Your Views for June 2

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Support the police

Support the police

Our police officers are too busy investigating crimes to respond to ridiculous accusations against them in the Commentary section of the newspaper (Tribune-Herald, June 1). No one wants to solve crimes and bring their perpetrators to justice more than our police officers.

Our officers have a difficult enough job without amateur detectives — whose knowledge and training probably are limited to viewing endless hours of “CSI” and other crime shows — criticizing or second-guessing their efforts.

If you have some helpful information, please do help with the solving of these crimes. If you don’t, please give some support to our law enforcement community by being a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.

Our officers have a difficult enough job without having to endure unfair criticism. Let’s get behind our police department and officers!

Renee D. Godoy

Police chaplain

Buckle up

There may be more incentive now to buckle up; the driver will be responsible for injuries and fatalities (under the new state seat belt law).

If the driver survives and a passenger dies, look for a negligent homicide or similar charge, not to mention civil court, if they weren’t wearing a seat belt. The new law tickets the driver for their passengers not buckling up.

Roger Schweitzer

Volcano

Entrepreneurial spirit

Got to get creative these days and think entrepreneurial — and that’s everywhere in the country.

You want to complain about your life? Come to Las Vegas, where thousands from the islands live struggling to make ends meet, many working two jobs. Most car accidents here are folks falling asleep at the wheel because they are so tired just trying to juggle two or three jobs, family and the unbearable weather here.

We are seeing many college grads who cannot find jobs starting arts, crafts and food kiosks in farmers markets all over country, including here in Vegas.

There are 800 coffee farmers in Hawaii! Gourmet foods are popping out of the ground and making big news! Quit bitching and get off your okoles!

How many years has Hilo been waiting for a Zippy’s? The angels have spoken!

Monica Lewis

Las Vegas

Spineless council

The County Council has wimped out — again. Property taxes are going up.

With the exception of council members Brenda Ford and Greggor Ilagan, the rest of the council people could not resist raising taxes and caving in to the administration, which wants to spend more money, before looking at equalizing the tax structure and before having an audit performed to minimize waste.

We will now see food prices go up, hotel rates increase and more businesses failing or not being able to open for lack of reasonable rents.

Isn’t that great?

Bob Dukat

Pahoa

‘Detection dogs’

Want to help our Hawaiian Islands and people to live better and longer lives?

Want to nip cancer in the bud by detecting it long before any symptoms appear? Want to help bring Hawaiian prisoners back to Hawaii and rehabilitate them properly at no cost to the taxpayer?

There is a way, a great way, to make all this and more happen, and all we have to do is join our voices to tell our county and state governments that we want this to happen.

How to do all this? By training people in and out of prison to train and use detection dogs who can sniff out cancers (and many other things) more effectively and cheaply than any other method.

The first step toward making the training of detection dogs a major industry here in Hawaii is to offer detection dog training as a new vocational program for Kulani prison when it reopens this September.

Various members of the government and prison system have been very supportive of this idea, but no firm commitment has yet been made. But, as with so many other good ideas here in paradise, this might die out from lack of momentum.

Therefore, I am asking all of you who want to save the lives of shelter dogs and give them good careers — and those who want to save our Hawaii citizens from poverty and/or repeated cycles of “offending” and imprisonment by offering them a vocation from which they can earn a great living (detection dogs sell for $25,000 each!) — to contact the governor, the head of the prison system, the mayor and all of the elected members of our state and county governments to show your support of this idea.

Carl Oguss

Hilo