Benicia joins Fairfield in limited curfew enforcement
The agency will respond to complaints about large gatherings and other "egregious" curfew violations.
Officials with the Benicia Police Department say they will enforce the state’s recently-enacted late night curfew that is intended to curb infections of the novel coronavirus COVID-19.
In a Facebook post on Monday, a spokesperson for the police department said it intended to enforce the curfew with “education on the rules and regulations during the pandemic” and would respond to calls for service on “a case-by-case basis.”
“While our staff will respond to egregious complaints of blatant large gatherings before and after the curfew hours, we are not going to take proactive actions to punitively enforce the curfew,” the spokesperson said.
The agency’s position mirrors that of the Fairfield’s police department, which said over the weekend that it would also limit its response to complaints of curfew violations to only the most extreme cases.
Other agencies have taken a different approach: In Vacaville and Vallejo, officials said they would not commit officers to enforcing the state-mandated curfew at all, but still urged residents to follow it.
The Solano County Sheriff’s Office also said it would not enforce the curfew, painting the matter as one where it felt personal freedom and individual choice took priority over the collective health of the public.
Last week, state health officials moved the Governor’s Office to impose a curfew on almost 95 percent of the population after Governor Gavin Newsom said he was ordering Solano County and others to move back into the more-restrictive “purple” coronavirus response tier.
The move came after densely-populated parts of the state began to report a sharp increase in COVID-19 infections after weeks of looser restrictions.
The state-mandated curfew prohibits social gatherings and non-essential travel between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. through the middle of December. It does not prevent people from attending Thanksgiving and other holiday celebrations with family and friends, though state health officials have strongly discouraged people from assembling with others outside of their immediate household.
Until recently, Benicia’s police department was silent on whether it would enforce the curfew. It offered an explanation on how officers would respond to complaints after one of its own became infected with the coronavirus on Sunday.
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