THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 27, 1996 TAG: 9604270019
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
After reading yet another article criticizing our law-enforcement community, I ask myself, why do they bother and why does The Virginian-Pilot do everything it can to give law enforcement a bad image?
I can't figure out why police would want to face danger every day when it becomes more and more difficult for them to arrest and jail the most flagrant lawbreakers.
Your paper has eagerly voiced the complaints of people making ridiculous comments like ``that accident was caused by the police chasing a vehicle doing 100 mph.'' Could you imagine police watching a carload of teenagers zipping by at 100 mph and saying, ``We better just let them go so we don't get blamed for the consequences''?
I wish so badly that your staff would take a turn at pursuing an armed and dangerous criminal, making sure that only they were cut, scratched, kicked, punched, shot, stabbed or bruised and not the poor misunderstood criminal.
You really did police a disfavor with the April 16 article about Michael Grandelli. You provide Michael's father, Charles, the opportunity to blast police for Michael's death with no accountability for his own actions. If Michael Grandelli had been involuntarily committed to mental hospitals ``so often that he was well known to the many members of the Hampton Police Department,'' what was he doing out of the hospital? Did he get better?
If his father ``knew him like a book,'' why was he unsupervised and chasing his tormentors with a stick?
Why did his father let his psychotic son have access to a knife? Charles Grandelli knew Michael for 41 years, according to the article, and could not prevent the terribly tragedy; yet you help him blame it on the police.
The very men and women who come to your rescue, risking their own lives to do so, are treated poorly by this paper. I am grateful to the law-enforcement community for hanging in there.
MICHAEL DAILEY
Virginia beach, April 17, 1996 by CNB