PORT ANGELES – As Gov. Inslee begins to slowly loosen stay-at-home restrictions on outdoor activities and particularly on business owners getting back to work, the question of who can open their doors, and when, is more important than ever.
Complicating things is the fact that the Governor’s proclamation came with 14 pages of exceptions to the rules, so the question of who can work and who can’t is a little murky.
And who’s enforcing the rules?
We put that question to Port Angeles Police Chief Brian Smith on the Todd Ortloff Show this week.
“We got a lot of questions. And a lot of people have called Dispatch and asked and reported stuff, and we direct people back to what we think are better sources of information. And we tell people when they ask us, you know, that you need to read the proclamation yourself. You need to know what it says. The proclamations are meant to be followed. They’re not necessarily meant for us, in the enforcement side, to be enforcing, if you understand the difference. Out on the street, the police officers are not in a position to know or identify the activity they are seeing, and whether or not it’s tied to some essential function. That isn’t a place that we exist in the system. To investigate something and determine something, you know, you need facts and need a reason to be able to stop and talk to someone. And, I mean, I’m not saying ‘mind your own business’ but, you know, you don’t necessarily know what someone’s doing. You don’t have to get involved in what they’re doing.”
The Governor’s office has set up a webpage where you can report a business that you believe is operating illegally under the proclamation.
That webpage reads, in part: “If this report is about an individual or private group that is not following the proclamation, contact your local law enforcement agency. If this report is about a business that is not following the proclamation, fill out the form on this webpage. This report will be forwarded to the appropriate agency to review the violation for the appropriate response.”
“Say somebody has a license with the state. The relationship is, you know, that business is with the state of Washington and their license. And it’s our expectation that if the business is open, they’ve read that and they have a clear understanding that what they’re doing fits that description.”
“And, important to note, I don’t think your officers are cruising around looking for somebody that’s illegally quote-unquote open at this point.”
“No, we’re not the arbiters. And we’re actually not checking for that. That isn’t, that is not our role. And the same kind of activity could look different to different people, and they can have different applications on the exceptions, depending on what they were actually doing. Like somebody build-…working on a house before the changes in construction. I mean we’re not, you know, are they working on the roof? Are they doing inside? That’s not that’s not a place for us to get involved.”