Fair vs Unfair Criticism

Our old friend Jack Dunphy is noticing the same thing we are:

• I’ve been a cop for nearly 40 years. For the last 20 of them, I’ve had the good fortune of being granted the platform, first at National Review Online, later at City Journal, Ricochet, and here at PJ Media, to write on behalf of my fellow police officers when their actions came under what I considered to be unfair criticism. Police work has grown more difficult since I began, all the more so when cops’ split-second decisions are scrutinized by an uninformed public after having been mischaracterized in the media, sometimes deliberately.
  
  So it saddens me to observe some of the asininity on display among some of my fellow police officers in recent days as fear of the coronavirus pandemic brings the country to its knees. Reason and common sense have in some places been abandoned in favor of a level of social control rarely seen in any country that calls itself free, much less in the United States of America. Here in Southern California, we have seen police officers ticketing a surfer on an otherwise empty beach, citing people for sitting in parked cars while watching a sunset, and, in what may be the most farcical display of them all, using not just one but two boats to corral and arrest a lone paddleboarder off the coast of Malibu.
  
  I do not discount the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, I am of a sufficiently advanced age to be considered a high-risk patient if I were to contract the disease. But neither do I discount the genuine threat to liberty posed by the various orders, decrees, edicts, and mandates lately imposed by the nation’s governors, mayors, health commissioners, and every other sort of government functionary exercising their newly discovered power to limit the freedom of their fellow citizens. In the case of the people being hassled for watching the sunset, cited above, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department was so proud of this exercise of authority that they made it their pinned tweet on their Twitter account.

He (and we) are of a generation of cops who remember exactly what the oath was we took years ago, and it wasn't to be petty tyrants in the service of political agendas.

Here's a bit of advice that hasn't steered us wrong in the decades we've been around:

• Lacking a declaration of Martial Law, the City can still unilaterally close down stadiums, museums, park buildings, licensed businesses and such. We enforce those ordinances.
  
  But restricting movement and peaceful gatherings on the public way or upon private property absent any sort of criminal behavior or intent, you better take a long hard look at the order being given and the person giving that order and under what authority it is being issued.

Closing down church services? Conducting checkpoints on the public way? "Sweeping the corners" without warnings and making arrests without any sort of dispersal order as happened on the west side last week? And then promptly disavowed by the mayor? You can guess exactly where that one is going....and you better be sure you're ready, willing and able to take that ride under the bus.