After reading your two front-page articles (“Angry crowd shows up at Mayor Peduto’s home challenging Pittsburgh police arrest of protester,” Aug. 16, TribLIVE; “ ‘Low profile’ arrest creates firestorm as officials, experts blast Pittsburgh police tactic,” Aug. 17, TribLIVE) and editorial (“Low-visibility arrest a high- visibility failure,” Aug. 18, TribLIVE), I offer my humble advice.

Mayor Peduto, and it appears many others of his ilk and background, need to understand “a man with book learning is no match for a man with experience.” While stationed in the Army at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1968, I was part of a company of U.S. soldiers who were being trained to “go North” and help quell the riots that were happening after Dr. Martin Luther King sadly was killed. As part of our training, we learned the advantages of a technique called “snatch and grab.” This was used at the time to grab and disarm the “leaders” of the rioters, discourage the leaderless rioters and save our lives if needed and used properly.

Reading a book written by someone who was never there and putting law enforcement and innocent lives at risk needs to be looked at in its entirety. Not by what someone thinks, but what they know from experience.

Andy Yaremko

Hempfield

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