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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

I 100% believe that "civilians should be able to do or say literally anything and fully expect law enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle with them."

And I don't see why that's not feasible.

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You can expect law enforcement to be 'perfectly rational and fair', but expecting them to always be gentle is unrealistic. When people are being violent, it sometimes requires physical force to restrain them, and oftentimes that physical force can't be gentle.

In addition, being 'perfectly rational' does not always mean doing the correct thing every time, with the benefit of hindsight. You can be rational, but in real life we have imperfect information. Innocent people are sometimes hurt because of this imperfect information, even if everyone behaves rationally. It sucks, but is unavoidable.

If "always gentle" is unrealistic, I'd like to set the bar a little higher than "tazing a restrained person 3 times".

None of us was there. If she was belligerent drunk, how could she reliably remember everything that happened ? More likely story is she refused orders to calm down, assaulted CO's and got tazed before being restrained. That would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

She was strapped to the gurney prior to leaving the scene of arrest.

Right.. and if she assaulted CO's to the point where it required three tazings, do you really think she'd escape without a charge?

None of us was there, as you said. I do not take it as "more likely" that the victim earned three tazings. I also don't believe that effective policework would ever require tazing a drunk person three times.

And as has been said elsewhere, she was restrained all throughout.

Both law enforcement and correctional officers are trained in similar facilities with similar skills emphasized, and both physical and verbal techniques are part of that.

Emphasis is key. Grappling, weaponry, and mediation are each taught, but it's individuals that decide on application.

The idea that cops respond with reasonable force in a rational manner is a fantasy. They are not some innocent victims of misunderstanding, they regularly fight back with as much force as they are allowed to employ, and if noone's watching a whole lot more. It's part of their dichotomous mentality. There is tons of evidence for the idea that cops regularly appoint themselves judge, jury and occasionally even executioner. Having the right information means nothing if your entire mindset is bent around the idea that you're there to mete out punishment to the deserving and all you're doing is waiting for someone to stick out their neck to be made an example of.

Again, I am not trying to argue whether too much force is used too often or not. I am simply stating that, even if we lived in a world where reasonable force was used every time by police, we would STILL have cases of citizens being harmed by the use of force by police. Since we know this, we can't use the fact that someone was injured by police to be our yardstick for determining if a police officer did the right thing or not.

The problem is our collective perception of what criminal justice means to Americans.

The parent poster immediately shifted "partial" blame to the victim because she is a "criminal".

Until we change the perception that criminal = bad person and therefore subject to any punishment nothing of importance will change.

If we could put them in soundproof safe rooms after they've been detained so they do not disturb others (and monitor them so they don't hurt themselves), sure. Probably will increase the fines and taxes tremendously to do that.

> And I don't see why that's not feasible.

Because law enforcement is made up of the same imperfect, mistake making humans as the bone-headed civilians that committed the offense.

The thing is that they have less expectations than civilians in many cases. If someone was restrained and I tazed them three times I would be arrested immediately.

And you solve that problem structurally. Saying boys will be boys is not how you fix things.

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