Keeping Us Safe

To the Editor:

Lately, it’s been one horror story after another: a friend pulled over for speeding charged with a $200 ticket, another $300, and then my mom, charged $200 not for speeding, but for a rolling stop when turning right at one of the very many abandoned three-way stops that grace our rural roads. Road safety is great — I love knowing that there is a set of standardized rules guiding the behavior of drivers everywhere. But I also love knowing that when my five younger siblings go to school each day, that I will see them again.

I was getting ready for work one afternoon when I received a text message from my sophomore-aged sister. It read, “There’s a lockdown, and I’m in the bathroom. I’m really scared.” My sister doesn’t get scared — except for the presence of spiders or heights, she is very rational. This she proved a year ago when an intruder broke the sacred safety of our home early one morning. Awake, my sister went upstairs, realized what was going on, and quietly went downstairs where she locked herself in the room with a phone. But after experiencing a recent bomb scare, she was rationally nervous about being stuck in a bathroom stall with a potentially armed stranger afoot. The strained ten minutes that we shared were finally relieved when things proved, once again, to be all right in the end, but not before I was reminded of a day, almost exactly a year before, when a gun was fired outside the window of my science class there at Newtown High.

Security is tenuous. And as humans we hate to be reminded of how fragile we are. I can accept the reality this precludes which is there are instances that will scare us, that will shatter our confidence in each other as good people. But there are forces that are meant to minimize those events, to give us time to heal our confidence in others in between the inevitable. In this case I speak directly to our police force, for instead of protecting my younger brothers and sisters — yes, I had more than one sister threatened with bombs, and she several times — their efforts seem to be spent making my friends and family, healthy and contributing members of society, feel as though they are the threats. I have never been a cop, so I cannot speak on the difficulties each of you must face, and I am thankful for the sacrifices made on behalf of my safety. But something needs to change. Something needs to change so that we as citizens know that the priorities of our police are in keeping us safe from bombs and break-ins and guns, and not in collecting funds and filling quotas. 

Tamarra Kemsley

14 Merlins Lane, Newtown                                                June 7, 2008