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Fremont should hire police chief from ranks

Re: “Ex-chief to take over in Fremont” (Page B1, Feb. 6).

Here we go again, hiring celebrity chiefs to run our local police departments.

Most local police departments have officers that started as rookies, worked and studied hard to achieve promotions up to captain. I cannot understand why city management won’t hire from within for chief.

Welton Rollerson
Union City

Local news outlets must hang in there

Re: “Truth decaying as newsrooms shutter in state” (Page A6, Jan. 27).

I am new to the East Bay Times branch of Bay Area news. God bless it. You cover local news. You inform us of state news. You pull strong, relevant pieces from the Los Angeles Times and other papers. You still have comics.

The op-ed by Mark Barabak should be read by all. I taught at California community colleges for 40 years and used good journalism as writing models, points of discussion and assignments. I could use Barabak’s excellent analysis and discussion of the breakdown of news in California. It would be an ideal lesson on independent journalism, writing clearly, and fine, persuasive writing.

Hang in there, East Bay Times. Stay local. Stay true. We need you.

Laura Bernell
Walnut Creek

Mold curriculums to students’ strengths

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s” second book, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” describes a society that focuses entire industries around saturating the market with copies of a poor-quality product. This increases reliance on a product that is not supposed to be consumable.

When this concept is applied to education, one example is forcing students to have generalized education plans that don’t account for students’ specific strengths and weaknesses. This leads to an inferior educational product, where students are less successful. This also leads to an over-reliance on degrees and a perception that people have to have good grades or a degree to have a job that supports them. Demand in industries where everyone needs a degree makes us look at people as a product whose value is continually dehumanized and pushed to worse means to meet their needs.

Schools can challenge this by increasing access and making degrees personally significant to each person.

Olivia Reyes
San Leandro

Trump’s corruption is why states run elections

Donald Trump is still trying to relitigate the 2020 election that he lost more than five years ago,.

He has just dispatched the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has no authority whatsoever over elections, to oversee a new 2020 Georgia election recount. The Georgia GOP secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, along with the GOP governor and GOP lieutenant governor, have all certified the 2020 election results, after three recounts. Trump has even gone so far as to try to bring all future elections under the management of the federal government, which is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.

There’s a reason the Constitution mandates each state run its own elections: to ensure that some corrupt president does not try to steal elections to stay in office for life. This moment could be exactly what the founders had in mind.

Arthur Straus
Walnut Creek

ICE contradicts notions of community, kindness

I am ashamed and heartbroken that our president and some members of Congress and our American government are allowing Liam Ramos and other sweet, innocent children and their families to be detained in filthy, horrific concentration camps. Jesus Christ taught us to love each other and to have compassion for the poor and to help them.

Abolish ICE. They are terrorists like the Gestapo and are bringing fear, violence, hatred, cruelty and chaos to our communities. This is not who we are. We are one human community and need to treat each other with kindness and respect.

Joan Redding
Pleasant Hill

Trump’s playbook has degraded our country

Re: “Trump’s playbook is simple but effective” (Page A6, Jan. 29).

The problem with Ed Kahl’s admiring view of Donald Trump’s “playbook” is that it’s a fiction.

There are no more Western Allies left. Trump, in his stupidity, has driven them away. In the interim, he has brought mayhem to our country. What an effective leader.

Stephen Gutierrez
Castro Valley

Boomers have history of marching for justice

“Why are there so many old people at the No Kings demonstrations?” I know why because I’m one of them.

We’re the generation called “war babies” and  “Baby Boomers.” It was our fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who fought the war so we would live in a democracy. We’re the kids who ran around playing war and killing Nazis.

We’re the young people who joined the Peace Corps, marched for civil rights, women’s rights, against nukes, to get us out of Vietnam, and for peace.  Some of us went to the South and joined the right-to-vote movement.  Some of us were more radical and became Black Panthers and Yippies.  Some of us were hippies who carried flowers to San Francisco.

We have invested in living and trying to improve democracy.  Why would we not show up when we’re experiencing the worst attack on our way of life in the history of the U.S.?

Nancy Thornton
Concord