‘No one will care. No one that matters‘: SC police chief shows stunning mask arrogance
The arrogance is stunning.
In an email about the failure of his officers to wear face masks while working at the Myrtle Beach International Airport, Horry County Police Chief Joseph Hill wrote in an email to Police Lt. TJ Mueller:
“Based on my monitoring of social media, no one will care, no one that matters.”
The “no one that matters” seems to be every local resident, tourist, airport employee and anyone else who has entered the airport during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not that there weren’t complaints. There were plenty.
As The Sun News reporter Chase Karacostas detailed in his three-part series on the department’s decision to flaunt the rules that everyone else had to follow, visitors noticed that police officers were not masking.
“MYR received complaints about people inside the airport not wearing masks as early as March according to airport documents, nearly four months before The Sun News first reported that dozens of people, including police officers, were observed on a daily basis not wearing masks while inside the airport. On March 7, 2021, MaryEllen StoneHill of Pennsylvania tweeted photos of maskless people at the airport, calling the mask requirement “bulls***” since it wasn’t being enforced. “More maskless wonders. This is ridiculous,” she wrote in a follow-up tweet with more photos.”
Karacostas found that at least 17 people also filed complaints with the airport. “One passenger wondered whether it might be safer to fly through Charleston instead. Several people said the airport should be ‘disgusted’ or ‘disappointed’ by its employees’ disregard for the federal mask mandate. ‘How absolutely barbaric of you all,’ Lee Rottinghaus of Indiana said in a complaint to the airport.”
The complaints were not enough to sway Hill to demand that his officers wear masks, something any of us must do when we travel to any airport across the country. In another email, Hill wrote that he believed that officers were still following the “spirit of the mandate” if they were masked in most areas but not when standing or sitting at a designated police podium on the west end of the terminal.
But Hill clearly knew he was taking a risk by not enforcing the federal mandate. “If a passenger approaches please have them mask up. That’s a very visible post, so this may continue to bite us if we are not careful,” he wrote.
Hill’s behavior speaks to a larger issue of those in authority who simply believe the rules and the law simply don’t apply to them. Just today British Prime Minister Boris Johnson continued to face calls for his resignation for attending parties while his country was in the midst of strict lockdowns that kept families and friends apart.
Each of us has been touched in ways big and small since the first case of COVID-19 was discovered in the United States. Schools and businesses have endured closures. Jobs have been lost. Medical professionals have been stretched thin.
Yet, despite all the suffering, the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask has turned into some test of wills and a statement of personal freedom for some.
We are now mere weeks away from the two-year anniversary of the great March 2020 lockdowns and yet here we are, still debating and struggling to take the most basic steps to protect each other.
After Karacostas questioned TSA about the police department’s actions, the agency issued a reminder that the airport risked being fined thousands of dollars if it did not enforce the mask requirement.
Karacostas visited the Myrtle Beach airport on Thursday and found, for a change, that police were all fully masked, though some other airport employees and passengers were not.
That’s welcome news, but why did it take pushing and prodding for our law enforcement officers to abide by the rules the rest of us must follow.
After all, COVID-19 is a killer and police are not somehow automatically immune from infection.
The Fraternal Order of Police website tracks COVID-19 deaths among its members and as of today 917 members have died as a result of the virus including 12 in South Carolina. “As we had feared, the virus has claimed the lives of many, and now includes a growing number of law enforcement officers,” the website notes.
In fact, the first image on the organization’s homepage is of a magnified coronavirus next to the words “FOP standing strong during a pandemic.”
Chief Hill and his officers would do well to remember that “to serve and protect” doesn’t come with a list of exceptions.
This story was originally published January 31, 2022 at 2:45 PM with the headline "‘No one will care. No one that matters‘: SC police chief shows stunning mask arrogance."