messed up the quoting:
Assuming by “they” you mean the deputies ,my point is that it’s not so easy to say that the deputies would have acted differently before Davis was jailed if only they had been civil servants. Being a civil servant offers some protection- but that sometimes that only means you get your job back after spending a couple of years in court fighting being fired.
I’d say just the opposite. A civil servant is supposed to enforce policy regardlardless of political considerations.
I came across one of those born again nutters a few weeks ago. She wanted to argue that she should get her kids back from her ex because he registered them in a Roman Catholic school and Roman Catholics were not Christians.
And MPP.
Ms. Davis or her staff might well not have behaved differently had they been civil servants; but had they been, they could have been removed/transferred/sacked administratively and pretty swiftly, leaving the legal arguments to follow later, without disruption to the service. In this case, presumably they wouldn’t necessarily have got the job back, given the judgment that the courts enforced. That’s certainly what happened in the comparable case in this country (though there are other ways of managing people out, often by some sort of redundancy deal, though common-sense compromises clearly wouldn’t have been on the agenda in this case, I assume).