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Metro officer’s status fodder for questions

To the editor:

After reading “Officer faces new legal woes” (July 19 Review-Journal), I wonder if anyone in the Metropolitan Police Department is thinking clearly. The first paragraph states that Officer Jesus Arevalo is facing termination in the December 2011 shooting death of Stanley Gibson. The second-to-last paragraph states that a pre-termination hearing was set for August, and that no matter what the pre-termination board decides, Sheriff Doug Gillespie will make the final determination.

So why is there a need for that hearing? Why has it taken so long to even set a date for it? Furthermore, the article states that Mr. Arevalo has been suspended with pay. Why couldn’t he have been put to work in a file room, or on a desk job answering phones? Or if he’s not fit to carry out those duties, put him to work as a custodian. If he had been put to work, maybe he would have had less time on his hands to find more trouble, and he wouldn’t be facing the assault charge from the February incident.

For all practical purposes, Metro has given Mr. Arevalo a paid vacation for at least 18 months. And we wonder why the police department regularly asks for additional funds. No private business could sustain an unproductive employee for such a long time. Is the Las Vegas Police Protective Association so powerful and so out of touch with reality, or is their intent to keep Mr. Arevalo on the payroll long enough to have him draw a pension check?

HELGA LOTT

LAS VEGAS

American crisis

To the editor:

We’re reading and hearing about this crisis everyday. A major American city with a bankruptcy looming, crime on the increase, a one-industry town in decline, thousands of abandoned homes and buildings, heavy union participation, overcompensated public employees, low education standards and an unsustainable future public debt. No, it’s not Detroit. It’s the Las Vegas Valley.

Where are gaming moguls investing their profits these days? Not here in Las Vegas, you can bet on it. Where else can highly compensated public employees retire at age 50 and draw a lucrative, lifelong, defined-benefit pension backed by taxpayers who earn far less and work longer? How can an area support the infrastructure necessary to sustain economic growth when by law, contractors must pay a contrived prevailing wage, and out-of-state contractors are automatically assessed a 5 percent bid penalty on public works projects? And what about the results that rank our very overcrowded and fifth-largest school district in America dead last?

With gaming giants moving to a more lucrative overseas market and online gaming becoming an American reality, what will happen here? Too many of the well-educated will leave for greener pastures, while the old-guard cowboy politicians linger on. We won’t become another Detroit next year, but unless we get it together soon, then just like Detroit, we will succumb to this fate sooner than we think.

RICHARD RYCHTARIK

LAS VEGAS

XpressWest is progress

To the editor:

The XpressWest high-speed rail system is being pushed because once you get a federal program started, it’s there for life. It grows and goes, from a cheap, low-speed, not-very-good rail system ending in the middle of nowhere, to an ever-expanding, ever-growing, right-of-way-extending, super magnetic rail system that creates jobs and revolutionizes transportation nationwide.

Look at how our original rail system started. Look at how it started in Europe and China. Look at how President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system started. Look at how our space program started.

Big oil and the auto industry aren’t as interested in high-speed rail as they were in the interstate highway or the air travel system, but we all know why. We need to get our new rail system started. Progress is its own reward.

JERRY STURDIVANT

LAS VEGAS

Zimmerman provocateurs

To the editor:

The reason for the hysterical aftermath of the George Zimmerman trial makes sense only when you ask who benefits from all the racial uproar whipped up by the media and the usual agents provocateur. A large turnout of the black vote is essential for the Democratic Party to retain power, and they will do whatever is necessary to get out this vote. The liberals need an emotional hook to incite their voter base; black-on-black crime doesn’t work, and Hispanic-on-black is only marginally effective. What really works is white-on-black violence, even if you have to assign a new ethnicity — white-Hispanic — to a Hispanic person.

We see the usual perpetrators here, mainly Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, clothed in the title of “reverend” to give them legitimacy as they incite the mob. And to add legitimacy to their latest get-out-the-vote con, they put up a noble smokescreen, repealing the stand-your-ground law in Florida. Reason does not work with these people, since their intent is not to fix things, but to bring out the vote.

There is one useful outcome from this spectacle. It has become very easy to figure out who is trying to help black people and who is out to use them. Sadly, this technique must be working, or they would stop using it.

ARTHUR McCRARY

HENDERSON

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