Not happy that as a sheriff in Massachusetts whose job is more management/custodial than rootin’-tootin’ Wild West Sheriffin’, but who wants to be that Wild West sheriff, now former sheriff Hodgson has spent the last many years trying to present an image that is far beyond reality attempting to claim he is the head law enforcement person in the county upon whom all residents’ safety depended as he, rather than the local law enforcement officers, had the county’s safety as a priority.
He was for all intents and purposes, the principal of an elementary school who, wanting to be something more, begins doing some of the duties of the superintendent to enhance their importance, but has to be constantly told to stop and just run the school.
Since in Massachusetts sheriffs run jails but do not patrol the streets or make arrests for transgressions, they wait for the locals and the courts to send people for temporary and even pre-trial custodial care until they are either set free, serve whatever short sentence a court imposes, or moves into a state prison to serve their time, there is no way this can be translated into John Wayne or Joe Arpaio.
And so, he created a threat whose non-existence made it easy for him to control.
I draw cartoons. When I do one with a specific person in mind, I create a picture that looks enough like the person to be recognized, but not so exact that it is a faithful portrait. In Falwell v Flint the Supreme Court ruled based on the obvious- a person of reasonable intelligence can recognize the difference between a faithful and true picture and a cartoon.
I know the cartoon that Sheriff Hodgson was drawing as I had seen the actual object.
During his years in office, he tried to establish a Sheriff coastal patrol by converting a small craft into a high-tech surveillance vessel. Since the Coast Guard and Harbor Patrol already did the job the sheriff decided he would do, he had to lose the boat.
His command center trailer also had to be jettisoned because local and state law enforcement already had them.
They did not need the kid in the Batman costume showing up when the real thing was already on scene.
He jumped from one scheme to another getting shot down each time until he landed on what he thought would win the day, immigrants.
He portrays them as being present in huge numbers which seemed to grow with each threat of a “Caravan” from Central America over the last few Years and refers to immigrants as “criminal illegal aliens” when relying on his invented threat to enhance his image as who would not want the protection from those kinds of people that only he could supply.
During the last few years, he was salivating to get the reputation as the new Joe Arpaio and the attention of the former, twice impeached president like a cat on the fence outside the White House howling to be noticed and have his needs addressed.
In spite of the prosperity of both Fall River and New Bedford largely because of the presence and hard work of immigrants and their progeny starting when the first whaling ship returned to port with replacement crew members needed and obtained on the voyage, as the cities die and some hung on to what was still there because it is where they live and can afford to, those who were not prevented by Red Lining moved away and formed the rural areas into suburban communities, forgetting how important the immigrants were to those in their families who had done well in those cities in the past.
With Malls and other conveniences being introduced into these growing communities, the need to go to Fall River and New Bedford was greatly reduced and most people moving into the towns around them only knew of the two cities what they heard from those already there when they moved to town.
Reading the room better than most, Hodgson saw that using a nebulous and unspecified number of undocumented residents as a threat to the outlying communities without details could get him reelected, a tactic he would grasp on to because there was grumbling in Bristol County to get him out.
He needed to convince the voters of the county that only he could save us from his imagined criminal element.
On election night I was at the watch party for Paul Heroux, Hodgson’s opponent. On a white board at the front of the room were three columns, one with the names of the towns in Bristol County and two with the names Heroux at the top of one and Hodgson the other.
As the towns reported in with their official votes the numbers would be entered in the appropriate columns.
The smaller town outside of Fall River, New Bedford, and Taunton began reporting first, and it did not look good for Heroux as the numbers showed, as expected, these voters had bought into the sheriff’s myth.
There were some small towns that had not bought the myth and their votes showed they saw a need for change not more platitudes and political posturing.
It was very close, and the results were swinging like a pendulum as the little towns reported in until the votes of those the sheriff had been vilifying for his personal and political aggrandizement showed up and he was out.
Yep, the Brown People let the white nationalist, xenophobe, and constitutional sheriff know that he works for us, the Brown people included, and we did not think he was performing his duties as he was expected to do.
There will be pundit prognostications about why the old sheriff lost and the new one won, but getting past the experts, the simple truth is that, clearly by the racial divide in the results, the Brown People had had enough and deported the sheriff from his job.
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