Oooh! I was just talking to someone with a serious hot take.

So, back during covid, I had cause to interact with the sheriff of our county. We became friends. Maybe not bosom buddies sharing the contents of our hearts or anything, but I can talk to the man about what ACAB really means and he listens instead of being a dick.

So, the subject came up earlier today when I stopped in his office after a dental appointment.

His hot take was that if it had happened here, he would have done his job; arrested the man, processed him, and posted guards on him 24/7 until he was shipped back to NYC. But he said he also wild have personally been present at any questioning or handoffs to make “plain fucking sure nobody did anything stupid”.

He also said that he agrees with why the man is angry, but that murder is too far. Then he said he’s worried about the man because he wouldn’t know who to trust with him. A fairly conservative country county sheriff outright admitted that he wouldn’t trust most cops to keep the man safe.

He even expressed concern about the safety of the people that called in the report in Altoona.

That’s probably the most surprising thing I’ve ever heard from him. He’s normally a fairly unbending sort when it comes to violent crime. Never let them out of jail again type of unbending. But for his thought to be worry about the killer? That’s fucking wild.

Anyway, beyond that, it’s kinda mixed. A ton of my friends are left leaning to full on leftist. So i expected some support. What surprised me among friends is that nobody is arguing that the guy needs the book thrown at him, even among my more moderate friends, and the smattering of conservative ones that aren’t so conservative I can’t be friends with them.

Relative wise, my family is politically mixed. And it’s still new enough that I haven’t talked to everyone because how the fuck do you have a conversation with that many people in a week without a gathering? But the usual group chats are leaning more on the side of the guy than on the CEO. The older family tends to be more about him needing to be in jail, with a few calls for the death penalty, but the “in jail” folks aren’t exactly ranting and raving.

The most extreme of the families, of which I’m not the most extreme, but I ain’t exactly not extreme at all, they want the guy out of jail. Some are calling him a hero, others more of a victim of the system, but the main group chat of us lefties is devoid of any hate for the man at all.

In other words, it’s not a consensus at all. It’s about what you’d expect over any situation where a regular guy does something illegal as a move against the status quo.