All laws are important

Dear editor,

The severity of the violated law varies, but not the significance of the law itself. When a law is violated and brought to the attention of the authorities it should be immediately and diligently enforced. Our police agencies and their administrations should not be allowed to selectively enforce or ignore the enforcement of any law. If we or they do not like the specific law, there is a proper method to seek to legislatively change or eliminate the law, not through disregard.

The old argument that our law enforcement personnel do not have time to enforce all the laws is a cop out. Once we start enforcing all the laws equally, our population will start to respect all of our laws, including those individuals that enforce them and begin to obey them, thereby reducing the number of broken laws.

We must also demand that our judicial officials start to equitably adjudicate the laws as they are written. If we continue to allow judges to selectively adjudicate laws beyond their defined statutes of punishment, we then have allowed them to usurp the legislative process, by making their own laws.

If we allow our laws to be broken, knowing that the police will not enforce and the judges will not properly adjudicate through selectively picking which are important to them, we have failed ourselves, our children and our society.

Layton T. Webb

Las Cruces