Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva says he doesn’t want to lose ten percent of his cops by forcing them to choose between their jobs and bodily freedom, so he won’t make them. This is the latest example of a growing number of police agencies opting to keep their cops instead of enforcing an arguably unconstitutional order requiring officers to get a Covid shot.
Villanueva announced on Friday that he would disregard the L.A. County Health Department directive to force his deputies to get the shot by October 1 because he doesn’t “want to be in a position to lose 5, 10% of my workforce overnight on a vaccine mandate.” He later said on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle” that the “poorly thought out, poorly executed” mandate was “so politicized, [that] I cannot in good conscience impose a mandate like that.”
LA Sheriff Villanueva says that he will not enforce a vaccine mandate, saying employees are willing to get fired over it. "I don't want to be in a position to lose 5, 10% of my workforce overnight on a vaccine mandate." pic.twitter.com/9DNJTeJUoY
— Alene Tchekmedyian (@AleneTchek) October 7, 2021
The elected sheriff oversees the nation’s largest sheriffs department with more than 18,000 deputies.
Villanueva joined Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who in September announced that “the government has no ability and no authority to mandate your health choices, [and] I will not enforce the vaccine mandate on Sheriff’s Department employees.” He said he took seriously his job as “the last line of defense from tyrannical government overreach.”
In 2020, those same two sheriffs refused to enforce Governor Gavin Newsom’s “stay at home” order.
The Faulkner County, Arkansas, sheriff won’t enforce a shot mandate on his officers. Sheriff Tim Ryals said the mandate was an act of “tyranny” and “an overreach of authority.”
Sheriff Richard Jones of Butler County, Ohio, says he’s not playing “vaccine police” for anyone who may come under Covid vaccine orders.
But elsewhere, law enforcement officers and other state employees seem to be on their own in fighting state shot mandates.
Washington state’s fire marshal is set to lose his job because he refused to get a shot due to having a preexisting condition.
I’m following my doctor’s recommendation, which is to not get the vaccine. Contrary to popular belief, there is a percentage of people in our population who simply cannot get the vaccination.
Fire Marshal Charles LeBlanc told KING 5 News that he was given a medical exemption and “the request was accepted, but I cannot be accommodated.” He’s among several state employees suing the state. He’s been with the department for 33 years.
Hundreds of ferry workers, Seattle cops, and other law enforcers and fire fighters are expected to walk off the job before the October 18 deadline in defiance of the mandate.
In Oregon, state troopers are legally fighting the shot mandate. They just lost a round in court seeking a temporary injunction to stop the mandate. The retired state Supreme Court justice overseeing the case actually said the temporary emergency diktats include “the authority to enact public health laws that may have the effect of curtailing individual rights.”
What’s most shocking about these law enforcers taking a stand is how few of them there are.
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