Time to consolidate police again

To the editor:

In the 70-plus years I have lived in this valley, it has been my belief that the Clark County sheriff is the chief law enforcement officer in the county. It is his elected responsibility to protect all of the citizens, young and old, wherever they may be. In that regard, the Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff's Department were consolidated in 1973. Overall, this has worked quite well.

We now face a budget emergency of great proportions. The problem of cost in law enforcement is distribution of services. We now have many sub-kingdoms that are inefficient and cannot sustain themselves.

It is time to reconsolidate. The Clark County School District is failing at teaching the youth of the community and yet is also trying to be a police agency. The school district police should be incorporated into the Metropolitan Police Department and protect the neighborhood and the schools within the neighborhood. When a police situation develops in a school setting, it should become a police matter, not handled by school personnel who cannot handle even the educational aspects of the school.

Substations should exist in the larger schools, and smaller schools should routinely be visited by neighborhood bike patrols.

The school police serving in Boulder City, Henderson and North Las Vegas should be incorporated into those jurisdictions as neighborhood patrol officers.

The park police of Las Vegas and Clark County should immediately be incorporated into the Metropolitan Police Department as part of a neighborhood policing program.

Such a redistribution of police manpower will offer greater protection to the citizens of Clark County and save huge amounts of taxpayer dollars at the state and local levels.

We need to be concerned with citizen protection, and not the ego and power of a few local dynasties.

CHAS MUSSER

BOULDER CITY

Never sorry

To the editor:

In 1970, there was a sappy movie called "Love Story." To make a long story short, the female lead develops a terminal disease, but before she dies, she tells the man, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Politicians make idiotic law and never have to say they're sorry. In the 1990s, Congress threw up a wall between the FBI and the CIA that kept them from talking to each other. Result? One of the reasons we couldn't catch the terrorists responsible for 9/11 before they killed 3,000 of our citizens. Tax revenues are at an all-time high, but Congress still spends more than the government takes in. Result? A huge deficit.

Congress puts Social Security taxes into the general fund and spends all of the money. Result? Social Security will be bankrupt by 2041. Congress mandates that ethanol be made from corn and subsidizes it at 50 cents a gallon. Result? Rising food prices and people starving all over the world. Congress will not let us drill for oil domestically and won't even let us build new refineries. Result? Gasoline at $4 per gallon and rising.

Now these brilliant politicians want to cap and trade carbon. When the economy tanks and our way of life is completely destroyed, don't expect any of them to say they're sorry. They have shown us repeatedly the word isn't in their vocabulary.

Robert Gardner

HENDERSON

Construction deaths

To the editor:

How many more men are going to die working at the CityCenter project ("Crane worker killed," Sunday Review-Journal)? When does OSHA step up to the plate? Who investigates OSHA?

Ben Merliss

LAS VEGAS

Appeasement reality

To the editor:

We know our decidedly non-reading "decider" is historically illiterate, but it's depressing that so many of his apologists are as well.

Somebody should point out to Ann Coulter (commentary, Friday Review-Journal) -- and she can perhaps whisper in her fearless leader's ear -- that no one (until now, of course) has ever accused Neville Chamberlain of being an appeaser for the sin of "talking" to anybody; the appeasement he was guilty of was essentially telling Adolf Hitler, "OK, take Czechoslovakia if you must and we won't intervene; just promise you'll stop there."

Like so many of the neocon attacks, this one is also not reality-based. I know they have an abiding faith that they can create their own reality, but that only works with a credulous and uninformed public. That's something they can apparently no longer count on -- at least judging by the midterm elections.

Barbara Fenton Bernstein

PAHRUMP