A frank conversation on violence would acknowledge the victims of police shootings

To the editor: Every media outlet, every law enforcement agency, every publicized comment from a citizen, every politician’s news release agrees how outrageously wrong are the latest killings of police officers in Baton Rouge, La. I can do no less than concur. (“Cops killing civilians, civilians killing cops. How do we fix this?” editorial, July 19)

However, someone needs to say — as I do now — that until law enforcement agencies across the country mention not only the names of the too many officers killed, but also the names of civilians recently killed by police that are excused as being “within department policy,” and until many officials cease their oblique blame of President Obama for these problems, then we are not actually having a national conversation about these issues. We are simply accepting the conditions of the police state we live in.

How brave we are.

Bob Loza, Burbank

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To the editor: “Certainly,” Ernest Hemingway once observed, “there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” Hemingway was talking about war and the battlefield.

The shooters in both Dallas and Baton Rouge were products of expert military training and the hunting of armed men in U.S. war zones overseas.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said of a different war in an equally terrible period of American history, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home.” Could the same be true of the bombs in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan?

Leigh Clark, Granada Hills

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To the editor: Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people, and we can’t ban people.

Patricia Freter, Yucca Valley

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To the editor: In regard to the strained relationship between police and the black community, The Times asks, “So what to do about it?”

For starters, how about doing what officers ask you to do?

Your editorial calls the recent shootings of police officers “reprehensible” and “indefensible,” and then the rest of the piece places the blame for these disasters squarely on law enforcement policies. As for your call for better accountability, the recent acquittals of the Baltimore officers prove that charging them in the first place with crimes related to the the death of Freddie Gray was a supreme example of over-reaction on the part of the state’s attorney for the city.

One thing is very clear now: If there’s ever a time to support your local police, this is it.

Charles Reilly, Manhattan Beach

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