Coronavirus has people calling the police and shaming neighbors on social media

[Sancho]

Source: Tampa Bay Times

Hillsborough County deputies arrived at the house in the Lake Magdalene area Friday night to find a crowd of 15 gathered around the wrestling ring in the front yard. Some were wearing costumes.

The deputies explained Florida’s stay-at-home order and the crowd dispersed, apparently before the main event.

People made hundreds of calls to law enforcement agencies across Tampa Bay over the past two weeks to complain about neighbors not following stay-at-home orders, at least as they saw it.

Often the officers arrived to find nothing enforceable going on. Sometimes the offenders had already left, and sometimes there was no offense to begin with. Other times they found clear violations, explained the issue, and people listened. Very few got more than a warning.

Read more: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/04/07/coronavirus-has-people-calling-the-police-and-shaming-neighbors-on-social-media/?trk_msg=CSU5BITPOVE475MS4LUIKS23FS&trk_contact=2LVUQ22E7IOMM9DEEA726PIHT4&trk_sid=IG33UPBE3F6NHKVFKE20ML9M9O&utm_email=1422E4C1E5F9350FC5E7646FE6&utm_source=DayStarter&utm_medium=MG2_Newsletter&utm_term=spending+lots+of+time+on+social+media+railing+against+people+gathered+in+the+park&utm_campaign=A+hurricane+during+a+pandemic%3f

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This has been an issue in Clearwater. One of our neighbors had a pool party and got flamed on the neighborhood watch. It started a debate with the TP45 nuts.

In Floriduh, nothing is enforced (yet), so I wonder how long it will be before there is gun play.

[Blues Heron]

1. hey whatever it takes to get through to the pinheads among us

act shamefully get shamed. works for me. It's life or death here, not fun and games. Playtime is over. Mother nature says go to your room!

[RobinA]

11. You Do Know

this is a liberal board, right?

[redstatebluegirl]

26. A responsible one. We care about each other and t he public.

There is nothing "liberal or democratic" about ignoring the warnings of scientists and doctors put in place to keep the public safe.

[The Mouth]

27. Of the four options

Shame is the least damaging.

1- do nothing
2- call the police
3- take vigilante action
4 shame the Covidiots

I put clustering right up there with drunken driving; I don't care WHAT someone puts in their body, but when your actions increase the risk and consequences for everyone else, don't expect people (not all, but some) to not take action.

Shame beats the hell out of a cop's baton, a vigilante's boot or just letting the idiot cum sociopath continue on their merry way.

Just a cranky .02 from a guy in a tourist area - devastated of course- who can't even go to the parks or the coast. YMMV.

[oldsoftie]

2. I dont like the acceptance of citizens "informing" on other citizens en masse.

Sure sounds a lot like the East Bloc countries in the bad old days.
And i'm sure SOME in govt would love to grab more power using the Covid19 as the excuse. Will they give it up when the pandemic is OVER? Doubtful

[EllieBC]

15. It's being encouraged in some locales.

And even by some on our side.

Fear knows no political side. It infects both equally.

[oldsoftie]

16. Yep.

[The Mouth]

28. A sad fact is that there are authoritarians

all across the political spectrum.

[oldsoftie]

29. Absolutely.

[47of74]

30. Yeah

That is why I will now and always be five days dead before I trust anyone with emergency powers. (People don't like that you know where the ignore button is too). There have to be limits on emergency powers and if Democratic governors need to make it clear that if they are doing emergency powers they will hold themselves and others accountable to making sure they are temporary and only as restrictive as necessary.

I think in fact that if Democratic governors feel the need for emergency powers they should commit to not standing for reelection at the outset and not running for office again for a set period of time. Yeah that might not work politically in all situations especially in purple states but I think if they're going to do that then they need to be willing to sacrifice their careers if needed.

[The Mouth]

32. There has really never been born the person

who should be trusted with emergency powers.

The Romans were very aware of this; they had the position of "Dictator", all power consolidated into the hands of one man. ONLY in case of existential emergency, and then only for 6 months; such when faced with a threat like Hannibal. There are instances in which republican and democratic forms of government react too slowly, invasions, cataclysms, pandemics, etc; but NO human ever born should be trusted with those powers; or if so only for the most limited of times.

I don't care who you are, Obama, FDR, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandala- name your saint- a human just can't have that kind of authority, but sometimes there's no choice.a

[yaesu]

3. I've been listening to my police scanner, picks up the new digital trunk system that departments

use to cut down on the listeners, picks up general traffic but the real secret stuff they use scrambling. They have been getting a lot more domestic dispute calls, shoplifting & yes, calls to break up parties & such called in by neighbors. One local store called last night to report a car load of teens that made 2 trips to the store within an hour buying snacks & stuff, she told them they better start taking this serious & called the police.

[lagomorph777]

4. A wrestling ring in the front yard? That would be shameful in normal times!

[Baitball Blogger]

5. +1

[Sancho]

6. If you read the whole article...

there are a bunch of examples of calls they police are getting.

I saw the pool party, but did not report it. Someone else did though.

I think the police will have to start enforcing the rules with fines or something before SOME people will take it seriously. We have lots of old, vulnerable people in our neighborhood, so the kids having a pool party can be dangerous for some of us.

[sdfernando]

9. It doesn't mention in the OP or article but

if these were mostly Hispanic individuals they could be doing their version of Lucha libre wrestling. They mentioned costumes so that leads me to believe it was lucha libre. It is like a religion to some fans.


......you KNOW that it is REAL wrestling don't you????

[lagomorph777]

13. Like in the Jack Black movie?

Even goofier than I had originally pictured.

[sdfernando]

18. Yep, exactly

...if you think WWF is goofy, you ain't seen nothing compared to lucha libre.

[Roy Rolling]

7. When threatened by the Coronavirus

Trump nuts just want to stand their ground.

[catsudon]

8. i wonder

if this will be weaponized against our fellow african americans in Florida

[Igel]

23. The behavior pointed out is

self-weaponizing.

Nobody else needs to weaponize it.

Any time a population is disproportionately affected by this bug, there are reasons for it. After that, whatever's said is merely irritating.

[Politicub]

10. Social media is a societal cancer

I wish it had never been invented.

On edit: It’s fine to notify the police, but public shaming is a recipe for disaster. It also can become a form of bullying.

[spudspud]

21. Kinda rough situation...

at worst social shaming is bullying, whereas calling the police could end up in someone dead or brutalized if they are a minority.

[Politicub]

22. That's true. I didn't consider that.

There’s no good answer. People that don’t heed warnings are outside of the social contract. I’m not sure how they can be reached because they’re nestled comfortably in their alternate-facts zones.

[Igel]

24. Meh. It's been the same for some folk since time began.

They see somebody doing something they disapprove of, steps must be made to bring them into conformity.

In my old church we had our "mabels", named after a particularly active moralist who insisted to bringing others up to her level of morality and purity by badgering the ministers to do something about it.

In elementary school classes, "Miss Smith, Johnny isn't doing his work!"

On social media, "Look at the video I took, please everybody judge this horrible, horrible person." And then some decided to doxx the person and ruin his/her life. Only to find out that the person so doxxed was actually just reacting to crap flung at them in the first place. (Who has a phone out to record the first few seconds of an exchange, anyway?)

HOAs are great for this. "Mr. Smith's yard is 0.01" too long" or "They have a variety of petunia that isn't listed in the acceptable plants list". My parents ran into the "the rock in the front yard isn't an acceptable color of light brown".

Same attempt at idiocracy. It fued the inquisition, it fuels Stalin's little purgatory, I assume there was some "social network" in Nazi Germany, and in every society there are suck ups who love authoritarianism because they treat that bit of authority as their own private enforcer. It's all a power game.

And it's enabled by people who react emotionally, assuming that they have all the facts and that they really have the authority to sit in judgment.

[47of74]

31. When all this started someone threatened my niece, her babysitter, and the babysitter's little girl

All because they were out going for a walk around the neighborhood. They were all keeping to themselves but someone took exception to the kids and babysitter being outside at all and used the pandemic as an excuse to threaten all three of them. The babysitter was disturbed enough that she called the police who said they would deal with the person who made the threat. The kids are both about 2 years old. So I take a very dim view of people harassing others.

[EllieBC]

14. My sleepy town outside of Vancouver, BC has people forming

a militia.

I wish I were kidding. They went from taking pics and bitching about people being out (while they were out as well) to forming a group to “patrol” the highway and harass people driving in from Vancouver.

Yes I sent screen shots to the local RCMP detachment.

[Sancho]

17. I'm worried about militia here too...

or at least some individual with a temper who decides to take things into their own hands.

Too many guns in the possession of dangerous people in Florida.

[LisaM]

19. We spend a lot of time on an island in the San Juans.

We haven't gone up there since the shelter-at-home order in Washington, but I am on a couple of local online groups there and people are nasty, posting instructions on how to rat out your neighbor. They have particular disdain for weekenders and tourists, and of course are far more tolerable of locals who go off-island to shop at Costco every week.

I think a lot of it is (as with most things) confined to a vocal minority, but I realized that a lot of it is people complaining about things that bother them to begin with, now with the weight of local authority behind it.

I realized that I did this myself. We live in an apartment complex with several buildings, and we are in the one that has the (currently closed) office. We've been approached in the last few days by delivery workers (they look like gig workers, they're not coming in UPS trucks or anything), asking where to go to drop off groceries or packages. Sometimes they can't reach the recipient by phone. So not only are the recipients dropping the ball, we are now confronted with social distancing issues for someone else's packages. i admit it, I got pissed. I posted something here, but worse, i posted a really strongly-worded diatribe on our online bulletin board asking our neighbors to be available for their own packages and to be sure to direct people to their own buildings, since people were letting multiple delivery people into our building and one day there were something like 50 packages piled up in the lobby, signaling a potential 50 people being let into our building, 50 potential infectious germ carriers.

I don't think I was wrong to complain, but my tone was terrible and I realize that it brought to the surface all my annoyance with the incessant package delivery that goes on in our apartment, which has significantly increased since I've moved here just five years ago. We used to have a nice little bench in our lobby, it's been replaced by an ugly package locker. Every day when i come home, there are multiple Chewy packages and Blue Apron boxes in the lobby. Amazon delivery people are constantly trying to get into our secure lobby even though (when the office is open) they are supposed to go there. I let my aggravation with this inform my tone of asking my neighbors not to send everything to our building now, which i shouldn't have.

All of this is a long way of saying that it sounds as if people are taking this opportunity to complain about things that have been bothering them all along. They do have reason to want people to observe the shelter-at-home restrictions, but in the case of the small towns, there is obviously a contingent that resents weekenders, and in the case of the front-yard wrestling, there are probably people who never liked it and now have their chance to gripe about it.

I'm sorry I ranted at my neighbors in the tone that i did, but I think that at least I caught myself before it got worse.

[EllieBC]

20. You're 100% right.

Tourism is the lifeblood of this area. It used to be logging and rails and labour but now it’s tourism. And yes locals despise it and despise that they are dependent on it.

But their bitterness and threats are getting scary. I feel like this virus is going to do irreparable harm to many communities.

[EarthFirst]

25. This is also beginning to happen with trades employment as well...

Fellow industry owners and employees are crying foul on other contractors over situations that they themselves seem to find objectionable; regardless of the NYS exemption guidelines.

They’re taking to social media platforms and comments sections of local media and creating a lot of problems for employers and employees that are still working; following extremely specific guidelines; punishable by intense fines.

It’s ugly out there; I know that we all want to get back to work; however the trades employees who are still fortunate to be working are not the enemy...