Item — HN Reader

> Training about recognizing and handling disabled persons should be mandatory

Sure, but in this case, the man's ability level doesn't even seem relevant.

Officers see a nonviolent man taking a shower. No weapons seen by officers. No weapons reported in the 911 call. Man is naked, also suggesting nothing concealed. Man is acting unusually but does not appear to be harming himself and is not uttering any threats to officers.

Yet a team of armed and armoured law enforcement officers think they are at risk? They respond with electric shock, physical force, and injecting drugs!

The ability level of the man is irrelevant. These are thugs and I think their problem may be deeper than gaps in their training.

1 comments

What if they were telling the truth and they really thought they were helping him?

That's sort of my point. I was responding to the "training" comment.

So if those officers genuinely believe that their armed and armoured team needs to electrocute, subdue, and inject a naked man in the shower who posed no apparent threat in order to "help" him then they are potentially beyond training.

I think there's a good chance they were trained to do that.

Yikes. If that's the case then trainers and everyone up the chain needs to answer to the community (i.e. who they ultimately serve and protect) on this one, then.

Thank goodness for 1) body cams on police, and 2) shared footage so we can have this conversation.

They most certainly do not serve and protect the community.. That is unless by community you mean "law enforcement community". They do indeed serve and protect their own gang quite effectively.

That is plausible. Especially if we assume that "helping him" meant ending the situation as quickly as possible. They probably hoped to drop him off at the next hospital to deal with.

Mental issues take time. Often you just wait for the person to recover. When you rule out that option, only force is left.

Then they are too stupid to be in the business of helping people.

Or they were trained that helping people means making them compliant by any means necessary so they can be brought to the hospital safely.

That's not what they did. They brought him to the morgue.

You know, where I grew up, it's very simple: if your actions directly result in the death of another human, you go to jail by default. "I only wanted to help" is a weak excuse, and "I only wanted to help by injecting a drug" gets you a longer sentence. As it should be.

I agree. I'm not saying that the police who did this were right or that they shouldn't be punished. I'm saying that with better training the kid might not have died. The idea that police could be trained to kill fewer people doesn't mean that they're currently not at fault when they do kill people.

Note that the police didn't inject the drugs. The paramedics did that. The police just held him down for that part.