The mail

WHO WILL LEAD?

Regarding Mary Anna Towler’s
“Rochester and Murder: Content
to Contain It” (December 6):

Rochester’s
children should not fall victim to a local charisma deficit. Whose job is it to
plan and execute the policies that will create safety for children in our urban
community? The assignment is too broad for either police or the school system
to take responsibility for.

City and county governments need to decide who’s got the
money and put someone in charge of this initiative full-time — whether they
call it the Children’s Zone or something else. No one is standing by to
“pick up the leadership”; leaders are searched out, assigned, paid
for, and held accountable for getting the job done.

Curfews are the last gasp of an exhausted system.

Susan B Price,
Penfield

WHY NOT?

Regarding “Rochester
and Murder: Content to Contain It?” (December 6): Why would we not be content
with containment? The opposite would be to let it spread everywhere.

The do-gooders have imported more people into the system
than the system can support. The bottom of the gold mine has been reached, not
only in the city but in the suburbs also.

The pie in the sky is to want a money pipeline to every
student and area of violence or poverty. The City of Rochester
has been throwing money at schools for many years, with little or no
improvement. Sucking money out of the suburbs isn’t going to help the students.

I worked for 39 years for Kodak and have been retired 24
years. I live in the suburbs and don’t feel that I need to have my taxes raised
to pay for mismanagement and fast boats.

The answers to our problems are not easy. Demanding more
money from what’s left of the working class is not going to work when our jobs
are being farmed out and immigration goes totally unchecked.

Al Reger, Gates

SUPPORTING ‘SCUM’

So what else is new? One scumbag, Mel Gibson, expresses his
sympathy for another scumbag, the ex-Seinfeld comedian who voiced his venom
with the “n” word. What are we to expect from a Class B actor and director and
a Class A anti-Semite? Unfortunately, Americans continue to spend their
hard-earned dollars for such scumbags’ productions.

S. Saltzburg, New Wickham Drive, Penfield

WRITING TO CITY

We welcome and encourage readers’ letters for publication.
Send them to: themail@rochester-citynews.com or The Mail, City Newspaper, 250
North Goodman Street, Rochester14607.

Our guidelines: We don’t publish anonymous letters — and
we ask that you include your street name and city/town/village. We don’t
publish letters that have been sent to other media — and we don’t publish form letters generated by activist groups. While
we don’t restrict length, letters of under 350 words have a greater chance of
being published. We do edit letters for clarity and brevity. And in general we
don’t publish letters (or longer “op-ed” pieces) from the same writer more
often than about once every two months.

This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2006.