Stopped by a pistol

Dear editor:

The Sentinel-Record coverage of the daylong standoff between the Hot Springs Police Department and a young man with a pistol seemed a bit strange, so we did a bit of investigation and discovered several other details worthy of note.

First off, the HSPD SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team is huge, consisting of approximately 25 members or roughly 25 percent of the entire force. With our rankings in the bottom 3 percent in the nation for both property crime and felony crime, we must ask how this can be justified since neighborhood patrols have recently been reduced or eliminated in favor of “work productivity” (writing more traffic tickets).

It was also discovered that our police department has spent an inordinate amount of our tax money training and equipping their SWAT team. The team has a large arsenal of weapons, including fully automatic M-16s, sniper rifles, weapon propelled gas grenades, shields and body armor. They even have a huge MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) military vehicle capable of driving through a house without damage. One would surmise that our police are prepared for any terroristic threat that could happen, right?

Wrong. Look at what happened when one individual with a pistol holed up in a mobile home. After two shots were heard, our SWAT team retreated and called in the state police SWAT team. That costly action should be unacceptable and is embarrassing to the entire city. It is painfully obvious no one bothered to equip our team with courage.

Heaven help us if we have a real problem in Hot Springs. We likely need to make certain we don’t block any of the exits from town because we could get run over by an armored vehicle full of Hot Springs’ finest.

Don Morphew Hot Springs