Letters to the Editor of the Pahrump Valley Times

Former law enforcement family can’t bite tongue again after seeing letter

I sit here every week and read the letters to the editors and bite my tongue. I will not do it this time. This is in response to Jean William Frenette in regard to police force. I assume he has no law enforcement experience and just sits in front of the television and tells everyone what he would have done. So let me explain this to you. I am a retired law enforcement officer with 23 years on the streets of Los Angeles and my husband has 27 years on the streets of Los Angeles.

No, police don’t volunteer, but they are chosen to do this job. It is not for the faint of heart. I have watched many young people come and go because they thought it was like a television show but when they realize it is not and see the heartbreak and evil dealt with on a daily basis, they leave the job.

So let me ask you this…

Do you say a prayer each time you start your work day and pray you get home uninjured and alive and thanked God when you got in your car to go home?

Have you ever held a baby or young child after their parent has nearly beat them to death and prayed?

Have you ever had to help and young mother who was beaten so badly for the 20th time that she could not see her children but was afraid to leave. Try as you did, she stayed until the day you had to call the morgue and you prayed some more.

Have you ever had to go to tell a parent that who live in gang-infested neighborhoods and were afraid to leave their homes and just gave them comfort?

Have you ever held a person who was dying, with blood all over your uniform until they finally stopped breathing and prayed with them? (Good guy or bad guy).

Have you ever given CPR to save a life and prayed?

Have you ever held your partner who had been shot with their own gun with the hope that they would survive and all you could do was pray?

How many births, baptisms, birthdays, parties, family get-together’s, barbecues, little league games, school events, parent teacher meetings, holidays have you missed?

How many times have you worked 36 hours straight, slept three hours only to have to go back to work in about five hours?

Have you sat in a police car when the person arrested kicked out the windows of the police car, stabbed you, bit you, spit on you?

Have you ever cried at the end of your work day?

How about the young kid who took some type of drug and decided to hitch a ride on the back of people’s bumpers as they were driving.

So you think we should de-escalate…NO officer, I mean no officer leaves the parking lot that day looking for a fight or hoping to shoot someone. Police do accept risk as part of the job and they will be the ones running into the gunfire as you run away from it. When you are on the ground fighting, all you can do is hold onto your gun.

Ignorance is no excuse for what you are saying and it is pure ignorance that you wrote that piece. It is people like you who think it is OK for people to spit on the police, throw things at the police, hit the police, shoot at them and come at them with a knife and then get upset when the police fight back. Yes, danger does come with this job but not where it would cost you your life. You have a right to protect yourself. Let’s see how it goes with civilians making traffic stops in Berkeley. Do you know that most officers become involved in shootings and are killed in traffic stops? Oh, yeah let’s let social workers handle family disputes and domestic violence calls. Right, do you know the City of Los Angeles social workers will not go into a call without the police?

Just so you know, when you are hired by a law enforcement agency, you must sign a contract and no place on that contract does it say that you have to stand by and get abused, injured or killed.

Pray you don’t need help because the first people you will call are the judge, jury and executioner.

Vicky McCormick

There is inherent danger in moving to cashless society

Listening to TV news and reading magazines and newspapers, there is talk about not accepting cash, only credit cards. Why? Is this a progressive play to be able to track anyone and or everyone’s movements and items purchased? If so, why?

Cash, that is what working people have jobs for, not electronic credit. Cash is hard-put to be hacked – but not credit. One hack and one can become penniless and lose everything before the hack is corrected.

What about those less fortunate who work panhandling or for odd jobs – if only cash is used, how do they survive? Are we about to do away with the young having car washes, green card immigrants picking our farms’ produces, etc.?

Cash money is our standard and should not be eliminated. I hope we can agree we are not to the “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” era yet, where one gets credits for what they do.

This sounds much like the reason Planned Parenthood was designed by Margret Sanger. You know, eliminate the undesirables from the elite society. She is highly admired openly by Hillary Clinton and other well-to-doers, the ones who actually preach hate by saying the truth is hate speech and everything in our past history is evil and hateful because it doesn’t correspond to today’s standards.

Henry Hurlbut

Solve country’s issues in November says reader

Due to Covid-19, we’re living in a new, frightening reality, which the Trump administration has failed miserably to address. In Pahrump, however, Republican support for the president Trump’s Democratic outrage over his incompetent, unethical, narcissistic and demagogic nature. I have always believed that America needs two strong political parties. Republicans like Mitt Romney, John Kasich and the late John McCain deserve respect. Currently, however, the former Republican Party no longer exists. It has become a cult with Donald Trump as its dear leader.

Trump is an existential threat to our country. Anyone who is uniformed may think his misguided, cruel policies have had positive impact when, in reality, they are abject failures: Pandemic Readiness (downplaying and ignoring multiple warnings) Health Care (covertly working to eliminate coverage for those with preexisting conditions while publicly touting support), Immigration (separating families and caging children at the border without adequate infrastructure to reunite them with their parents), Deregulation (eliminating many industrial related regulations that safeguard our clean air and water); and the list goes on and on.

No one needs to make America great again; it always has been. Surely, mistakes have been made in our past and slavery will always be a dark stain on our history. With that being said, the recent national protests over George Floyd’s and Rayshard Brook’s deaths at the hands of police confirm that systemic racism still exists. And many other issues persist: Our health care system needs to be overhauled; income inequality prevents many families from financial security and home ownership; opiod and drug abuse continue to ravage communities across the country, just to name a few. When we exercise our right to vote Trump out of office in November and Congress embraces bi-partisanship by working together to find practical, far-reaching solutions to our problems; America can and will continue to be that shining city on the hill…

Marc Fineman