Or as close as Mayor Blake will allow them to come to it. Which is to say, leave cancellations might just as well be permanent furloughs or outright disbandment:
The Baltimore Police Department has canceled leave for officers on Wednesday and on September 10th, when hearings are scheduled in the case against six officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, police said.
Canceling leave ensures the department has a maximum number of officers working or on call “in case there are any issues we need to respond to,” said T.J. Smith, the department’s chief spokesman.
The decision was made last week “out of an abundance of caution, just so we’re not caught flat-footed in case there is a need,” Smith said.
"In case there's a need" is a funny thing for Mr. Smith to say, given that there's already a need borne of the city-imposed "less aggressive posture" forced on the BPD in the wake of the (first) Freddie Gray Uprising. What's the point of canceling cops' leaves, vacations, etc. if they're only being called back to duty to sit on the sidelines and watch the rioters demolish more of "Charm City"?
As another revealing postscript to this blurb, looky what Mayor Blake is doing to try and contain the Gotham-like crime wave while keeping her own law enforcement from enforcing the law:
This has led to their asking for the help of federal agents from the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service and the ATF to try to tamp down the violence and establish some sort of normalcy.
In Baltimore, and inevitably the rest of the country, local law enforcement is being federalized. Now maybe it's just me, but that seems like a recipe for enabling greater tyranny than it does for facilitating "fairness" and combatting "racism".
That Obama martial law declaration prior to the 2016 election looks like a better bet all the time.
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