Mailbag

Police advisors are hardly toadies

Regarding “Police committees need outsider’s eye,” Mailbag, Jan. 3:

The Glendale Police Advisory Council is a subcommittee of the Community Police Partnership Advisory Committee. The members of the committee are nominated by their individual community organizations to represent the viewpoints and interests of those groups while providing input to Glendale Police Department management. There is no selection process by the department or the chief. Both the committee and the council were established to further the transparency of the department and are made up entirely of volunteers.

The role of the council is to meet once a month to hear any complaints, criticisms or compliments about any member or action of the police department. Any information gathered by the council will be given to the appropriate department supervisor and acted on according to the guidelines found in the Citizens Complaint Report.

The council will report to the committee on any activity and to the City Council as needed.

The Glendale Police Advisory Council is just one of many ways available to lodge a complaint. Other approaches are phoning, writing via mail, approaching an officer on the street or at the station, going to the department website or, if desired, in front of a camera at a City Council meeting.

I assure Carole Weling that the volunteers of the council and advisory committee are giving their free time working toward improving the city of Glendale and its police department by acting as a sounding board and not as sycophants.

Speaking for myself, I have been called many names over the years and certainly deserved or earned several of them. But a toady? Gee whiz.

MARKO SWAN

Glendale

EDITOR’S NOTE: Swan is the chairman of the Glendale Police Advisory Council.

Abortion is not a triumph for liberty

Judging from Sharon Weisman’s Mailbag contribution of Wednesday (“Population control will help ‘go green’”), I can only surmise that while she is concerned with the physical health and welfare of girls and women — and who isn’t — she is also favorably disposed to abortion in the name of progress. To support her position, she relies heavily on the United Nations Population Fund.