Vigilante

Re: "The Vigilante of Carthay Square" (Sept. 25) Hooray for Joe Connolly. Local police no longer serve as a preventive deterrent to the criminal element but often are a reactive after-thought, i.e., the crime has been perpetrated, you are now a victim, and the police arrive 30 minutes later to take a report. It is quite evident that the Thin Blue Line cannot effectively police our communities. Living here during the L.A. riots has revealed the impotence of law enforcement. The sense of frustration and feeling of dissatisfaction (with police)

"The Philanthropist," premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone.

Columnist Mike Royko's sympathy with Bernhard Goetz (Editorial Pages, Jan. 18) is a legitimate immediate reaction to the New York subway shooting. On the same page columnist Ellen Goodman moves beyond this easy satisfaction with elementary justice and interprets the overwhelming public support that Royko epitomizes. Many of us urban dwellers lead alarmingly lonely lives over which we seem to have little control. Monthly bills, pressures at work, and the increasingly awful fear of being attacked consume too much of our energy.

COALCOMAN, Mexico - Rafael Garcia slaps the oversize wooden desk where he sits, one of the last mayors still in office in this region of Mexican farm country known as Tierra Caliente - hot land. Mayors from a couple of the nearest towns fled with their drug-cartel pals, people here say, when locals took up arms against them. But at Garcia's City Hall, the facade is festooned with hand-lettered signs supporting local gunmen who challenged the cartel, loosely referred to as community "self-defense" guards, comunitarios . Several cities in Tierra Caliente are now patrolled by such groups, whose members, often masked, man checkpoints and pull over passing vehicles for inspection.

The Dodgers didn't throw at the Diamondbacks on Wednesday night and the Diamondbacks didn't throw at them. The benches never cleared and no punches were exchanged. But the brawl from the previous night at Dodger Stadium was still on their minds as Arizona piled up 20 hits in an 8-6, 12-inning victory. "I don't think it ends there," reliever Ronald Belisario said before taking the loss. BOX SCORE: Arizona 8, Dodgers 6 (12 inn.) Manager Don Mattingly also implied that the situation could escalate later in the season, as he sounded more concerned about administering vigilante justice than he did about the consequences of doing so. As it was, the Dodgers already lost Yasiel Puig from the starting lineup, as the rookie outfielder sat with a strained right shoulder he presumably sustained in the fracas.

Vigilantes vs. Bend * 6:55 Tonight-Saturday 5:35 Sunday Site--Saddleback College Radio--KPLS (830) Records--Bandits 16-15, Vigilantes 14-17 Record vs. Bend--(1-2) Update--The Bandits have two players among the league leaders in batting average: outfielder Mark Charbonnet (.400, eight home runs) and first baseman Randy Kapano (.385, four home runs). Vigilante first baseman Alan Burke and outfielder Phil Kernan (.369, five home runs) continue to pace the Vigilante offense.