Despite the show's positive message, it ran into controversy amid local politics even before national demands for its cancellation. Local politicians where the show had contracts with law enforcement didn't like the idea that their communities were portrayed as having problems with domestic violence, drunk driving, addiction, and homelessness, and sought to have the contracts canceled. The show's host, Dan Abrams, has apparently spoken without authority, and perhaps without basis, saying that talks are in progress to bring it back. This remains to be seen.
However, following a hiatus that started about the same time as Live PD's cancellation, a spinoff, Live Rescue, returned to A&E Friday night. This has a nearly identical format to Live PD, except that it covers incidents in the daily routines of firefighters and paramedics. A host, Matt Iseman, is accompanied by two working firefighter/paramedics, Dan Flynn and Garon Mosby. The difficulty for A&E and all right-thinking people is that emergency first-responders work closely with law enforcement, and you just can't blur the police officers out of the scenes.
This problem surfaced during the show's first episode after the hiatus Friday night. Paterson, NJ paramedics responded to a shooting, and inevitably the scene included police. A public information officer updated the camera crew on the situation, and in order to be reassuring, he and a police officer explained that due to recent outbreaks of violence, the police had a special task force to investigate and prevent such shootings. In the background, the victim screamed in pain as he was loaded into an ambulance.
The commentators explained with Matt Iseman the extreme pain that results when a bullet wound to the leg breaks a femur. Then, Garon Mosby spoke at greater length. He said something like, "I don't quite know how to put this. Paterson, NJ has had as many homicides so far this year as it had in all of 2019. We have the same problem in St Louis. We've had as many homicides so far this year as we had in all of last year. Something's going on. It isn't a Paterson problem. It isn't a St Louis problem. It's all over the country."
This is what makes Live Rescue and Live PD so extraordinarily popular. It's probably also why there'll be a new move to cancel Live Rescue. The programs give an unmediated look at real life, no politically correct agendas inserted.
The problem is almost certainly that the manufactured COVID crisis resulted in mass releases of felons from prison, which unleashed them back onto their communities. The COVID measures, largely unnecessary, have been an inconvenience to more prosperous people, many of whom were simply able to work from home and continued to draw salaries. But to the poor, the manufactured crisis has imposed a genuine disaster, loss of jobs, loss of businesses, and massively increased crime and violence.
Little wonder that from what we've been seeing, neither law enforcement nor the judicial system wants much of attempts by political authorities to penalize church attendance.
