Stephen Libhart, the director of public safety for Dauphin County, says managing public safety issues under normal circumstances is a balancing act. But managing them during a pandemic, amid conflicting messages from government officials and civil unrest, requires a herculean effort.
Libhart, who oversees the county public safety department where the seat of Pennsylvania state government sits in Harrisburg, says from an operational standpoint it requires a little hocus pocus: “You need a magic trick to handle a crowd control in public protest environment while simultaneously ensuring social distancing measures are all being observed.”
He said, “I can’t imagine a scenario in which anyone would be successful in accomplishing both simultaneously.”
When you have the governor of the state breaking his own rules at the state capitol that makes life even more interesting.
For months, Gov. Tom Wolf and Department of Health Secretary Rachel Levine have been telling Pennsylvanians they were under a stay-at-home order that dictated whose work was considered essential. The stricter order has been disrupting lives, ending jobs, closing schools, preventing religious ceremonies, and even funerals. But Wolf violated his own guidance last Wednesday when he joined hundreds of racial injustice protesters at the state capitol.
Dauphin County is still in the yellow phase of lockdown in which people are not permitted to attend gatherings of over 25 people.
Wolf’s move came two weeks after he called county officials who planned to move to yellow without his designation “cowardly” and threatened businesses who followed “the whims of local politicians and ignore the law” with losing their business licenses or occupancy permits.
“You see the frustration on social media, people instantly saying, ‘Well, OK, so I haven’t been allowed to open my barbershop for two-and-a-half months, but it is OK to go out and have a public protest?’” Libhart explained. “Not that they are trying to criticize the underlying message people are trying to convey at a protest, but it causes confusion.”
He added, “And the question becomes, is social distancing only applicable in certain situations? And if so, somebody please define when it’s okay not to social distance.”
On Saturday, the optics of a massive protest in Philadelphia, a county where the residents are also still in the restrictive color code yellow and where the largest outbreak in the state has occurred, frustrated those people who played by the rules and did everything they were supposed to do; losing jobs, businesses, and time spent with family.
Protests large and small continue in Pittsburgh as well as with Democratic politicians and elected officials who have told their constituencies to follow the social distancing rules but are clearly not following the social distancing rules with crowds well over the 25 the yellow designation mandates.
Libhart says the protests illustrate some of the lack of clarity of enforcement and messaging that many counties have been dealing with from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, although not quite in such contrasting issues.
There appears to be no end in sight for Dauphin County residents. The state has still not moved it from the restrictive yellow to green, nor will it next week either. Dauphin did not make the cut last Friday when Wolf updated what counties moved forward.
Libhart has been the public safety director for over nine years. Previously, he was the county’s criminal justice administrator after he retired from military service.
The Dauphin County native has not been informed as to when his county goes green nor why the goal posts for the metrics keep changing.
“My opinion is that the determinations of moving counties from red to yellow to green, they can cite whatever metric of the day they decided to hang their hat on,” he said. “I think that any reasonable person could really look at the totality of it and come to the conclusion of almost every single one of these decisions, in terms of the phase transitions, has been based far more on political considerations than any, any metric that they may cite.”
In April, the Wolf administration elaborated on Levine’s metrics, saying their target goal for reopening was set at having fewer than 50 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported to the department in the previous 14 days.
“I was stunned when the governor acted surprised when he was asked that his first live press conference last week, have they stepped back from the 50 in 100,000 metric? And the answer was, ‘Well, I don’t know why everyone’s so focused on that metric,’ even though each administration had a 7:30 p.m. press conference in April to announce that as the metric that was going to be used as the measuring stick,” he said.
“In public safety, if you give somebody a target, they’re going to endeavor to beat the target,” he said. “And then to all of a sudden back away from it and say, ‘Well, there’s many metrics.’ OK, please define them.”
Libhart said there has been frustration within the emergency management community in how the state has managed the process and the lack of transparency.
“I think it’s been very frustrating because we’re used to dealing within a known set of parameters through the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. And, by and large, response to the pandemic was taken over from the get go by the Department of Health, who has no background in coordination and communication during an emergency scenario,” he said.
Initially, the first layer of people economically destabilized from the coronavirus rules was the small-business owner.
“And now that they’re being faced with, perhaps, permanent closure due to the economic effect of not being open for two-and-a-half months, then the stress is compounding as is the tension,” he said. “There’s already enough tension to go around just with the instant issues driving the peaceful protest. But with that underlying culture and approaching a boil, with the addition of the impetus for the public protest, I think it requires more than just a discussion on, but from all perspectives,” he said of deep instability within the communities and society.
There can be families who have lost their job, a loved one and still want to be part of a protest, it is an extreme hypothetical, but Libhart says nothing is unfathomable,
“Given the current conditions, it’s far more plausible than to say that could never happen,” he said. “Those are the things that require a look at the totality of the circumstances, not just the instant issues in a snapshot of any of the given moment, because the physicality is what really plays into the overall attitudes and persons being willing to actually have a meaningful analysis and discussion of one or the other situation without kind of blending the two issues.”
