Did you RTFA? Are EMTs/EMSs - entirely - incapable of telling police to not put their body weight on the backs of "certain people" (to use your vernacular), which clearly contributes to the issue of them dying -- negating the levels of the drug being another contributing factor?
There is shared culpability in these scenarios but, sure, no one could handle these people for hundreds of years before sedation was used, so they killed them all, right? That's your and the OP's rationale, from what you're saying.
> Your policy would result in more deaths.
My policy? More deaths? Give me the numbers/statistics on how this policy has saved _more_ lives. I'll wait...
>Critics say forced sedation should be strictly limited or banned, arguing the medications, given without consent, are too risky to be administered during police encounters.
I've been a volunteer EMT for 20 years and in that time I've been punched, cut, choked, and bit on multiple occasions-- and I'm in one of the most affluent counties in the US. People in poorer areas have it 10x worse than I do.
I'm a very tall, very strong, fully grown adult man. Most of the paramedics I work with are very small, not particularly strong, women. Practically everyone I work with is young.
If forced sedation is banned the critical nationwide shortage of EMS personnel will become much worse than it already is.
Have you ever had a 30-year-old man who's lying on the ground bleeding behind a vape shop at 3am try to repeatedly bite you every time you come within biting distance?
It's either: I hold him down and the medic gives him 5mg of midazolam or he's the cop's problem.
> Do you think the officer who tackled her down and then climbed on top of her should also have the authority to inject her with a sedative at his discretion?
The person you're replying to is, assuming they're not lying, a medical professional.
> Do you think that, in an environment where simply not following directions promptly to the full satisfaction of the arresting officer can result in being tased or even shot
Are you suggesting that a person trying to bite folks is on equal legal footing with a college professor tapping an officer on the shoulder? In any case, sedatives are unquestionably less lethal than guns (and probably tasers, where Google suggests hundreds of people die in the US from being tased by the police each year). Putting aside whether the officer's discretion in such a situation is being wielded appropriately, sedation (by the numbers) is essentially never a worse option than what police have at their disposal already, no?
>Police are protected more than medical professionals.
If that was the case, then why isn't there 250x the public outrage when a medical professional makes an error that kills someone, since they kill 250x more than police do each year[0]?
And I'm not muddying the waters, so I don't appreciate the accusation of bad faith. I think the professions are comparable in nature, but there's a huge discrepancy in how they're treated, despite a massive body count difference.
> This is indeed a selling point of militarizing cops but the justification doesn't jibe well with generations of decreasing police death rates.
Your argument still makes no sense. Law enforcement is just like any other job—the death rate goes down over time as more and more safety measures are adopted. They went down, in part, because of the safety measures.
> It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression.
More recent? Most of the SWAT stuff dates back to the 1980’s and 1990’s at the very latest, the “War on Drugs” era. And I’d be sympathetic to the argument that these measures are excessive when it comes to drug trafficking, but this is a domestic terrorism case.
> Could you please reference where I said that the specific activity in the article was some form of best practices? Or where I even mentioned (or even implied) the article at all in that first response to you?
Given I was responding to specifically what happened in the article, you are taking my response out of context if you are applying it to anything other than the population of the police in the article.
> You've created your own contradiction, by the way. In this frothy rebuke to me, you've claimed that the police in the article do not care about their personal safety much, yet the first comment you made is bitching about them putting their personal safety as a priority.
> It honestly sounds like they are so self-centered that they only care about their arrest stats/job performance + personal safety. They care nothing for anyone else's safety if it gets in the way of their job performance numbers. That is a horrific concept, honestly.
I pretty much baldly stated they care about job performance numbers more than anyone else's safety. I also focused on job performance over their personal safety. I think the issue here remains you just didn't understand I'm talking about "job performance is #1" followed by personal safety as #2.
> Perhaps you should do some of this 'thinking' you so proudly throw in my face?
I pretty clearly said "job performance is #1" and you are insisting otherwise. I just didn't say it literally which is why I guess you got confused?
>This is a very uninformed statement. For 911 and/or police calls, there is an extensively well-established (to put it mildly) precedent that the safety of an area must be secured by police before medical personnel are even allowed on scene.
Here in the UK, the police would not routinely attend an ambulance call-out for someone experiencing suicidal thoughts unless there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient might present a credible threat to an ambulance crew. Most British police officers are not permitted to carry firearms; armed officers would only be deployed to a mental health crisis if there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient was armed and posed an immediate threat to life. All armed officers have specialist training, including crisis management and conflict de-escalation.
In 2017, six people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales. Since 1990, the average number of fatal police shootings was 2.46 per year.
> How do you infer that the article concentrates on the misbehavior of police more than misbehavior by EMS workers?
Well, I guess it's not so much that the article concentrates on police misbehavior, but that the actual people involved did so. The article does not give us complete information, of course, but it appears that the police basically said, "We messed up, and we're fixing things," while the EMS people said, "There isn't any problem." And since the EMS people apparently are the problem, I find the response disturbing.
> The next thing you learn is that we really need to do something about tasers, because if there's a top 3 set of circumstances for death involving police officers, "death after tasing" is at least #3.
Since you've looked at the data, could this be survivorship bias? Is there data on how often tasers are used where firearms would've been, in the absence of tasers? It certainly could be that tasers reduce the number of people killed by police, but it sounds hard to measure that.
> You went back and edited your comment after I replied to it.
After editing and posting I saw no replies. I left for work.
> Most of the changes in police tactics are motivated by specific incidents, many of which involved officer deaths.
This is indeed a selling point of militarizing cops but the justification doesn't jibe well with generations of decreasing police death rates.
> You’re positing some imaginary world where the police adopted SWAT tactics and gear for literally no reason...
Not for no reason. Unions, agencies/depts, pols and police industries have crafted many reasons. Universally those reasons exclude the super critical part about generations of decreasing police deaths.
> in reality, it was because of deadly incidents [cites incidents that long, long predate the spikey part of decreasing police deaths].
It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression.
> Each of these incidents resulted in changes in equipment, training, and procedures.
I would agree that LEO events from 50 years ago eventually contributed to the 40 year decline in police deaths that continues today. A big one is the Church committee's exposure of FBI domestic surveillance. That pressured the agency to refocus on it's law enforcement duties. And that coincides with the sharp reduction of domestic terror attacks, from the historical 1970 high of ~400/year to decades of much, much lower DT rates.
> How about focussing more on teaching police officers to learn how to be calm and composed as much as possible instead of going on the offensive too quickly.
Most police departments do. In the area I work as a paramedic, they certainly are trained in de-escalation.
I also know that some of them just... don't... care.
I've been dealing with mental health patients, got them calmed down, got a plan for dealing with their issues. And then had a cop march back over (who was on scene, saw the initial incident, the de-escalation), and start shouting at the patient over the destruction of property. The patient's property. "Who the fuck do you expect to clean up that broken glass? Selfish asshole. I should make _you_ get on your knees and clean it".
End result? The patient who was compliant and willing to go for evaluation in the back of my ambulance needed to be sedated and narrowly avoided being tased. In the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened. But this was a situation actively under control. And a situation this officer, and only this officer, actively worked to make worse.
That incident resulted in a complaint, though I have no idea what the resolution was.
> Paramedics were called and injected McClain with ketamine, but they incorrectly estimated his weight, giving him more than 1.5 times the dose he should have received. He got 500 milligrams because they thought he weighed 220 pounds, but he was only 140 pounds and should have received 315 milligrams.
That’s 7.9mg/kg, not nearly enough ketamine to cause cardiac arrest in someone that size. LD50 in humans is at least 5-10x that.
Those officers that had him in a chokehold killed him, and are trying to scapegoat the EMS.
There is a name for this behavior: a lynching.
Erica Marrero, Kyle Dittrich, Jason Rosenblatt, and Jaron Jones, white cops, murdered an unarmed black man.
The entirety of the consequences they suffered? They lost their jobs. The police who declined to enforce the law against them are complicit.
> Hey there, I don’t know why you feel so compelled to make things look less worse than they are, lots of anecdotes...
I'm just trying to break through people's echo chambers, and help get to the core of the issue. I agreed with most of what the poster I replied to said, but wanted to point out that not all police are trigger-happy. I think any reform to policing in the United States has to help make non-trigger happy police officers' lives easier. The only way to do this is by ending the drug war.
> Breonna Taylor was an EMT that was murdered by police while asleep in her own bed during a no-knock raid.
That's absolutely not what happened. At worst this was horrible police work at "best" it was a freak accident. There is zero reason to believe that anyone was murdered.
Not going into the other cases because quite frankly it does not falsify my claim even if they are in fact what you say they are.
My calm was that its very very very unlikely which is true even if it happens. Just like the mass shooting you original brought up that is also very very very unlikely to kill you even trough it could happen.
That does not make "police interaction somehow a threat to people" (the original statement)
Just like the lottery does not make you a millionaire.
And boarding a plane doesn't make you die in a fireball.
You gotta look at probability in a rational way.
The risk of being killed by police is very very low and as said above by not being a criminal/drug abuser and by complying it gets even lower. So low that its practically non-existent. You do dozens of things every day that have a way higher probability of killing you. Like taking a shower. The statement that taking a shower somehow poses a threat to people is still absurd and wrong.
> I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
I don't think this is really relevant, because "suicide by cop" is a great reason why police should not take the lead in responding to suicide threats. You never hear about "suicide by paramedic" or "suicide by social worker."
> and after reading the police report, the more I understand the police's motives and generally agree with their response
Wow. Are you and I reading the same report? I'm able to understand the police's motives, but that's the problem. It was reasonable for them to clear bystanders away from the EMTs, but it was unreasonable for them to resort to physical force so quickly after encountering hesitation that a) posed no threat to the EMTs and b) could have been easily addressed without violence. I don't think police SOP should be "1) make demand, 2) attack civilian that hesitates due to objections with demand." Some situations allow time for rational conversation, this was one of them, and the police rejected that possibility (which had a lower likelihood of resulting in bodies flying into the EMT's workspace) in favor of using force.
Sgt. Espinoza used Woosley's passive insistence on getting his phone back, which explicitly did not interfere with the wellbeing of the patient or the actions of the EMTs, as a justification for employing violent compliance techniques. If Sgt E doubted W's ability to get his phone back without interfering (not unreasonable), he should have volunteered to do it on W's behalf rather than violently subduing him for what to me looks like entirely reasonable hesitation (reasonable in the moral sense, not in the maximize-probability-of-avoiding-arrest sense).
Partensky's case is more difficult to assess without a video recording. It's conceivable that P's hesitation justified violent escalation (as opposed to a more rational but slower approach with higher P(success)) but I doubt it.
> 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.
It took two to tangle, and I believe the police were unambiguously in the wrong, whatever you think of W and P.
> But why would you hypothetically remove bad actions from just the police?
Because the person I'm responding to is claiming that police kill more civilians than civilians kill police, with the implication that it's because police are corrupt.
I used a hypothetical scenario to point out that this doesn't follow, because the same would be true even if there were no police corruption.
> By the exact same argument, if you removed all bad actions from everyone who isn’t a police officer, then of course you’d expect police to kill more people.
Not clear what your point is here.
> In the original comment, before all the ridiculous hypothesizing, the actual world is what was being discussed.
Yes, some times people use thought experiments to highlight facts about the real world.
Did you RTFA? Are EMTs/EMSs - entirely - incapable of telling police to not put their body weight on the backs of "certain people" (to use your vernacular), which clearly contributes to the issue of them dying -- negating the levels of the drug being another contributing factor?
There is shared culpability in these scenarios but, sure, no one could handle these people for hundreds of years before sedation was used, so they killed them all, right? That's your and the OP's rationale, from what you're saying.
> Your policy would result in more deaths.
My policy? More deaths? Give me the numbers/statistics on how this policy has saved _more_ lives. I'll wait...
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