The Bristol County sheriff is dangerous, not only for those in his facilities, but the county in general.
His job is to run his jails and get people to and from the courthouse. To do his job correctly, he should approach it objectively and avoid treatment based on a person’s color, race, religion, place of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or anything other characteristic, and all that should determine their treatment is that they are in a house of correction, not one of horrors.
Political beliefs should never enter into how anyone in a county facility is treated by those who run it.
In the recent past when, after volunteering inmates in the Bristol County House of Corrections to help Trump build his wall at his own swearing into office announcing,
“I’m making a formal offer to President-elect Trump, that inmates from Bristol County and from across the nation, through Project N.I.C.E., will help build that wall,”
people began to question this, and in looking into it, discovered a plethora of questionable conduct. The sheriff dismissed what they found and those who found it as just political opposition because a county sheriff in Massachusetts volunteering his inmates to the newly inaugurated president known for his political stance on the Border Wall and animus toward immigrants is certainly not a political act done by an elected public official.
Besides being a clever form of slavery, unpaid workers doing jobs that could mean a paycheck to another person to keep profits high for the construction company with more workers to get the work done than paychecks to compensate them for the work as the inmates would be “volunteers”, the cost of transportation, food, and housing would be covered by the taxpayers of a county who could benefit from some local volunteer project without the need to add on the costs of transportation and housing.
When to prevent such political and expensive grandstanding in the future, the Massachusetts House voted 120 to 35 to prevent the use of inmate labor beyond the borders of Massachusetts Sheriff Hodgson declared the bill would
“show once again that personal political agendas are more important than keeping our citizens and legal residents safe.”
As talk of Sanctuary Cities and Safe Communities began to increase because of the Miller/Trump policies toward immigrants and refugees, and elected officials and local law enforcement began to object to a federal agency creating an unnecessary adversarial and potentially dangerous relationship within local communities between police and people by having raids and representing ICE as the local police, Hodgson condemned this saying,
“Now we have elected officials who are saying they’re going to protect them, undermine a judges ruling and law enforcement and expose us to even greater dangers when we try and round these people up.”
He would later not only engage in it, but would defend his own undermining of a judges ruling as to do supported his political agenda.
When Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey called on Daniel Bennett, secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, to investigate the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office citing concerns about suicides and allegations of “harsh or unhealthy” conditions at the two county-run jails that house some 1,005 pretrial and sentenced inmates, she referred to stories by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting that ran in The Boston Globe and on WGBH radio, showing that Bristol County accounted for nearly a quarter of all the state’s jail suicides between 2006 to 2016 even though it housed just 13 percent of inmates.
She also referred to lawsuits filed against the sheriff’s office for segregating mentally ill inmates for long periods of time, denying services, and exposing them to harsh conditions, saying that these suits were consistent with reports from her office’s Civil Rights Division about issues related to “inadequate mental health screening and treatment, denials of medical care (and) unsanitary conditions.”
Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson dismissed the Attorney General’s call for an investigation as politically motivated and an effort to intimidate “those who uphold the laws.”
He claimed investigating him based on documents presented to her, an investigation that had the possibility of clearing him and silencinc critics, he, instead claimed,
“It’s rank politics on the part of the AG. She ought to be ashamed of herself.”
As a result of a document dump coming from law suits, it was found that after having seen leaflets in several languages on a table at the back of his church where various pamphlets on various topics are displayed informing immigrants of their rights when dealing with law enforcement, without having spoken to his parish priest, the Parish Council, or anyone connected to the church he attends each Sunday Sheriff Hodgson, emailed Trump’s advisor Steven Miller at the White House,
“Stephen, thought you might like to see samples of cards I discovered in a holder at the back of [my church] in Dartmouth, MA. While attending mass last Sunday, I noticed a holder on a table near the entrance marked, ‘ICE-Immigration’ and noticed the three stacks of colored cards. Trying to determine if this is an isolated situation or a common occurrence in other parish churches.”
He justified this by claiming it was his duty to inform the White House of “efforts to try to help people avoid abiding by the law” which these cards did not do as they merely explained to immigrants, some who might have come from countries where the police were the enemy, how to interact in this country so as not to make any situation worse than it needed to be.
Unlike his one time, very public volunteering of inmates to help build the wall, he went further in pledging this was only the first step in an ongoing process.
“My undercover units are poised and ready for whatever we can do to identify and expedite the arrest and removal of criminal illegal alien. Our discussion regarding a hotline is clearly relevant.”
The sheriff claims he reacted as a law enforcement professional when he saw the cards, and was in no way being political, explaining,
“I thought it was appropriate to make Washington aware when these things were happening. If these kinds of things are going on in churches, then we should be aware of it,”
although it doesn’t seem to be standard procedure for local law enforcement to say nothing to the pastor while quietly sending an email to Stephen Miller in which he named the church.
This is not his job. This is clearly politics.
As the list of abuses at his jail grew, the suicides continued, his white supremacist ties, in both meanings of that word as, once it was discovered that the tie he sports in his official portrait bears an anglo-confederate design and being asked if he would continue to wear it the sheriff said he would because “It represents the colors of a country that’s given me the opportunity to serve,” were revealed, and because of his lack of taking appropriate steps to care for those in his ICE detention unit during the beginning of the pandemic, people called for his resignation, and the sheriff dismissed with,
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In like manner, when advocates addressed releasing non-violent ICE detainees that had not broken any law beyond being here without the proper papers, the sheriff’s spokesperson released a statement saying,
“We suspect these detainees are working with outside political activist groups to use the coronavirus crisis to advance their political agenda.”
As Corona virus began to show up at the house of corrections and people’s concerns were being validated, apress release said,
“Any headlines or press releases from political activist organization claiming infections or outbreaks are completely false and reckless,”
The sheriff’s attitude regarding politics is erratic and blatantly self serving.
While he goes beyond his duties and officially communicates with the White House, specifically with Steven Miller to whom he wrote in emails,
“Stephen, I couldn’t have been more proud of you as I watched you dress down the CNN reporter and school him on immigration law and the origin and meaning behind the Statue of Liberty. I have to believe President Trump must be equally as proud you stood squarely in the face of yet another attempt, undermine the President’s agenda to protect the interests of all Americans and our legal residents. Congratulations on your continued good work for the President and our nation. Many are singing your praises here on local radio and around the water coolers.”
and,
“Stephen, Excellent article highlighting your unique talents, intellect, and political savvy. The President is truly fortunate to have someone who is in sync with his mindset and able to drive his agenda. Congratulations!”;
When people produce documentation and statistics showing things are not well behind the walls, the sheriff will cry politics because law enforcement, himself, is under siege from anti-Trumpian, radical lovers of all thing criminal.
Issues are dismissed and ignored.
He creates a fear of law enforcement within the immigrant communities in the county by making sweeping generalities about immigrants, painting a picture of these people as a threat to the larger community, and letting his white supremacist biases feed those who eat it up, with part of his strategy being presenting himself as the leading law enforcement person in the county when in reality he is elected by the voters to do a specific job, and that’s not it.
So you would think that a person, who claims county safety is his number one concern, and condemns both the alleged hatred of all law enforcement by the politically motivated critics and politics’ attempting to oppress it, would work to foster a good relationship between the community and local law enforcement, and keep politics out of it.
Agree or disagree with them, there are people who see a need to reform policing, and they base that need on things that are observable. Simply dismissing those concerns without so much as a show of faux interest keeps the anger rising to a boil. Worse is actively misrepresenting their concerns in order to influence people’s perception of a concern so dismissal of it will have wide support even as the supporters have no idea they are victims and pawns of a ruse.
And, in the case of Bristol County, what is abhorrent is that, while spewing falsehoods about the immigrant community, the sheriff let’s his white supremacist leanings drive his self aggrandizement and his creating an Us/Them division in the county built on a race and color line which harms the community, but benefits him.
Whenever there is a political street gathering in New Bedford, the sheriff will drive by, and most recently that would have been the Black Lives Matter actions. Such gatherings on such an issue make sense in a city whose whaling and manufacturing history meant this has been a multi-racial, multi-ethnic city going back to its founding and days as a terminus on the Underground Rail Road. He is aware of this.
In spite of the reality that a person can support those who point out that the lives of Black people matter and can still support the police, and that person can be of any race, religion, color, sexual orientation, or political party, the sheriff has aligned himself with the movement Back the Blue and Trump Too, as if those two are bound.
Back the Blue came as a result of the latest BLM events and the calls to defund the police, opposing calls for that and a Police Reform Bill they believe will have a negative impact on community law enforcement. They certainly did not result from parades of armed men bearing white supremacist and Nazi flags marching down streets in parades or marches better armed than the watchful police they could have erased in moments if they thought it necessary.
Blue lives should have mattered then too. They could use the backing
Back the Blue and Trump Too creates an adversarial division based on the falsely implied premise that those who don’t back Trump don’t back law enforcement, and distracts as it gets people away from examining what needs to be examined and has them just opposing the whole thing on some assumed to be reality based principle because it sounds good, eases a pin prick of guilt, or gives license to ease up a little on treating all people decently.
Sheriff Hodgson spoke at a recent BBTT rally in Wilmington MA, an event to show support for police push for Trump’s re-election the re-elect. He was there because not only is this a man in blue who sees politics everywhere and wields it like a cross in the face of a vampire, but because he is also the Trump Campaign Chairman for Massachusetts.
“There is no one in this country more deserving of our support,” he said of Trump. “No one has worked harder for us, and now he deserves to have us fight for him. … What would our children and our grandchildren say to us as they look back at our time in history? … Will they say, ‘My mom and dad stood up like real patriots and passed on to us a greater nation, with greater opportunities”.
If you backed blue for whatever reason, but did not support Trump, how welcome could you have felt by the content of the speeches and the implied connection that those two things, the Blue and Trump, are inseparable or you are a fraud.
And, while appearing to Back the Blue, considering that helps set up a subtle political and racial divide, the sheriff gets a chance to have a little white supremacist tickle as he creates and promotes a false division between people of color and the police to accompany his already created fear of the immigrant population of local law enforcement
So while the general assumption is that he has been doing his job, and while many may see what appears to be a series of politically based attacks disguised as concerns for the wellbeing of inmates waged on a wholesome man pure at heart, especially since he is consistent in pointing that out, it appears that all the volunteering, gushing emails to Steven Miller, the tough, macho stance on immigration, and all the other fawning paid off, and now he has an official Trump title that he has been working for since the Wall business.
It is not those who are concerned about the conditions in the jail who are the ones involved in the politicking, but the sheriff who measures a person’s support of those in blue by whether or not they support Trump and on whether that person can repeat racist tropes about minorities and police to create a division that should be prevented, not created.