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There were two components to last week's shelter-in-place request in Watertown, Massachusetts. The first was a request that people not to leave home. The second was a door-to-door search by heavily armed law enforcement officials. Those are two very different things, with different implications. But neither was illegal.
No one in Watertown had to stay at home. The shelter-in-place was optional, largely an effort to ensure public safety in the classic sense of such requests. Time explains the difference:
“The lockdown is really voluntary, to be honest with you,” says Scott Silliman, emeritus director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke Law School. “The governor said he wants to use sheltering in place. Sheltering in place is a practice normally used if you’re dealing with a pandemic, where you’re telling people, ‘You may have been exposed and we want you to stay exactly where you are so we can isolate everything and we’ll come to you.’”
The “shelter in place” request is legally different from a state of emergency, which Patrick declared earlier this year as winter storm Nemo descended on the Bay State.
The ACLU agreed. In a phone interview Monday, Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, told The Atlantic Wire that her organization was in contact with attorneys for the city, state, and the Department of Homeland Security on Friday. While the organization was concerned about how open-ended the request seemed to be, it was assured that the order was voluntary and that no one would be arrested if he or she left home in the midst of it. It would have been hard for the police to crack down anyway, given that various Dunkin Donuts locations were allowed to remain open.