Wekly Standard
Kevin Williamson

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.

Link

Acevedo can kiss my rump.

We are cursed in Houston.
We always elect them because they are a minority, lesbian or whatever rather than someone who can do the job.
Nevertheless Houston still has a LOT of good conservative people despite the liberal leadership ~ not that they care.

If you don't support the 2nd Amendment and respect the Constitution as written - you have no business being a Police Chief. At that point, you are nothing but a puppet for the left.

I don't remember the last police chief in Houston who 'wasn't' a politician as in the military, once promoted past Brigadier General, you are no longer a military guy, you are a pol.

What pol or police chief of a major city (not Mayberry RFD) isn't a politician masquerading as a police chief?

None, that's who...

I assume he's appointed. If he his what are the views of the elected officials who appointed him?

All varieties of marxists and not Groucho....

Oh, you had a shooting in your jurisdiction. Do you own that part of the country? What is it with these "police" in charge? They turn into pissing drama queens when they get the spotlight.

If you don't accept the Constitution, which enumerates (not grants, mind you, but enumerates) our rights, then you CANNOT be an American. You do not get to cherry pick your favorite parts of the Constitution while ignoring the parts you do not like, asshole. Grow up. Figure it out, and if you think you can handle it, them come and try to take our guns.

That's what I figured. They probably have no problem with the opinions he expressed (and he knows it.)

quote:

Originally posted by Birdvol:
All varieties of marxists and not Groucho....

I would suggest everyone run a Google search on "Art Acevedo CHP lawsuit" and see what pops up. Interesting stuff, to say the least. Plus CHP paid him nearly a $1M to just go away.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by parabellum:
Oh, you had a shooting in your jurisdiction. Do you own that part of the country? What is it with these "police" in charge? They turn into pissing drama queens when they get the spotlight.

That's the icing, it was not in his jurisdiction, not even the county Houston is located in. He saw an opening and decided to take it. D-Bag.

Art Acevedo is Law Enforcement in name only. Time and time again in Austin he proved that he is just another politician and bureaucrat spouting off the current mix of polarizing nonsense. He does not represent the rank and file Law Enforcement Officer as many of my friends in this field have made a point to tell me. Now that he has moved on to another jurisdiction he is taking his BS to the next level.

Effing commie cop. It pisses me off that all the big TX cities are now run by these cockroaches.

He came to Houston via the same job in Austin. That should give folks familiar with the political climate in Austin a clue to his personal politicical views.

Stink-sucking racist anti-Anglo SOB.

You guys have nicely illustrated the problem with these "Chiefs":
1- They are politicians and completely out of touch with rank and file.
2- They move from one department to the next effortlessly, no matter how poor a job they do. They have no real connection to the city they serve.

One of the sure signs of a politician chief is if he has a driver or travels with a full time aide.
These guys are the illustration and definition of the Peter Principal.

The link has several Facebook posts I was unable to copy and paste.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.d6d16838f761

Houston police chief ‘hit rock bottom’ after Santa Fe shooting. Then came a nasty feud with the NRA.

By Meagan Flynn
May 24 at 6:27 AM

The three-day-long gun-debate beef this week between Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and the National Rifle Association’s Dana Loesch started with a Facebook post.

“I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve shed tears of sadness, pain and anger,” Acevedo wrote on May 18. “I know some have strong feelings about gun rights 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.”

Acevedo has been a police officer for the past 32 years, 11 of them as chief of a major-city police force in Texas, but there had been nothing like the day he hit rock bottom — May 18 — and the three places he went that day that put him there, he told The Washington Post.

The first was Santa Fe High School. He raced down to the campus, about 30 miles southeast of Houston, with his bomb squad and top brass after the calls for help came in, and he arrived to find a scene of desperation, shock and pain. After hours of trying to organize the chaos, he finally welled up when he and others stopped for a prayer, and he began wondering about the victims, “not knowing who had been gunned down yet, thinking, ‘Are they seniors? Were they planning a party for senior night, graduation?’ ”

The second place he went was to the hospital bedside of the critically injured Santa Fe school resource officer John Barnes, a retired Houston officer who was fighting for his life. And the third trip was to a scheduled memorial for the 114 Houston police officers who have died in the line of duty, many of whom were fatally shot.

He cried on the way home, he told The Post.

“I started reflecting on officers that I personally know,” he said, “a California highway patrolman shot dead, another guy killed by a gang member, another officer gunned down in Austin and having to go to his wife’s house and notify her. The names went on and started racing through my head, and I said, you know? It’s Sandy Hook. It’s Columbine. It’s San Ysidro, at the McDonald’s. There are so many people dying from gun violence, and we do so little to try to address it. We can’t even talk about it without demonizing one another, right? I started realizing, it’s time. I’ve hit rock bottom. It’s time. It became very personal for me that day, because I ended up at a place I had never been, and that’s at a school campus.”

Acevedo’s ensuing Facebook post would be featured in headlines across the country. He started doing more and more interviews. And his comments about gun violence and gun control quickly caught the attention of the NRA. Acevedo, who has long been outspoken about his views on gun violence, has called for universal background checks, particularly to cover the “gun-show loophole,” and stiffer penalties for failure to safely secure firearms in the home, among other things.

On May 21, an NRATV segment titled “Exposing Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo” aired, hosted by Grant Stinchfield and featuring spokeswoman Dana Loesch. Stinchfield kicked off the segment claiming, “Art Acevedo’s solution to gun violence is to hold law-abiding gun owners responsible for crimes they don’t commit.”

The segment centered on comments that Acevedo made on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” in which he highlighted the fact that the accused Santa Fe shooter took his dad’s shotgun and handgun from home to school. “We’ve got to make sure that everyone stores [their guns] in a responsible manner and that there are significant penalties when they fail to do so and people die as a result of that failure,” Acevedo said.

Loesch pounced, focusing less on guns and more on immigration. She cited Acevedo’s opposition to Texas’s law requiring local jails to cooperate with federal immigration officials and allowing street cops to ask people about their immigration status, which Acevedo has said will make undocumented witnesses of crimes fearful of contacting police.

Loesch, characterizing Acevedo’s position as support for illegal immigration, said this made him a hypocrite.

Acevedo “doesn’t believe you have to enter [the country] legally,” she said, “but thinks he has the right to go into every home in Texas and inspect how everybody’s storing their firearms? I don’t think so.”

Looking back on the past few days, Acevedo says now that he should not have responded to these comments with angry tweets.

But that is what he did.

The comments, he said, misrepresented his views and twisted his words.

“Unlike the @NRATV I believe guns belong in the hands of law-abiding Americans of sound mind and will do everything I can to keep it that way and to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable. Goodnight,” he said in one tweet — before continuing with several more.

“Blah, blah, blah,” he said in the next tweet, linking to both a quote from Stinchfield that described him as “a Left-Wing Shill in Cop’s Clothing” and a news article about recent arrests of hundreds of alleged gang members the Houston Police Department made with U.S. marshals.

It would only escalate from there.

Loesch said the next day on her show that Acevedo “decided to have an epic Twitter meltdown.”

“I almost missed it because I was going to bed,” she said.

She described Acevedo’s beliefs as a “gun-grabbing philosophy” — to which Acevedo strongly objected, saying he is a Second Amendment supporter who would fight any policy that confiscated law-abiding Americans’ guns. And then Loesch invited him to come on the show.

Acevedo said no. He also threatened that if NRATV continued to misrepresent his views, he would consider taking them to court. He would be watching them, he said — a comment that became the subject of Loesch’s Wednesday show.

“A free people have the right to call to account elected or nominated political figures,” she said on Twitter. “I will continue to exercise my free speech and do so. You can continue to threaten censorship and surveillance.”

In the future, Acevedo told The Post, “I assure you I will not be engaging them,” saying he turned down Loesch’s invitation to come on the show because he doesn’t believe an actual conversation about gun sense could have occurred there.

But he will keep tweeting and talking about his views on guns, he said, everywhere but on NRA’s TV channel.

“I couldn’t live with myself if something were to happen to one of my children and I couldn’t honestly answer the question ‘What have you done, Chief?’ Not just from a crime-fighting perspective, but from a public-policy perspective,” he said. “I want to be able to say that I’ve done everything I can within my power, which means I’ve spoken up. I’ve stood up.

“I’m tired of people saying there’s nothing that can be done.”

Hmmm... So the "Chief" raced 30 miles to Santa Fe and brought his top brass with him? Slow day in Houston?

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Hmmm... So the "Chief" raced 30 miles to Santa Fe and brought his top brass with him? Slow day in Houston?

That’s where the press conference was.

You don’t want to be the only multi star big shot not getting your air time.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I assume he's appointed. If he his what are the views of the elected officials who appointed him?

Even the lefties in Houston usually keep quiet about gun control. It is a loser issue in Houston as it is in much of Texas. They will, mostly, make noises of despair when there is a shooting, but they don't call for actual gun control. Jackson Lee is the one exception, as her district will re-elect her until she is caught fornicating with a goat, and maybe even then. But she will weigh in as pro-gun control.

I didn't think anything about Acevedo until this. Now I think he is a dunce.

This is above his pay grade and he should keep quiet on politics.