we always have, from the mundane to the exciting. But there’s also kind of a theoretical aspect of it. I mean, my kids, my family, my extended family are all suffering during this, like everybody’s family. And it really has had an oppressive effect on everybody’s family, and I really don’t want our women and men of the sheriff’s office to be instruments of that oppression. I want folks to call us when they need help, knowing that we are going to show up and make their lives better and make the situation better, and this is the opposite of that.”

He later added, “[I]f we’ve learned nothing else over this last year, folks are crying for police to be more responsive to their community. Enforcing these rules, that are not criminal laws, is really the opposite of that.”

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