Good Samaritan Backfire

Police officers have better things to do than "pandering to the ego of a bystander" (is that what they're calling politeness these days)? Then surely they have much better things to do than spending hours engaging in an egregious miscarriage of justice to flatter their own notions of self-importance (i.e. that they deserve unquestioning obedience even in non-urgent situations). Except that they clearly didn't. So what, exactly, are the "more important things" they have to think about?

I wasn't talking about expectations about what would actually happen. I was talking about your claims about what was right or wrong, with which I disagree. See below.

"pandering to the ego of a bystander" (is that what they're calling politeness these days)?

In the particular context under discussion (a cop who has more important things to think about in the particular situation under discussion), yes. A cop who arrives at an accident scene is under no obligation to say "good job" to a bystander who called 911. Just saying "Move" to the bystander if he wants him out of the way is not impoliteness; it's prudence in a situation that, to the cop, is not yet under control.

surely they have much better things to do than spending hours engaging in an egregious miscarriage of justice to flatter their own notions of self-importance

But you weren't talking about that. You were talking specifically about the cop just saying "Move" to the bystander. The bystander not complying immediately escalates his status, in the cop's mind, from "bystander" to "potential threat". That's why the bystander got arrested.

I certainly agree that the cops took things much too far after they arrested and cuffed the bystander. But again, you weren't talking about that; you were talking specifically about what happened before the arrest. Big difference.

(i.e. that they deserve unquestioning obedience even in non-urgent situations)

You were talking specifically about what happened at the accident scene. An accident scene is not a non-urgent situation.

While I feel bad for the guy for getting himself into trouble, we had a situation where a guy called 911, the first responders showed up, and the guy had such a sense of entitlement that he acted like he was still in charge of the situation, and because of that misbehaved in a few serious ways. Probably the fact that he was drunk played into his foolishness, but by his own account and the account of the police report, the cops had a drunk guy and his friend interfering with the first responders' work, the police asked them to step back, they were belligerent to the police about it and refused to step back, when the police tried to move him he resisted physically, so the cop put a lock on him, cuffed him, and arrested him. When a drunk is interfering with first responders, disobeying lawful orders, and physically resisting efforts to move out of the scene what else are they going to do? They ordered him to leave, he was belligerent, they pulled him away, he resisted, so they pinned him, cuffed him, and off to jail he went. Maybe they were too forceful, but all we have are the memories of the angry drunk guy prone to fits of screaming by his own account - no medical records or corroboration, and the cops actually made sure there was surveillance of the incident preserved.

They treated him pretty harshly in the jail, but by his own account he was screaming and acting out. It's not a real shocker that the drunk screaming guy misbehaving in jail is going to suffer for it.

There are legitimate cases of serious police abuses. This is more a case of a drunk fool getting himself in trouble by acting like an entitled clown and not complying with the officers' requests to give the first responders space to work.

Even with his annotations, the police report shows what was missing from the story: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/779439/police_report_ann...

In the case of HN, there are submissions I've seen which have gone down with no appreciable comment which, one or two or four years later, may well deserve a re-hearing. At the same time, you'll get iterations on a specific theme (a recent instance being 2^11 stories) which, while different in source, are often largely similar in content and significance. HN penalizes the former while passing on the latter. I'd prefer that reversed.

I've grown increasingly impressed with reddit's "related" link giving access to other discussions on a particular URL or topic. Actually, I've been growing increasingly impressed with reddit in general.

Two good example of problematic management techniques:

* All-car patrols, where police officers are either locked into their squad cars or, if out of the car and not eating lunch, in some kind of scuffle, so that their only contact with the locals is bad.

* Triage coverage, where units from all around the city are swung to hotspot areas in the city (in Chicago, for instance, alternately the west side or the south side), so nobody puts down roots with the community.

There are others.

A theme to all the recommendations I've heard is that they cost money. It costs money to allocate patrols so that officers can take the time to be on foot and retain the same neighborhood coverage they had before. It costs a lot of money to allocate enough officers to simultaneously and permanently cover the hotspot neighborhoods.