5 minute read
Opinion
Join the next Chandler Citizen Police Academy
BY LAURIE FAGEN
Guest Writer
Watch Chandler Police Department’s K-9 dogs sni drugs. Learn how 9-1-1 calls come in to CPD and how they’re dispatched. Find out why tra c issues are the top complaint in Chandler. Go on a “ridealong” with a Chandler police o cer.
Hear from CPD o cers working in robbery, homicide, narcotics, fi rearms, street gangs, SWAT and more during the next free Chandler Citizen Police Academy which runs for 13 weeks from 6-9 p.m. each Wednesday from Aug. 17 through Nov. 9. All classes are held at the Public Safety Training Facility at 3550 S. Dobson R in oad, Chandler.
I graduated from the Chandler Citizen Police Academy in 2018, and was not only impressed with all the great information I learned about the Chandler Police Department, but also how dedicated the local o cers are to their jobs.
The Academy is designed for Chandler residents to get an up close and personal look at the inner dealings of the Chandler Police Department. Participants will walk away with more awareness and understanding of law enforcement’s role in our community.
It’s a great resource for those 18 and older who live in Chandler to fi nd out what police o cers deal with every day in their work.
I hope you’ll consider checking this out and telling your neighbors about the opportunity. Once you’ve gone through the classes, you are eligible to join the Citizens Police Academy Association of Chandler, or CPAAC, a nonprofi t organization where members are goodwill ambassadors who advocate and volunteer in support of CPD’s mission to provide a safe community. Check CPAAC out at CPAAC.org.
Registration for the next Citizens Police Academy starts July 18. For more details, visit ChandlerAZPD.gov/citizens-academy or call 480-782-4960 for information.
Laurie Fagen is a long-time resident of Chandler, a crime fi ction novelist, an artist and former publisher of SanTan Sun News.
Maybe we should each think of ourselves as a choice
BY DAVID LEIBOWITZ
Columnist
She was a 12th grader on the afternoon she got the news she was pregnant, in the humid summer days of 1964. The girl was 17, with a beehive hairdo piled to the sky and dreams of going to nursing school. She told her boyfriend the news after he got o work at the bicycle shop. The fi rst of many conversations ensued.
Abortion was still six years from becoming legal in New York, where the girl and the 18-year-old boy lived. Roe v. Wade was still nine years away from the United States Supreme Court. Still, there were ways. But they were illegal and dangerous and they cost an outrageous sum of money.
In the end, the girl and the boy talked themselves into a decision. They drove one mid-August morning to a small town named Elkton on the Maryland border. They brought with them two witnesses, themselves barely adults. The elopement complete, they returned to Queens, married. I was born six months later.
My mother told me the story of her choice not to illustrate a political point, I believe, but to underscore that I was a choice, a defi ning one, a decision that changed the course of her life and my father’s. She eventually became a nurse, but it wasn’t for another 25 years. My father worked three jobs to put himself through night school to earn a college degree.
That one choice led to a million sacrifi ces, disadvantages that could have been avoided with a single decision, to remove the tiny clump of cells that were only a few weeks along and – in my view – not yet human, a life in potential only.
I remember asking my mother, “Why not get an abortion?” Her response: “I just couldn’t. I thought about it so much. But I loved your father and I wanted to have his baby. So that was it.”
My mother, as liberal as they come, didn’t live to see the Friday in June when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
I know the news would have been a gut punch for her – a woman who herself had a choice, and believed deeply that every woman should have the same freedom to choose. I can imagine her phone call and where the conversation would have taken us: To topics like personal freedom, the right of a woman and a man to decide their own destinies.
We would have discussed sacrifi ce, because it was a theme my mother drilled into me until the day she died.
We choose what we become, and every choice we make negates countless other choices. So choose thoughtfully and with love in your heart, because that is the way your parents chose to have you, son. They were fortunate to have such a choice, because not everyone does.
And now, after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that choice is gone for many women in many states.
My mother, who chose one path for herself, never once spoke ill of the 17-year-old girls who chose a ride that didn’t lead to a courthouse in Maryland.
“I could have had an abortion,” my mother told me. “That wasn’t my choice. But I understand it, because my life was never the same.”
To say I’m glad my mother chose as she did will sound macabre, because without that choice there would be no column, no life, no me.
So, let me say this instead: Imagine if we each lived with consciousness that we are a choice, a set of sacrifi ces. Then we might not so easily trample the freedoms of others. And America might not be in the sad state in which we fi nd it today.
SHADE SCREENS / ROLLSHADES / RAIN GUTTERS
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