Police Don’t Mean Security

Remember the days when the sight of a police officer made you feel secure? He was a protector of your rights!

Those days are apparently over in Ventura County--at least from what I read in the L.A. Times. In horror, I read parallel stories of Ventura County women harassed by Ventura County “peace” officers for wanting to help injured children. The following Thursday (July 26) I read of a Ventura policeman who used a stun gun nine times on a helpless disabled man.

Am I really reading this? A stranglehold used on a woman for protesting the anti-human acts of “law” men? A stun gun used on a helpless man for “causing” an accident?

(And I am reading this within two weeks after returning from the Berlin Wall. What country am I in?).

Yet the worst thing is to read that district attorneys--our “public defenders”--insist that these officers were only performing their duty! As a former professor in two university-run police academies (as well as a grandmother), I am outraged--and embarrassed for those many fine law enforcement officers who still maintain a sense of personal dignity, restraint and dedication, yet must live and work in the paranoidal atmosphere that permeates the law enforcement offices in Ventura County.

Perhaps it is time we put warning signs up for those entering Ventura County: “Enter at your own risk: Lawmen dangerous to your health. First Amendment rights--to say nothing of the Second, Third or Fourth--do not apply here.”

In the case of the Thousand Oaks woman who retorted “offensively” to the sheriff’s deputy, let me affirm: No self-respecting woman in America would have acted any differently than this “doctor’s wife.”

Did I say “doctor’s wife”? The sheriff’s deputy who allegedly held a stranglehold on this woman said “ . . . just because she’s a doctor’s wife doesn’t mean she can . . . “ etc. By focusing not by her own identity but only in relation to her husband--and carrying out her act on this basis (if the L.A. Times story is correct), the officer showed a pathetic need of awareness training in what sexism is.

JUDITH A. JOHNSON

Channel Islands Harbor