TNT letters: Refund the police; trash on the highway; what’s up with GOP praise for Putin?
Refund the police
Re: “Tacoma to offering hiring incentives for police officers” (TNT, 02/25/2022)
Wow! Tacoma has been reduced to poaching police officers from other communities. According to a Feb. 25 article in The News Tribune, the City Council has allocated over a quarter million dollars in order to bribe 10 officers to forsake their current departments and join the TPD.
This appears to be another example of how the “Defund the Police” movement is being replaced with the “Refund the Police” movement.
Nearly anyone with common sense could have foreseen this ironic situation. Crime is now skyrocketing. After all, “When the cat (the outnumbered police) is away, the mice (the crooks) will play.”
Many municipalities, including Tacoma — and especially Seattle — are currently almost desperate to backtrack and hire more cops.
However, after the appalling manner in which law enforcement professionals often have been characterized as racist neanderthals, it is little wonder that fewer individuals have been willing to step forward. Why not thank a police officer for their service?
Thomas Hoyle, University Place
Russian gas
One of the world’s leading exporters of natural gas threatens allies the United States has sworn to protect. The world’s leading exporter of oil is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden, whose ghost undresses us in airport security lines.
Electricity generated by burning natural gas is the biggest reason for recent years’ reduction in coal usage in power plants. The Biden administration should do less to discourage U.S. gas and oil production. Local governments should remove non-safety barriers to building townhomes, apartments and condos that share walls and therefore share heat. They should also consider banning natural gas appliances and heating in homes built after 2022, and removing parking requirements for new buildings.
The shopping center adjacent to Sixth Avenue and Pearl Street (where Safeway was), Narrows Plaza near Tacoma Community College, Westgate and the Tacoma Mall stand out as places near me with space, grocers and nearby schools to support new housing in the style of Point Ruston or recent apartment construction in the Proctor District.
Dawson Allen, Tacoma
Highway garbage
We live near the intersection of Highway 16 and Jackson Avenue. Highway 16 is strewn with discarded old broken furniture, bags of garbage, other litter and a host of other bits of discarded items. There is a person who sleeps underneath a blue tarp right near the beginning of the walking lane across the Narrows Bridge, and has two big shopping carts filled with sodden, dirty items. This tarp and these shopping carts are the first thing you see when you exit off the Narrows Bridge into Tacoma. So, welcome to our beautiful “City of Destiny.”
If you continue eastbound on Highway 16, as thousands of people do all day long, you see garbage on both sides of the highway all the way to the Pearl Street exit. I try to pick up garbage and litter when I am out walking in our neighborhood near the bridge, but I cannot even begin to make a difference in the massive amount of garbage alongside Highway 16.
What is happening?
Nancy Keay, Tacoma
Praise for Putin?
A day before Russia launched an unprovoked attack against Ukraine, former President Trump praised Putin for his actions against the independent, democratic sovereign nation as an act of “genius.” (Once a puppet, always a puppet.) Former Secretary of State Pompeo stated, “ I have enormous respect for Putin. He is very shrewd, and very capable.”
Fox News Host Tucker Carlson has for weeks sounded like a Russian propagandist, asking why the United States would take action to stop the Russian dictator from invading an independent democratic nation.
In a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Republicans and GOP independents seem to support Putin as a stronger leader than President Biden. Trump and his cult of Trumplicans’ interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America.
Why are these so-called patriotic Americans supporting an unhinged, authoritarian dictator who wants to restore Russia to its former glory of the Soviet Union? Is this their vision for the future of the United States?
Steve Golubic, Puyallup