Absurd Alhazred posted:

Except dogpiling a non-violent suspect until he suffocates can not by any stretch of the imagination be called a necessary medical intervention. Was Freddie Gray suffering from an acute case of verticalitis?

Frabba posted:

What are the odds that this is legitimate?


There are scans of the documents included at the link, but I don't know how one would go about confirming they are legitimate. If this is true though, loving .

e. Looks like the link is dying from going viral. RIP, hopefully it will clear up quickly.

Dead Reckoning posted:

OK, so let's say that, because he has the equivalent of a Boy Scout's first aid merit badge, the officer applies a bad tourniquet to the leg, and it ends up having to be amputated. Is the officer liable for that?

A lot of medical interventions carry risks for the patient.

Dead Reckoning posted:

I was responding to Falcon's general suggestion that police should have an affirmative legal duty to render medical assistance to suspects in custody. This came up earlier too, when someone was asking why the police don't perform first aid on the people they shoot. I'm not sure what the various state laws say about the matter, but I agree that they should have a duty to ensure that suspects receive adequate care. I just don't think it's necessarily wise to require the officers to provide that care themselves, for the reasons I outlined above. It might be possible to write some sort of Good Samaritan exception, but that requires accepting that police will be off the hook if they gently caress up treating the person they just shot.

Dead Reckoning posted:

I was responding to Falcon's general suggestion that police should have an affirmative legal duty to render medical assistance to suspects in custody. This came up earlier too, when someone was asking why the police don't perform first aid on the people they shoot. I'm not sure what the various state laws say about the matter, but I agree that police officers should have a duty to ensure that suspects receive adequate care. I just don't think it's necessarily wise to require the officers to provide that care themselves, for the reasons I outlined above. It might be possible to write some sort of Good Samaritan exception, but that requires accepting that police will be off the hook if they gently caress up treating the person they just shot.

falcon2424 posted:

Why would the officer (or anyone else) be liable for providing reasonable first aid? Especially first aid that they're trained to give?

Dead Reckoning posted:

You really think no one ever tries to sue for medical mistakes?

Dead Reckoning posted:

OK, so let's say that, because he has the equivalent of a Boy Scout's first aid merit badge, the officer applies a bad tourniquet to the leg, and it ends up having to be amputated. Is the officer liable for that?

A lot of medical interventions carry risks for the patient.

Javid posted:

I'd personally favor just going ahead and making cops strictly liable for the physical health of anyone in their custody, with pre-existing conditions they couldn't have known about being an affirmative defense.

Abusable, but in ways that result in less dead citizens than the current arrangement.

Trabisnikof posted:

Most states have Good Samaritan laws that limit the liability, and BSA hasn't taught tourniquets in a long long time. And cops do let people bleed to death before getting them medical care, so I think it'd be worth it.

Dead Reckoning posted:

You really think no one ever tries to sue for medical mistakes?

Watermelon City posted:

Someone is dying in front of you and you're scratching your chin going gee I don't know what's my liability?

Watermelon City posted:

Someone is dying in front of you and you're scratching your chin going gee I don't know what's my liability?

quote:

A white Cleveland patrolman who shot a 12-year-old black boy carrying a pellet gun told investigators that he and his partner continuously yelled "show me your hands" before he fired the fatal shots, according to the officer's statement released by prosecutors Tuesday.

The rookie officer said that Tamir Rice didn't obey his commands and that he saw the boy pulling a weapon out of his waist band.

"I knew it was a gun and I knew it was coming out," officer Timothy Loehmann said in the statement given to investigators.

It turned out Tamir was carrying a nonlethal, Airsoft-type gun that shoots plastic pellets when Loehmann shot him twice outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014. He died a day later.

A grand jury will decide if Loehmann or his field training officer should be charged criminally for Tamir's death.

Prosecutors in recent weeks released a frame-by-frame analysis of the surveillance camera footage from the shooting, along with expert reports that called the shooting justified.

Attorneys for the Rice family have asked Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty to step aside and allow a special prosecutor to take over the case. They called the prosecutor's presentation to the grand jury "biased" and "improper" after releasing the reports that found no fault with the officers' actions.

They said Tuesday that allowing both officers to make unsworn statements that won't be subject to cross examination "further taints these proceedings."

The statements from Loehmann and patrolman Frank Garmback describe in detail action that the surveillance video shows took about two seconds.

They were responding after a 911 caller reported that a man was waving a gun and pointing it at people. The caller told the dispatcher that the gun might not be real. The call also said the man might be a juvenile, but that information wasn't passed on to the officers.

Loehmann said he and his partner thought Tamir was going to run as they drove up to him, but Tamir turned toward the cruiser.

"The suspect lifted his shirt, reached down into his waistband. We continued to yell 'show me your hands,'" Loehmann said in the statement. "I was focused on the suspect. Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn't fire. I still was yelling the command 'show me your hands.'"

The rookie officer said he was getting out of the cruiser when he saw a weapon in the boy's hand coming out his waistband. "The threat to my partner and myself was real and active," Loehmann said.

He said he fired two shots and heard his partner still yelling "show me your hands" after Tamir fell to the ground.

Garmback, who was driving the cruiser, said in his statement that he wanted to keep the boy away from the recreation center and that the patrol car slid when he hit the brakes. The car didn't stop where he intended, Garmback said.

He said he saw the gun Tamir was carrying when Loehmann opened his door. "I thought the gun was real," Garmback said.

Subodh Chandra, an attorney for Tamir's family, said Tuesday that the officers' statements were contradictory and did not make sense.

"Loehmann, for example, insists that he observed things and took action that would have been physically impossible for any human being to do in the under two seconds it took him to shoot a 12-year-old child," he said in a statement.

Chandra also noted that Loehmann said he issued at least three commands to "show me your hands," but that Garmback said he thought the cruiser's windows were rolled up as they drove toward Tamir.

KomradeX posted:

Now it's been awhile since I watched the video of the incident, but isn't everything this dude is saying completely contradicted by the video that shows the cruiser pull up abs the kid shot in less than 5 seconds

KomradeX posted:

Now it's been awhile since I watched the video of the incident, but isn't everything this dude is saying completely contradicted by the video that shows the cruiser pull up abs the kid shot in less than 5 seconds

Grundulum posted:

Nonsense. I can fit three "show me your hands" in two seconds without breaking a sweat. That's like seven or eight repetitions in five seconds.

Dead Reckoning posted:

You really think no one ever tries to sue for medical mistakes?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

ETA: Sorry, didn't see your edit. I don't think what you're saying is true, because I am pretty sure that if I committed a crime, someone got fatally hurt during its execution, and died in spite of me attempting to subsequently save their life, it would still be considered a homicide.

Watermelon City posted:

Someone is dying in front of you and you're scratching your chin going gee I don't know what's my liability?

DrNutt posted:

So rather than have to deal with the occasional litigation, you think it is preferable to let someone bleed to death. That's pretty lovely.

VitalSigns posted:

Uh if the police deliberately kill someone while pretending to treat them, I don't think that would fall under Good Samaritan immunity if proven.

For example Florida's statute: anyone who renders aid whether licensed or not yada yada "shall not be held liable for any civil damages as a result of such care or treatment or as a result of any act or failure to act in providing or arranging further medical treatment where the person acts as an ordinary reasonably prudent person would have acted under the same or similar circumstances."

I doubt deliberately murdering someone is how an ordinary reasonably prudent person would act (note: I am not a doctor I could be wrong) so I don't think we have to worry about accidentally legalizing cops executing someone and claiming it's medical care (I mean aside from the de facto legality of cops murdering people now by letting them bleed out so they can't contradict the cop's testimomy)

VitalSigns posted:

Dead Reckoning posted:

Nothing I wrote had anything to do with the police knowingly and provably killing people unlawfully.

Dead Reckoning posted:

No, I think letting the police treat people in their care under some sort of Good Samaritan-like immunity is perfectly workable, but I expect that there would be some pushback on that after the inevitable "suspect loses a limb due to substandard medical care but can't sue due to immunity" story, or allegations that police provided improper treatment to a shot suspect who dies after a questionable shoot so that he wouldn't live to tell his side of the story.

Like I said, it's workable, but it has the potential to create situations that I think people concerned about policing and justice would be unhappy with.

Dead Reckoning posted:

No, I think letting the police treat people in their care under some sort of Good Samaritan-like immunity is perfectly workable, but I expect that there would be some pushback on that after the inevitable "suspect loses a limb due to substandard medical care but can't sue due to immunity" story, or allegations that police provided improper treatment to a shot suspect who dies after a questionable shoot so that he wouldn't live to tell his side of the story.

Like I said, it's workable, but it has the potential to create situations that I think people concerned about policing and justice would be unhappy with.

DrNutt posted:

Which would still be a step up from current SOP which seems to be magdump, shout at the dead/dying person and treat them like they're dangerous for an additional 5 minutes or so, then get on the phone to the police union.

KomradeX posted:

This is what literally happened when that NYPD officer shot that dude in NYCHA housing he called his partner than I actually think they're Union Rep, to figure this or while this dude bleed to death in a stairwell in November

VitalSigns posted:

There's no Good Samaritan law where anyone would have immunity to those allegations

KomradeX posted:

This is what literally happened when that NYPD officer shot that dude in NYCHA housing he called his partner than I actually think they're Union Rep, to figure this or while this dude bleed to death in a stairwell in November

quote:

Fliedner, the lead prosecutor in the case, did not mention the order in court Wednesday. He did say, however, that another report by the Daily News -- which claimed Liang texted his union representative right after the shooting -- was false.

Dead Reckoning posted:

That particular detail was denied by both the prosecutor and the union.

Dead Reckoning posted:

Without a confession, it's going to be nearly impossible to prove that poor medical care was due to malice rather than incompetence (which is what Good Samaritan laws protect).

Dead Reckoning posted:

I suppose you could require that every police officer hold an EMT-B cert, but good luck finding the money for that, especially in smaller departments.

Grundulum posted:

I just did some cursory poking around, and it appears to cost $600-900 to obtain an EMT basic certification. Could not quickly find an answer to how much it costs to recertify and maintain the license. Additional Googling suggests that state and local law enforcement agencies employ about 1,000,000 people full-time. Assuming (perhaps generously) that all of those million are patrol officers, and that EMT licenses must be re-obtained at full cost every year, that's an annual expenditure of just under $1B to get every officer in the US EMT-certified. (Really, the annual cost will probably be substantially lower, since many full-time law enforcement personnel aren't patrol officers, and I am pretty sure EMT certs last for more than a year and don't need to be reobtained from scratch.) How much do we spend at a federal level on grants for former military equipment? Is it about that much, significantly more, or significantly less?

Set aside the political feasibility for the moment; I was just curious about the economics.

VitalSigns posted:

Federalize the police Then their funding won't depend on how randomly poor their town is and we can have federal Law Enforcement Division that investigates police shootings and charges them so there's no conflict-of-interest with the cop's friends investigating him and his DA buddy bringing it to a grand jury. And hey, making cops EMTs would almost certainly save lives even apart from the duty it would impose on them not to deliberately kill people with incompetent care, right?

VitalSigns posted:

Yeah it was a joke, hence the devil smiley, I know it's unconstitutional currently.

Although really I don't see how it could be any worse than police under various lovely governors and/or the local racist mayor. At least federal agencies are accountable to national politics.

And anyway, President Nixon wasn't even able to stop the FBI investigation of himself, four or eight years just isn't long enough to build up enough cronies to completely ruin institutions, it'd have to be GOP dominance for a long long time before all the federal police agencies are their private stasi or whatever it is you're worried about.

quote:

E: But I also think states' rights are poo poo. Sorry the south ruined it by being terrible in every way with every chance the constitution gave them, gently caress federalism let's have a real nation-state.