Southern California sheriffs are refusing to enforce stay-at-home orders

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new restrictions face backlash as ICU capacity dwindles.

Sheriffs of counties that represent nearly 40 percent of California’s population are refusing to enforce Gov. Gavin Newsom’s newest stay-at-home order aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19.

Sheriffs Alex Villanueva, Don Barnes, and Chad Bianco enforce the laws in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties, respectively. In response to Newsom’s announcement, Villanueva said he won’t “take part in enforcing stay at home orders at businesses,” Barnes called compliance “a matter of personal responsibility and not a matter of law enforcement,” and Bianco said he wouldn’t be “blackmailed, bullied or used as muscle” in carrying out the order.

The latest rules require regions where the adult ICU bed capacity falls below 15 percent to comply with a stay-at-home order for a minimum of three weeks. The order, once triggered, bans “all gatherings with members of other households” except in specific cases. KTTV Fox 11 in Los Angeles Fox reported that the order would also shut down all indoor and outdoor dining, limiting restaurants to takeout and delivery.

The Southern California region, which includes LA, Orange, and Riverside counties, dropped to 7.7 percent ICU capacity as of December 10.

Newsom’s order comes amid a nationwide spike in coronavirus cases. Almost no states are seeing anything close to meaningful suppression of the virus, and daily death tolls are reaching record highs.

America faces a dark few months until the vaccine arrives

The standoff is largely about the terrible trade-offs between public health and economic activity, made all but inevitable by Congress’s failure to pass more stimulus. By not providing the necessary financial assistance to individuals, businesses, and state and local governments, the federal government has put states in the unenviable position of mandating public health measures without the ability to compensate businesses and individuals suffering the consequences.

As Vox’s Li Zhou has reported, Congress is still arguing over major components of a potential stimulus package, including whether to include unemployment assistance, business liability protections, and aid to state and local governments. The latest competing proposals, neither of which currently have enough support to move forward, carry price tags of more than $900 billion. But, as Vox’s Emily Stewart recently noted, a new study has estimated that it will take between $3 and $4.5 trillion in near-term spending to “get the economy to reach its full potential.”

As Stewart has also reported, states are facing budget shortfalls numbering in the hundreds of billions due to Covid-19. They are in no position to be offering their residents and businesses the type of financial assistance that Congress could.

There is good news around the corner: the FDA looks set to approve effective vaccines in the coming days, with distribution to ramp up to all Americans hopefully by spring. But in the meantime, the country is exhausted and struggling to comply with strict public health guidance as winter holidays make people want to take more risks.

Julia Marcus, epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School argued recently in the Atlantic that “abstinence-only recommendations regarding social contact” are bad public policy when it comes to Covid-19 prevention. Public officials need to be giving people guidelines for how to manage risk as they continue to live their lives — especially if they’re going to dine indoors in defiance of the best public health recommendations.

Sheriffs have long had a lot of leeway in deciding whether to enforce laws

The defiant sheriffs are expressing a frustration not just coming out of the very real frustration at the end of the pandemic.

Though their positions are supposed to be apolitical, they often aren’t, and it shows with the stay-at-home orders. The LA Times reported that Riverside sheriff Chad Bianco sounded a lot more like Republicans fighting public health when he said falsely that “the medical field is so split about this virus” and when pressed on this assertion he doubled-down arguing that “doctors and other medical professionals have differing opinions on benefits of masks, social distancing, and lockdowns.”

Most concerning, Bianco added a wildly incorrect statistic: “Not everyone is going to get the virus and 99.8 [percent] of those who do, will get over it.”

These sheriffs’ refusal to enforce the stay-at-home order is part of a long tradition of sheriffs picking and choosing when and how to require their constituents to adhere to the law. From defying gun control orders to selective enforcement of traffic violations, our system has granted wide latitude to law enforcement. California’s current crisis is a feature, not a bug, of the system.

The most recent example of this is following the shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newton, Connecticut, states passed laws targeting guns saw similar protestations from law enforcement. The New York Times reported though these sheriffs were “outnumbered” by those who complied, Colorado, New York, and Florida all had sheriffs refuse to enforce these orders.

The nature of policing requires some level of discretion when it comes to enforcement. Traffic violations are so common that police have to decide which ones are worth ticketing and stopping (these decisions are rife with racial bias). However, outright refusing to uphold a law goes beyond that day-to-day discretion as sheriffs appoint themselves lawmakers and law-enforcers in the same breath.

At the end of the day the people most at risk — those facing eviction, job loss, the shuttering of their businesses, and isolation from their friends and families deserve more from their government than theatrical showdowns and hypocritical scolding. But it looks like that’s all they are going to get.