Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti encouraged residents to report businesses that failed to comply with state and local coronavirus regulations in a press briefing on Friday afternoon.
In April, Garcetti made a similar statement, encouraging residents to report on those violating coronavirus stay-at-home orders.
“You know the old expression about snitches — well, in this case, snitches get rewards,” he said on that occasion.
On Friday, citing a surge in local COVID-19 infections, he said:
We know that there still, though, some businesses that are not following these protocols. And that’s risking spreading the virus, and preventing other businesses from opening, or staying open. As part of our general enforcement work, the City of Los Angeles inspectors went to 539 businesses yesterday, and we found 97% compliance. That’s good news. And to those three percent: we need 100% compliance. In the last two weeks we’ve also received complaints, through 3-1-1 and our helplines, 288 complaints about non-compliant businesses, not following the public health rules necessary under this COVID-19 crisis. These complains are then referred to the city attorney. And I would encourage folks to please, let us know. We can send city inspectors out, and fine businesses, but it’s easier if we know where we’ve seen non-compliance, and we can help people comply. Again — we educate, we encourage, before we enforce.
Garcetti also provided a web address to “report recurring business violations of the Safer at Home order”: Coronavirus.LACity.org/Violation.
Asked by Breitbart News whether encouraging citizens to inform on one another evoked “police state” practices, Garcetti replied: “No. The police state is — we enforce things all the time, and we had business complaints long before COVID-19 … that’s what we do.”
Though there has been a local surge in reported infections, and hospitalizations, the number of deaths has continued to fall, according to Los Angeles County public health data.
Garcetti said that was a result of more young people being infected, and cautioned that after five weeks of decline, there had been an uptick in deaths.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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