Police are relaxing traffic enforcement, avoiding going into homes and substituting arrests for tickets and summonses.
“That would wipe me out,” said Mike Chitwood, the sheriff in Volusia County, Florida, where he has suspended staff meetings and training, and discouraged “nonessential contact” with the public. “I have almost 500 sworn members. So if there were that number of people in quarantine here, there would be no sheriff's office.”
That is one of law enforcement’s biggest worries, even in agencies that don’t have shortages, because the coronavirus is still spreading, and the need among police — not to mention doctors, nurses and paramedics — is rising.“I’m personally concerned that any minute now we’ll get a CDC recommendation that everyone should be wearing masks,” said Art Acevedo, Houston’s police chief and president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We didn’t wrap our minds around the potential impact on our workforce, the potentially devastating impact,” said NYPD Sgt. Paul Grattan, a fellow at the National Police Foundation — stressing that he was speaking about police generally and not on behalf of his department. “I’m certain there are agencies with no plan of any kind for this kind of thing, and among those that did it was on the back of the bookshelf.
So far, all her officers are healthy. But Tejada said she has struggled to protect them. As part of a regular screening procedure, she sought out no-touch thermometers, but they were out of stock at stores and on backorder with local manufacturers. She ended up putting her request on Facebook. A distant relative saw the message and gave her two.“As first responders, we practice how to respond to emergency disaster situations. But in this situation, nobody has practiced what to do,” Tejada said.
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