Ohio Law Enforcement Officer Tells Democrats He Won’t Render Aid To Them, Blames Posts On His Sleep Medication
Always great to see another law enforcement officer weaponize his job by letting his politics motivate his actions. We recently saw this in Ohio, when Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski sent out a Facebook post telling residents to write down the addresses of people with Kamala Harris signs in their yards.
I’m not going to call this a trend, but a second similar incident has happened, also involving an Ohio sheriff’s office. In this case, it’s Clark County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant John Rodgers. Rodgers has somehow managed to put together a 20-year run at the Sheriff’s Office, but also somehow still manages to be unaware of how his job actually works.
Rolling up to election day, Rodgers started mouthing off on Facebook. His politically slanted, completely inappropriate posts racked up hundreds of thousands of views. But it wasn’t until WHIO TV ran a report on Rodger’s posts that anything actually happened to the Sheriff’s Lieutenant.
In a series of posts shown on News Center 7 at 5:00, Rodgers said things like “I am sorry. If you support the Democrat Party I will not help you” and “The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party and I will not help you survive the end of days.”
Another post indicated people would need to “provide proof of who you voted for” if they asked Rodgers for help.
You simply can’t do that. You’re not allowed to pick and choose which calls for aid you respond to based on your political beliefs. And even if these might have been empty words, you definitely can’t say that, not if you’re a public servant. Sure, Rodgers may have been inspired by his personal hero, Donald Trump, who threatened to deny federal funding to “Democrat cities,” but the former president/incoming president wasn’t in the right when he said those things either.
Hilariously, Rodgers has an excuse for his posts. And it’s literally unbelievable.
News Center 7 also obtained the investigative file and discovered in an inter-office communication with supervisors, Rodgers wrote, “I do not remember writing these posts or deleting any posts.”
Rodgers also wrote that he had been prescribed sleep aids by his doctor to help with a sleeping disorder.
“It does cause some of my communication to be ‘out of character’ which is a documented side effect,” Rodgers wrote.
That might make sense if there had been a single “out of character” post among the hundreds of posts made by this law enforcement officer. But there were several identical posts containing the same sort of message, which means these were definitely in character for the Sheriff’s Lieutenant. Pretending you were somehow sleepwalking through Facebook is possibly the only thing stupider than pretending your account was hacked, but the hacked account was only used to send out the posts currently causing problems for you back at the office.
Also, there’s no apology for the “I was asleep when I said it” statements Rodgers is in trouble for. At least not from Rodgers himself. The Sheriff’s Office has issued a statement apologizing for Rodgers’ social media posts, but nothing in the reporting suggests Rodgers feels any remorse for threatening to let registered Democrats suffer or die because he would refuse to render aid.
Finally, there’s no real punishment for Rodgers either. All he’s received is a written reprimand. There’s been no suspension and he retains his post as Lieutenant. That means this recent history will repeat itself because it’s clear there are no genuine consequences for these actions. Rodgers wasn’t smart enough to avoid doing this the first time. There’s no way he’s smart enough to avoid doing it again.