Unpaid tickets

In times gone by when you had a large number of unpaid parking tickets, you’d find a “Denver Boot” affixed to one of your car’s wheels. Payment was required to remove said boot and keep your driver’s license in good standing with the Registry.

Alas, thanks to State Senator Julian Cyr and Representative Brandy Fluker-Reid — with an assist from the ACLU — soon we won’t have to worry about paying parking tickets to keep our cars on the road and our drivers’ licenses in good standing (“Unpaid fines bill on the move,” Jan. 21).

Apparently we also won’t be dinged for ignoring those annual excise taxes, highway tolls, and tax payments to the Commonwealth to stay in good standing with the RMV.

Thank you Senator Cyr and Representative Fluker-Reid!  My plan is to remove the EZ-Pass transponder from my windshield, parking apps — like “City of Boston: Park Boston” — from my phone and buy a paper shredder to dispose of those nuisance tax bills. After all, once the bill is passed, I’ll have no problem renewing my license next year at the RMV.

Paul Stewart

Quincy

De-escalation

The recent op-ed arguing that federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis should “stand down” in the name of de-escalation rests on a dangerously oversimplified view of what is actually occurring.

De-escalation is a legitimate and valuable law-enforcement tool when unrest is organic — driven by fear, confusion, or raw emotion. But that is not what we are seeing here. A significant portion of the anti-ICE activity is organized, ideological, and explicitly aimed at obstructing lawful federal authority. In that context, escalation is not an unfortunate byproduct — it is the objective.

The author assumes that if federal agents withdraw, tensions will cool and dialogue will emerge. History and recent experience suggest the opposite. When activists are committed to preventing enforcement altogether, retreat signals vulnerability, not goodwill, and invites further disruption. One cannot de-escalate a situation in which one party has no interest in resolution, only resistance.

This is not a question of whether immigration policy is good or bad. Reasonable people can disagree strongly on that. It is a question of whether lawful authority can be exercised at all when confronted by coordinated efforts to nullify it through intimidation and disorder.

Law enforcement must be restrained, accountable, and professional — always. But professionalism does not require withdrawal from lawful duties, nor does public trust depend on conceding the streets to those who reject the rule of law outright.

De-escalation is a tactic, not a governing philosophy. Treating it as a cure-all in the face of deliberate obstruction is not enlightened — it is naïve, and it risks encouraging exactly the behavior it claims to prevent.

John Guinee

Groton