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A Florida sheriff released a video supporting police officers facing protests and calls to have their departments defunded around the country Tuesday – while blasting the media and warning off non-peaceful protesters.
“Don’t fall victim to subjecting yourself to this conversation that law enforcement is bad, that law enforcement is the enemy of the citizens that we’re sworn to protect and serve,” Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels says in the video. “We swore an oath, and in that oath we swore to support, protect and defend the Constitution.”
He said that his department would uphold the constitutional rights of all peaceful protesters, but he condemned “lawlessness” and what he described as groups that make themselves “a spectacle.”
He also noted that the oath his deputies take ends with “so help me God,” which he said is “absent from the media’s message or Black Lives Matter.”
He said his officers had a “great relationship” with the local citizenry but acknowledged that is not the case in many parts of the country.
“I just wanted to take a stand with these men and with these women who feel the same way that I do: Lawlessness, that’s unacceptable in this country,” he said, adding a stern warning to anyone who might be considering bringing chaos to his community.
Don’t fall victim to subjecting yourself to this conversation that law enforcement is bad, that law enforcement is the enemy of the citizens that we’re sworn to protect and serve.
Near the end of his 3 minute, 18 second video, he cautioned that if his department were to be overwhelmed by violent protesters from out of town, he would deputize “every lawful gun owner” in the county “to stand in the gap between lawlessness and civility.”
Daniels is the first African-American sheriff in his county’s history, according to the Florida Times Union, which also reported that he is up for reelection and under investigation in connection with the arrest of an officer with whom he’d allegedly had an affair.
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Mike Taylor, one of Daniels’ six challengers in the election, ripped the idea of deputizing citizens en masse, according to the report.
“I don’t believe it was intended to be a pro-police message,” he told the paper. “Real police professionalism actually acknowledges that professionally trained police officers cannot be replaced by a swearing-in ceremony.”
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