Letters: Female Dispatchers Can Handle Type A Leaders; Document Shows the U.S. No Longer the Good Guys

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Female Dispatchers Can Handle Type A Leaders

This letter is about the conflict involving 911 Dispatch. Based off of The Chronicle’s article, it is clear most of the conflict involves law enforcement and fire administrators, 911 administrators and county commissioners. It is important to note that all of the involved parties in this “breakdown in communication” (apart from Commissioner Edna Fund) are men.

That’s why I was surprised by this: 

“Snaza and other chiefs said a manager with a take-charge, Type A personality does particularly well in a law-enforcement or emergency communications setting. 

“Schulte acknowledged that (Dave) Anderson does not have a Type A personality, but said a manager of the 911 center needs to take a softer approach, notably because up to 70 percent of dispatchers are women.”

News flash to Schulte: Female dispatchers are not delicate little flowers. They deal with people at their absolute worst moments. They get screamed at, get sworn at and are responsible for the safety of police and firefighters who are responding to potentially dangerous situations. If a female dispatcher can handle emergencies, I think one can assume they could also handle a “Type A personality.”

Schulte’s quote shows just how out of touch he must be from the real trouble at the dispatch center. 

Blaming a conflict that involves a bunch of men on the 70 percent of female dispatchers is, as interim dispatch manager David Anderson would say, “hogwash.” Or, to put it in less diplomatic terms that Schulte would understand, it’s bull crap.

 

Stephanie Schendel

former Chronicle reporter

Seattle

Document Shows the U.S. No Longer the Good Guys



The law of war has long been part of who we are as a nation. George Washington, as commander in chief of the Continental Army, agreed with British adversaries that the Revolutionary War would be “carried on agreeable to the rules which humanity formed” and “to prevent or punish every breach of the rules of war within the sphere of our respective commands.”

During the Civil War, President Lincoln approved a set of “Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field.” 

After World War II, U.S. military lawyers, trying thousands of Nazi and Japanese defendants before military commissions did, in the words of Justice Robert Jackson, “stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of law” in “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

The new Law of War Manual by the Office of General Counsel released by the Obama administration in June 2015 now sanctions among other atrocities nuclear attacks and the killing of civilians. The LOWM also justifies the use of napalm, herbicides like Agent Orange, depleted uranium weapons and drone missile strikes.

This document attempts to distinguish between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” acts of military violence against civilian targets. Under the criteria set forth in LOWM, mass slaughter of civilians can be justified if military advantages gained by the slaughter are deemed sufficient by the military officers involved. The similar previous 1956 Pentagon document stated “that any deliberate targeting of civilians was illegal and a war crime.”

The LOWM, in stating “there is no general prohibition in treaty or customary international law prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons,” ignores international covenants that state even threatening the use of nuclear weapons is illegal and thus is considered a war crime. The LOWM authorizes the use of cluster bombs, mines and booby-traps because “the United States is not a party to the 2008 U.N. Convention on cluster munitions.”

This Pentagon document also authorizes the use of hollow-point exploding bullets, rationalizing that the U.S. is not party to the 1868 St. Petersburg declaration banning their use.

War is never civilized. However, international humanitarian laws seek to limit the effects of armed conflict between nations, including the protection of those who have not or are no longer taking part in hostilities and by restricting the means and methods of warfare.

This new U.S. military document clearly illustrates the downward slide of the United States from a pseudo-democratic society to one of oligarchic totalitarianism. The LOWM puts an end to the myth of the American military as the good guys who only fight on the side of right and freedom. This document is the Pentagon’s attempt to justify the excesses of its current war machine. 

 

Larry Kerschner

Centralia