After the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, Houston police chief Art Acevedo took to Facebook to share his thoughts.
“I know some have strong feelings about gun rights,” he wrote, “but I want you to know I’ve hit rock bottom and I am not interested in your views as it pertains to this issue.”
I’ve met Chief Acevedo, and he seems to me a good guy with a tough job, but he’s out of bounds here. Like a great many police chiefs and other civil servants in this ailing republic, he could stand being reminded of who works for whom.
Police chiefs are not lawmakers. It is not Chief Acevedo’s job to decide what kind of gun laws Texas—or the United States—has or does not have. Like any citizen, Chief Acevedo is entitled to his opinion, but he doesn’t have any special competence or standing to speak on the issue of gun control. What he has is only a point of view.
Of course, he doesn’t have to be interested in anybody’s views on the issue. That’s one of the nice things about being an appointed official rather than an elected one. But what Chief Acevedo is engaged in here isn’t law enforcement—it’s politics. He went on Face the Nation and insisted: “We need to start using the ballot box and ballot initiatives to take the matters out of the hands of people that are doing nothing that are elected into the hands of the people to see that the will of the people in this country is actually carried out.”
Chief Acevedo may not be interested in our opinions. But we are interested in our opinions, and in his opinions, too, if he’s going to make a habit out of inserting himself into political debates. And here’s the thing: Chief Acevedo works for the residents of Houston. (I was happy to be one of them until recently.) The people don’t work for him. They don’t have political opinions at his sufferance. They don’t require his condescension. He is their employee, and he should be mindful of all that that means.
The reason we have a Second Amendment is precisely to protect the rights of Americans from overreaching, overbearing politicians—and from the uniformed, armed agents who put their decisions into force. Chief Acevedo is one of the latter but is behaving as though he were one of the former. Somebody should clarify that for him.
The Second Amendment, like the First Amendment, is a constitutional provision that says, in effect: “You idiots don’t get to vote on this one.” The First Amendment says what it says, no matter how much that may annoy Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The Second Amendment says what it says, too, no matter how much Chief Acevedo wishes it weren’t so. Not that anybody should give a fig what a bureaucrat in Houston thinks about gun control or any other political issue.
Chief Acevedo should stick to policing crime in Houston rather than the political views of the people for whom—in case he has forgotten—he works. Unless he wants to be chief of police at Face the Nation, the position of sheriff of Fox News already having been taken.
Chief Acevedo needs to give some thought to the question of whether he wants to be a cop or a politician. If he wants to be a cop, he should go stick to running the Houston police department; Santa Fe has one of its own, and God knows Houston’s has administrative troubles enough to keep Chief Acevedo busy. If he wants to be a politician, he should resign his position as chief of police and run for office. Making strident public-policy pronouncements while hiding behind the protection of a position that shields him from direct democratic accountability is not the stuff of which heroism is made.
Acevedo is, by all I’ve been told, a pretty good police chief. I’m sure he’d be a pretty good member of the Texas legislature or the U.S. House of Representatives—or the Houston city council, if that’s what he wants to do.
He should pick one.
