Are You Safe Behind Your White Picket Fence
by Larry Turner

We have touched on this subject before, but the voters don’t seem to have taken notice or they are just too comfortable to feel threatened.

The problem was brought into focus recently when a store clerk was attacked by a customer and then charged with the attacker’s murder when the clerk defended his life while the girlfriend of the attacker was herself also attacking the clerk and she, however, like her boyfriend was not arrested for her criminal conduct.

The problem here is not the police; it’s the prosecutors and judges who don’t charge criminals with crimes or sentence them to jail if they are charged. In that type of environment, the police consider it a waste of time to undertake the paperwork and commitment of time to charge someone who will be back on the streets before the officer finishes his daily shift.

So, we can relax in our comfortable homes on our quiet streets well off the major highways and chat with our neighbors while walking our animals at night and wait for this element of our population to find our retreats and realize what eligible targets we are for crime, or we can exhort our elected politicians to pass tough-on-crime laws and insist that they be applied strictly in order to protect our residents from this type of activity infiltrating our seemingly well-protected enclaves we call home. It only takes one or two thugs who understand the vulnerabiity of our communities before we too become the victims of this sector of our society.

You can shrug this off as something that will never impact your family, or you can begin to realize that the five or ten police officers employed by your town are powerless if your friends are set upon by twenty or twenty-five thugs in different parts of your community at the same time. You will lose! So, do something about it now, while you can. Once the word is out about our achilles heel we are in deep trouble. It’s your choice. Lounge around the pool or drive to city hall and demand that the right laws are in place and that they are being vigorously enforced for the protection of your community.

It’s your choice. What are you going to do?