Did you think California couldn’t get any worse?
A bill introduced in the California Senate in February would strip funding from police departments that refuse to enforce health policies such as face mask dictates.
Democratic Sen. Richard Pan introduced the legislation.
Senate Bill 1464 requires law enforcement agencies to enforce “all orders of the State Department of Public Health or of the local health officer issued for the purpose of preventing the spread of any contagious, infectious, or communicable disease.”
The series of mask mandates imposed on Californians at both the state and local levels would meet the definition of the orders described.
But it gets even worse.
“The bill would additionally prohibit state funds from being provided to any law enforcement agency that publicly announces that they will oppose, or adopts a policy to oppose, a public health order,” a summary of the legislation reads.
Funds stripped from local law enforcement would be diverted to county public health departments.
The law appears designed as an attack on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva, a rogue Democrat in the progressive state, openly refused to enforce a county mask mandate.
.@lapublichealth has authority to enforce a new mask order, but the underfunded/defunded will not expend our limited resources and instead ask for voluntary compliance. Read my full statement by visiting https://t.co/DVBvmRbFA9 pic.twitter.com/Je1nMerWrO
— Alex Villanueva (@LACoSheriff) July 16, 2021
At the time, Villanueva pointed out that it’s patently ridiculous to expect law enforcement to force each and every citizen under their jurisdiction to muzzle up in all public settings.
But Pan doesn’t seem to have Villaneuva’s grasp of common sense and reality.
The state Legislature considered Pan’s deeply authoritarian social engineering measure on Wednesday, according to Assemblyman Kevin Kiley. “It’s the most fanatical threads of ‘progressivism’ knotted into one bill,” he tweeted.
Today the Senate considers legislation to defund police for not enforcing mask mandates. It's the most fanatical threads of "progressivism" knotted into one bill.
— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) March 30, 2022
Gov. Gavin Newsom only removed California’s indoor mask mandate in March, well after the majority of Americans abandoned wearing face masks as a pointless gesture.
The mask mandates imposed by Los Angeles County and the state of California were issued under emergency authorization rather than by legislation.
The potential police defunding would come as California is blighted by a spree of property and violent crimes, including the looting of trains that spurred Newsom to admit that the state had come to resemble a third-world country.
Welcome to the world of insane progressivism.