Speaking about the upcoming election and the polls, when Trump announced,

“We’re going to have everything. We’re going to have sheriffs and law enforcement and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals, but it’s very hard,”

not only did militias go crazy that they could strut their stuff, and certain county sheriffs, like Bristol County, Massachusetts, Sheriff Thomas Hodgson get as excited as a middle school boy who suggests to the teacher that now is not the best time for him to go to the chalkboard because they could suit up, get all the gear on they can, and go to the polling places, where there has been no trouble in the past, for no real reason other than create the trouble in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Oh, and for the pictures. It’s always good to have pictures with everyone looking so Rambo.

Not only did the president imply that there was no local law enforcement at the polls, or any worth being there, but he and the Bristol county sheriff implied quite strongly that up to this point the local law enforcement officers had somehow shown that they were not up to the task they had been performing competently for decades.

When some local state representatives proposed legislation to ban Trump’s Militias to cause trouble at the polls, and ensure that as it has been, only local law enforcement should do the job of keeping order at the polls, Hodgson not only showed how badly he wanted to become a real boy, but he also revealed his low opinion of local law enforcement saying that the bill is

 “one of the most outrageous bills I can remember. …Why would anyone want to prohibit law enforcement from protecting the rights of the citizens of Massachusetts?”

Obviously the sheriff of the county is so dismissive of local law enforcement, he not only does not acknowledge they exist or do their jobs, but represents the county sheriff and militias as its equal.

Neither is local law enforcement.

I have been voting for over half a century. I have voted in large cities, like Boston and Los Angeles, and real small rural towns with the back of my house abutting a corn field ,and in a number of states. I have served as a trained poll watcher at more than one election, and have seen, even now at my present polling place, that there has  always been at least one local police officer, present while all of us working the polls had the emergency phone number if there were any major problems in the voting process, behavior of the voters, or activities near the polls.

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A friend, as offended as I, took it upon herself to set the record straight and contacted her local law enforcement department asking

“In view of the much publicized call to citizens to protect the voting polls, provoking the real possibility of action by non-authorized persons appearing at polling sites for this purpose, what plans have you and your Department considered or have decided to implement on November 3rd (or before) if this situation arises, to keep voters safe and not intimidated?”

The reply:

“We will have a police officer present at every polling location in town for the duration that the polling location is in operation.  This plan may be amended should specific intelligence be developed that would require a higher level of protection at certain locations.  We have always worked closely with the Town Clerk to ensure that polling locations are safe and free from intimidation.” 

That is the way it has been done in any place I have voted in my half century of voting.

So all this drama about needing a paramilitary presence and a county sheriff presence at the polls is just that, drama.

Rather than allowing the local law enforcement officers to just do what has to be a real boring assignment, they want to dump a huge problem on them to handle, ignoring that when the party is over and they all go home, local law enforcement is left behind to clean up the mess.

They demand that they get to get dressed up in paramilitary drag, swagger around in public out doing each other in looking the meanest like there’s a tiara to be won, “playing guns”, as we called playing any type of pretend game with toy guns when I was a little kid, and then being able to brag within their bubble how great they had been when the general population is left wondering why they had even been there.

Yet while they will Back the Blue and have all manner of pro law enforcement paraphernalia on display, their very action, their very presence will show they really have no trust in the  competence and effectiveness of the local law enforcement who did not ask them to be there.

While saying they support and respect local law enforcement, their actions say otherwise.