SHOOTING TRAGEDY NOT ABOUT MARIJUANA GROWING OPERATIONS

TO THE EDITOR:

It is a tragedy the lives of four police officers who had dedicated their
lives to help others has been taken from us. We all share in the grief
their loss brings.

Out of this tragedy will come the opportunity to assess the reasons these
officers lives were taken and make sure that these circumstances never are
repeated.

Rational thought and reflection must be taken in the weeks and months to
come. The last thing we need is a knee jerk reaction that will do more harm
than good.

This story is not about marijuana grow-ops. It's about police procedures,
and how we, as a society, allow dangerous people to live unsupervised among us.

If all that we can do about this tragedy is go out of our way to crack the
skulls on a bunch of pot growers then we are going to be guilty of missing
the point, and the blood of these four fallen officers will be on all our
hands.

The proper responses will be to evaluate how to make our communities safer
by keeping the types of people that would shoot at someone out of society
and how to improve police procedures so never again will we lose an officer
to walking into a situation under-prepared.

Kirk Stephens