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How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

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Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#801

Post by loup-vaillant »

drpp wrote: post #796
loup-vaillant wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drunk? I suppose you refer to the 3 drinks they had in the course of 3 hours. And they probably had eaten not long before. Self-entitled asshole… You mean, working in a startup, and tell the policemen when asked what he does for a living? And even if he was a drunk self-entitled asshole? Was he a hindrance ? Was he dangerous in any way? My probability for both is extremely low. And even if he was a real hindrance or…

I (the author) understand the comments above and the reasonable skepticism about my self interest in portraying only one side of the story. I'm not an angel. This was avoidable. I can even understand the police perspective and sympathize with the difficulty of their job. For full transparency, I'm preparing a followup post with all of the assembled documentation, including the police report. And yet, this still shoul…

I too understand the scepticism. But I cannot condone the insult. Sure, what happened to you was avoidable. But not just by you. From the look of it, you bear very little responsibility there. Your biggest mistake was in your model of the cops: you assumed they were trustworthy, and could be reasoned with. Some were not.

I would have made the same mistake. So, thanks for the tip. Your story was definitely worth reading.

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#802

Post by rapala »

JshWright wrote: post #302

Why were the cops in charge of this scene at all? Around here the ranking medical provider would have been in charge, and the cops wouldn't have gotten involved unless they were asked to by EMS. As a paramedic, I would be seriously pissed if a cop dragged a helpful bystander away from my patient (for all I know they have useful information that I need to know).

This was my first reaction as well. If a call comes in of a bicycling accident, why would the 911 dispatcher send a fire truck and multiple police squads to the scene?

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#803

Post by rapala »

Just a couple of days ago I was having a conversation with my friends about police brutality in the USA. We dug up some articles from US news papers with searches like "police shot" and "shooting". In most cases it seemed right that the police used force. In most cases the amount of force was way too much.

The latest case of a police using a firearm here in Finland was when a man was walking in a populated pedestrian way carrying a knife and a pistol. He didn't comply with orders to lay down his weapons and was shot once, in the leg. One of the first questions in media was whether an electroshock weapon could have been used in stead. The use of a firearm in a populated area was also questioned. These sort of questions didn't seem to be asked in the articles from USA.

The OP's case was from the other end of the spectrum. He may have had the smell of beer in his breath and didn't comply with the order to leave the scene. The police tackled him done and handcuffed him. One explanation given is that the officer was on a power trip. But it also seems that the police was having difficulties in adjusting their use of force. They dragged away a man who was supporting an injured person. They tackled OP for not complying with an order to leave.

After reading those news articles my friends and I started think about the training that police officer receive in the USA. How much time is used to teach giving orders? How much time for hand-to-hand combat and controlling a person with or without a weapon? How much time is spent in the firing range?

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#804

Post by omarchowdhury »

neumann wrote: post #237

I've made a few 911 calls, but the last one was pretty surreal. My partner and I were walking past a high rise where people go to score and in front of us on the pavement we saw a man and a woman trying to wake up someone who seemed on the verge of OD. He wasn't responding, the two were frantic, and everybody was watching from the other side of the road. She was screaming at him and us, saying he is ODed, and get an…

Intense. Haha.

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#805

Post by smsm42 »

vacri wrote: post #580
fennecfoxen wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police solidarity, and labor unions, for the win!

What professional or semi-professional group doesn't close ranks? From politicians to doctors to plumbers, I can't think of any group where outing a bad apple is the norm.

Not all professional groups have ironclad unions and official rules that prohibit their victims from even knowing the result of the investigation. And most of them aren't allowed to shoot innocent people [1] or beat them to death [2] and suffer no consequences. It's one thing if you let the colleague slide on a minor infraction, it's another think when murder becomes minor infraction. That corrupts. One can not see people around you literally getting away with murder and not have consequences for your morality.

[1] http://jonathanturley.org/2014/02/12/eight-police-officers-f...

[2] http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/12/kelly_thomas_f...

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#806

Post by smsm42 »

tga_d wrote: post #619
crystaln wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another disconnect. Calling the US a "totalitarian police state" without so much as a hedge is incredibly ignorant. While the US has the potential to become a totalitarian police state, it is far from one. You can go ahead and list all the violations of civil rights you want - the fact that you can do that, and that victims in those circumstances have a high chance of prevailing with the right representation…

Nominally, the US isn't a police state, but practically... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... Your view is probably skewed by personal experience, but the fact of the matter is most people who have to deal with the police regularly do not get the "right representation." And of course, those people "can" talk about the violations of their civil rights, but what good has that done them? It'…

This statistics is mostly War on Drugs. As soon as US citizens wake up and end it, this will drop pretty sharply (unless they'd do something as monumentally stupid as WoD again).

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#807

Post by crystaln »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #671
crystaln wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another disconnect. Calling the US a "totalitarian police state" without so much as a hedge is incredibly ignorant. While the US has the potential to become a totalitarian police state, it is far from one. You can go ahead and list all the violations of civil rights you want - the fact that you can do that, and that victims in those circumstances have a high chance of prevailing with the right representation…

What happened here is called "arbitrary detention and release". And is one of the characteristics of dictatorships or of a police state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_arrest_and_detention

Having one characteristic of a police state marginally met in a single instance does not mean sufficient characteristics are met most of the time.

I can guarantee you, living in San Francisco and having lived in actual police states, the US is not a police state and you do a disservice to those in Egypt or North Korea by suggesting so

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#808

Post by rynes »

rapala wrote: post #802
JshWright wrote: post #302

Why were the cops in charge of this scene at all? Around here the ranking medical provider would have been in charge, and the cops wouldn't have gotten involved unless they were asked to by EMS. As a paramedic, I would be seriously pissed if a cop dragged a helpful bystander away from my patient (for all I know they have useful information that I need to know).

This was my first reaction as well. If a call comes in of a bicycling accident, why would the 911 dispatcher send a fire truck and multiple police squads to the scene?

In my city they always send both an ambulance and a fire truck when an ambulance is requested. Perhaps they think that the caller may have forgot something and they could always use the extra help.

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#809

Post by socrates1998 »

Cops generally do not care about your constitutional rights.

They care about their authority.

Unfortunately, this is a tough lesson to learn.

Most minorities in the US know learn this at a very young age.

The irony is that the police are losing the respect of decent people every day when they pull this behavior.

They are making their jobs more difficult by separately themselves from the public.

The police treat neighborhoods like war zones. Us vs. Them.

Re: How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

#810

Post by smaudet »

apayan wrote: post #521
jjoonathan wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways talking can help. It can help you avoid the police officer's discretionary punishments. It can help you avoid increased scrutiny that turns up something incriminating. It's less probable that it will help you avoid being punished due to a baldfaced lie on the part of the officer, since presumably the courts are good at filtering those out, but it's not impossible. Once you require the services of…

I can't recommend enough watching this video. The law professor explains why you should never speak to the police. It's 46 minutes long, but every minute is pure gold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

This is good stuff - also why privacy is so damn important - those who don't believe in it are simply clueless, or morons, or logically both.
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