Stay-At-Home Executive Order Scofflaws Cited By Police

There appears to be some confusion over how to enforce the stay-at-home order issued by Gov. Doug Ducey Monday.

Gov. Ducey’s executive order, which went into effect Tuesday, closed all restaurants and bars to patrons, and urged Arizona residents to stay home unless they were “conducting or participating in essential activities,” such as shopping for food and medicine, seeking medical or mental health care, or caring for family members and pets in another household, the order said.

At the same time, his order allowed Arizonans to continue working outside their homes, and allowed essential businesses to stay open, including hair and nail salons, which generated controversy until that provision of the order was rescinded on Friday.

Left largely unclear in the Executive Order was how authorities would enforce measures to curtail public activities. Left up to the departments themselves, officers are now citing residents who fail to follow the rules.

“Right now, our main focus is on education,” Glendale Police Sgt. Randy Stewart said. “Educating people that might be violating the order so that they have an understanding of what the order is, and what they are supposed to do to comply with the order.”

Education

According to Sgt. Stewart, the order has been a learning process for his department. Under the provisions of the order, officers in his department are not allowed to stop traffic or pedestrians in order to give a citation if they are violating the order, unless they are responding to a service call involving a violation, Sgt. Stewart said.

Officers are also required to give a verbal warning to first offenders instead of a citation. After the first offense, police must give a citation, Sgt. Stewart said. As of Wednesday, Glendale Police had not cited any residents, he stated.

If distributed, the citation is filed as a class one misdemeanor and can be taken to court; however, Sgt. Stewart did not know if the regulations are consistent with every department throughout the state, or even if every department had to follow the same protocol.

“Like I said, it’s new, so I don’t know what all the rest of the cities are doing,” Sgt. Stewart said. “I think the main focus from the departments that I’ve heard from is education.”

Public information officers from almost every department in Maricopa County declined the chance to discuss the regulations over the phone. Glendale and Tempe were the only agencies who responded with a phone call.

Do valley businesses get cited?

Phoenix Police Sgt. Mercedes Fortune confirmed via email that they “are also now responding to calls associated with restaurants who are not following the executive order and large groups of people who are not practicing social distancing.”

Sgt. Fortune was unavailable for further comment.

In regard to valley businesses, Sgt. Stewart said that non-essential businesses that are still fully open will also be cited by “city services,” and not by the police.

To add to the confusion, Tempe Police Detective Natalie Barela said her department had cited open businesses throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic since before Ducey’s official Executive Order was declared Monday.

“We had information that Brick and Barley was operating outside of the proclamation guidelines and rules,” Detective Barela said about a citation her department gave out last Sunday. “Officers and a couple Lieutenants responded out, and they identified that they were in violation, and the business owner was cited.”

However, Detective Barela was unaware that Phoenix Police began citing residents that were violating the order, and to her knowledge no citation had been made in Tempe, Detective Barela said.

In order to educate residents on what activities they can still do, Sgt. Stewart said “we’re actually trying to come up with some literature that we can actually have to provide to them some of the basics of the laws.”