Serve and Protect? Democrat Wake County Sheriff Suspends Senior Well-Check Program

RALEIGH – New Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker has been making headlines in his young tenure as the county’s top law enforcement official, but not for high profile busts or early success in reducing crime. No, Sheriff Baker has earned publicity for things like suspending the county’s cooperation with immigration officials and releasing criminal illegal aliens back into the community instead. And now, the sheriff is in the news once again for inexplicably pulling the plug on Wake County’s senior well-check program.

Seriously.

From WRAL:

“Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker is ending a program in which deputies check daily on dozens of senior citizens.

Participants in the Citizens Well-Check program live alone and don’t have anyone to check on them, so they receive an automated call from the sheriff’s office at 3 p.m. every day. If no one answers, there is a follow-up call and then a call to a family member. If there’s still no contact, a deputy is dispatched to check on the person.

“If you move to another county, you don’t have as many relatives around. I don’t have a big family to start with,” 84-year-old Robin Ingram said.

Baker said Tuesday that he was elected last fall because he promised to serve all of Wake County, and Citizens Well-Check serves only a small fraction of local seniors.

“At the end of the day, the bigger picture here is serving all of Wake County and not just a handful of people,” he said. […]”

So, because the sheriff doesn’t think they can do well-checks for every person in the county, no one should get well-checks? With that reasoning, no one should get punished for breaking the law because we can’t expect every single person breaking the law to get punished. It’s just not fair.

That argument, as octogenarian Robin Ingram says, is stupid.

“Ingram said she was so upset to hear the program would end on July 1 that she called Baker to complain.

“His argument is, if you can’t do it for everybody, don’t do it at all, which to me is a stupid argument,” she said. 

Baker couldn’t say how much time or manpower is spent on the program.

“If someone is concerned about a member of their family who lives in this county, they can call us, and we will dispatch the closest car,” he said. “We will go there and check on their loved one.”

And if the senior doesn’t have loved ones close or engaged enough to sound the alarm to go check on grandpa? Tough luck. If they’re incapacitated or worse, dead, know one will know for who knows how long.

As noted above, no numbers were announced as far as manpower and time spent on the program. Conceivably, if the program included thousands of people, it could be a drain on resources that maybe needed for other law enforcement duties to keep communities safe. Yet, Baker likely would have cited the costs and strain the program causes if that were the case. Plus, we know the program only consists of merely 100 people, with others on a waiting list.

So, what could have motivated this new Democrat Sheriff, who has already demonstrated an fealty to the progressive cause regarding illegal immigration, to cancel a small senior well-check program? Surely, it’s not political.

“Former Sheriff Donnie Harrison started Citizens Well-Check in 2005 and called it one of his proudest accomplishments when he left office last year.

Harrison started it after his mother’s death. His father was living alone, and he wanted to provide a resource for him and other Wake County seniors to remain in their own homes as they aged.

He said Tuesday he was disappointed by the decision to end it.”

Sheriff Donnie Harrison is a Republican. During his long tenure as Sheriff of Wake County, Harrison also implemented the cooperation contract with ICE to detain illegal alien criminals for immigration enforcement. Baker campaigned against, and ultimately suspended that program, at the expense of Wake County communities’ safety. Being that the senior program is named the ‘Citizens Well-Check’ program, perhaps Democrat Sheriff Baker was triggered by the ‘citizen’ terminology? After all, that would be consistent with his explanation that he only wants programs that serve everyone in Wake County, not just a handful of citizens that reside in the county legally.

If you have senior loved ones that live alone in Wake County, then you might want to give them a call to check in. Sheriff Baker doesn’t seem to think it’s worth his deputies’ time.