“For months, we have been focusing on education and not citations, but now I am instructing the Houston Police Department to issue the necessary warnings and citations to anyone not wearing a mask in public if they do not meet the criteria for an exemption,” the mayor said Monday at a press briefing.
Police said that the wouldn’t respond to call outs reporting people for not wearing masks, but they would issue the fine if they saw someone not covering up during regular patrols.
It’s been less than two weeks since Miami-Dade County announced it would be fining people for not wearing masks in public. Already, Florida media outlets are filled with stories of people cited for wearing masks improperly, lowering masks to sip a drink, or removing their face coverings once outside of a store.
On Thursday, the Miami Herald reported that the Miami-Dade Police Department has issued 162 citations for violating the county’s mandatory mask ordinance, which comes with a $100 penalty.
One woman, Johanna Gianni, says she removed her mask in the parking lot of a Publix grocery store in North Miami Beach, when a police officer approached her and wrote her a ticket for not wearing a mask. Gianni told the Herald the parking lot was nearly empty and that she felt set up by police.
She’s not the only one.
If you ever have any doubt about how the state forces compliance with arbitrary dictates like vehicle registration, it is the promise of violence. If you do not obey every single arbitrary traffic code, you will be issued a promise of extortion via a citation. If you refuse to pay those who are doing the extorting, they will kidnap and cage you. If you refuse to be kidnapped and caged, they can and will initiate violence against you.
Over the years, the Free Thought Project has reported on countless instances in which people have been beaten or even killed over things as trivial as a burned out light bulb on their license plate. As the following case illustrates, the state is willing to hold children at gunpoint while beating and arresting their mother for failing to pay the state for a vehicle registration sticker.
The video, recorded by San Jose resident Josh Gil, shows police stop a family in a McDonald’s parking lot. When the video begins, the mother is outside of the car and on her knees. She is not resisting and not posing a threat when all of the sudden one of the officers appears to kick her in the face.
Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) issued an executive order Wednesday requiring residents to wear masks outside of the home as the city battles rising coronavirus cases.
“Basically what it says is, if you leave home, you should wear a mask,” Bowser said at a press conference. “This means, if you’re waiting for a bus, you must have on a mask. If you are ordering food at a restaurant, you must have on a mask. If you’re sitting in a cubicle in an open office, you must have on a mask.”
The order, which allows for fines of up $1,000 per violation, won’t be enforced on children under the age of 3 and people who are actively eating or drinking.
The mayor also said she will extend the District’s state of emergency.
Here is a nice compilation of the high-tech police state in action. One can only imagine when this gets combined with facial recognition, health databases, social distancing, contact tracing and all the rest – oh, wait, they’re already doing some of that in these videos.
The federal government’s response to COVID-19 has been a hot mess, and state and city officials haven’t done much better. But if there’s one thing at which governments have excelled during this crisis, it’s been collecting fines from anybody who steps out of line.
Whatever else it is, the great pandemic of 2020 has turned into a revenue-collection opportunity for officials who demonstrate little competence at anything other than squeezing their unfortunate subjects.
Hellbound and Down 
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