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Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

> She turned to me and abruptly said that I was not needed as a witness and should leave immediately.

"I then walked home." should have been the next line, and I'm fairly sure the author knows it.

That doesn't excuse what the officers did, but it's not "being a good Samaritan" that backfired. Being nosy is the part that didn't end well.

I'm not even sure the use of force wasn't justified - even in this immensely biased account, he mentions being told to back away by the officers. What are they supposed to do when you ignore them?

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>"I then walked home." should have been the next line

Unless it's against some kind of law for someone to observe police, you should know better than that. And seeing the way these animals acted, I'd say being concerned for the welfare of the downed biker is a perfectly legitimate reaction.

>Being nosy is the part that didn't end well.

Not illegal, and certainly not worth violent treatment and solitary confinement.

>What are they supposed to do when you ignore them?

If they're breaking this minute of a law? I don't know, issue a fucking citation? If they're not breaking a law, leave them alone? You know.. sane, professional, calm behavior that police SHOULD aspire to?

By the way - I find it interesting that people are referring to the police report as if it were the gospel where the author's article is just some random nut's view. Do you really think a police force that has no problem with brutality and unjust imprisonment really has any moral issue with filing an untrue/misleading report that makes them look better?

By his own account, he was ignoring police officers while interfering with their work at the scene of an accident.

You can't do that and expect to not get physically removed.

Even then, that still doesn't necessitate violence and solitary confinement.

Stop making excuses for bad behavior!

So when he says "that doesn't excuse what the officers did" you think he's excusing their behavior?

>You can't do that and expect to not get physically removed.

This is an excuse/rationalization.

Yes, physically removed from the immediate situation which is treating an accident victim and the first responders don't want to figure out whether the dumb white kid who keeps sticking around is an off-duty EMT.

He absolutely should have been physically removed from that particular situation since he wasn't leaving on his own.

This doesn't mean he should have had his hands stepped on or been put in solitary to teach him a lesson.

I'm not talking about the violence and solitary confinement, I'm talking about the use of physical force and subsequent arrest.

The point when he was in handcuffs on the ground would have been where he should have waited the situation out kept quiet and not talk to officers "how he appreciates their service." or enquire if their actions where "standard protocol". That is just asking for trouble.

> That is just asking for trouble.

It's also perfectly legal and doesn't deserve the treatment he received.

>Unless it's against some kind of law for someone to observe police, you should know better than that.

What isn't against the law?

This probably doesn't apply exactly, but there are plenty of laws about "disobeying lawful orders of a peace officer".

Here's an example (it may not apply in these case, I dunno, IANAL):

> It is unlawful to willfully fail or refuse to comply with a lawful order, signal, or direction of a peace officer[...] in uniform [...] or to refuse to submit to a lawful inspection pursuant to this code.

CAL. VEH. CODE § 2800

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/VEH/1/d2/4/1/s2800

While I'm not a lawyer, I would assume that "lawful order" has a specific legal definition and that "pursuant to this code" means that it's restricted to orders for enforcing the laws.

There are certainly laws against interfering with police, but the right to observe them if you're not in the way is pretty well established.

I've posted this else-thread, but, basically: your assumption is incorrect.

http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/316176.html

That's some random guy's Livejournal with no sources and amounts to "If the police tell you to hand over $20 because they want to order a pizza, the safest thing to do is comply and file a complaint later." Which is probably true, but I was talking about the legality of ignoring orders that the police don't have the authority to give. And I don't think I'm wrong.

Here's what the MD ACLU has to say [1]:

> The safest course of action is to obey the officer's directives. Not every order by a police officer is lawful, and police may not lawfully arrest you in Maryland for failing to obey an order unless the order is lawful, and aimed at averting some imminent illegal conduct. It is difficult to know at the scene whether the order is proper, and failing to obey may result in an arrest, even though the arrest may not be proper. You have the right to photograph and record police officers performing their job in public. Police may not order you to delete photographs or recordings on your camera or cell phone.

Assuming the system works properly, you could not be found guilty of refusing to give a police officer pizza money (to reuse my earlier example). It's not illegal. Photographing the police and observing a scene without interfering is in the same boat.

[1] http://www.aclu-md.org/your_rights/know_your_rights

The ACLU just agreed with the link, in your quotation no less: The safest course of action is to obey the officer's directives.

It is difficult to know at the scene whether the order is proper, and failing to obey may result in an arrest, even though the arrest may not be proper.

You can't be found guilty of refusing to give a police officer pizza money, but that's not what the question is: can you can be found guilty of refusing a lawful order? Worse yet, as the link points out, the dead do not make reports to Internal Affairs.

Of course, the ACLU link you give says much more. Here's a choice extract to remember: Remember: police misconduct cannot be challenged on the street.

The point I was making is that "Give me money for pizza" is not a lawful order and you're within your rights to refuse it. You can not be found guilty of refusing a lawful order if you did not give him the money.

The same is true for things like photography. It's been established that on duty officers have no expectation of privacy, and you have the right to watch and record them. If a police officer demands that you erase photos from your camera, you are under absolutely no obligation to comply with that order.

https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/know-your-rights-photograph...

You need to understand that doing anything an officer might class as "Disobeying a Lawful Order" can get you killed.

This bit, written by an individual with Aspergers, explaims the situation more clearly -- and why the awful nature of it isn't going anywhere. http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/316176.html

If you don't feel like reading it, this line will substitute somewhat: > "[...] If you don't think he should have given that order, you can file a complaint later, but you can't complain to Internal Affairs if you're dead."

(The reason why it is necessary -- and yes, this is arguable, but this is not new -- follows not long after that sentence.)

> Being nosy is the part that didn't end well.

Neither did being obnoxious, I imagine: "I told them that it was an early stage startup; I’m doing this because I feel it’s a way to make the world around me better, to bring people joy through better food."

I don't condone the violence and abuse of authority, obviously. But imagine being a cop, and having to deal with this at 1 am after a long day at work.

Yeah, I'm surprised and almost impressed by how much he manages to come across as a total wanker in his own account where he's presumably trying to cast himself in the best possible light.

And yet your reply condones the violence and abuse of authority. Why is that?

Here's the basic rule: as a police officer, you must be polite, fair, kind, and law-abiding, even if the public you deal with is rude, nasty, entitled, somewhat drunk, and otherwise unpleasant. Period. If you can't do that, you're in the wrong profession. And if the profession permits people who can't do that, the profession has systemic issues that need to be corrected.

Asserting that the reaction was predictable and in some sense understandable isn't the same as condoning it. This is the real world, and it's unavoidable that the sorts of people who are going to sign up to police the streets in the face of aggressive hobos and violent gang-bangers aren't going to be the most staid and self-controlled.

I disagree. As a police officer, you must be fair and law-abiding. Why must they be kind and polite?

Because one of the key challenges of law enforcement is securing community cooperation. Law enforcement cannot be effective when hey are seen by the community as a hostile gang of thugs, and politeness is just a name for adherence to social standards than signal that you are part of the community and not a hostile outsider.

Sometimes, yes. Other times, such as when a robbery is in progress, or when an accident has just occurred and you've arrived on the scene, polite and kind aren't very important.

Fair and law-abiding become much more important in these situations. Once the danger has passed, kind and polite can be important again.

If you walk in the street you might get hit by a car. I don't condone a driver hitting you, but reality is what it is.

Cops have to constantly deal with the worst elements of society doing the worst things imaginable. It'd be great if they didn't get hardened, but the reality is they often do. Expecting cops to be polite and kind to the drug addicted guy beating his wife because she isn't turning enough tricks to support his habit is probably an unreasonable expectation. Until we've fixed society, cops aren't going to change.

> It'd be great if they didn't get hardened

"Hardened" suggests the officers are immune to bullshit. The officers' behavior suggests the exact opposite.

Hardened has nothing to do with being immune to BS. It means that they adopt the mindset needed to do a job that involves potentially getting killed, potentially dealing with murders, murderers, rapists, and similar things that require hardening psychologically to handle working with. That mindset doesn't make them immune to BS, it makes them able to do their job. It also makes them the kind of person you don't want to have interactions with professionally, so if they tell you to leave an area, you leave the area and don't linger and piss them off pointlessly. Hanging out and obstructing/distracting them from their work is the kind of BS they have no tolerance for, which is what the guy in this article was doing out of mind-bogglingly profound ignorance.

Then how about we call it "oversensitized" or "embrittled" instead of "hardened"? They are far more fitting terms for what you just described.

Not only is the "Colonel Jessup hypothesis" total baloney (note how the deputy at the end saw what happened as the mark of a rookie), but accepting it glorifies moral failure and belittles the efforts of officers who have managed to develop a thick hide along with the integrity to judiciously wield the authority they have been given.

"Hardened" was the first term that jumped to mind, though the more I thought about this, and after reading the police report, the more I understand the police's motives and generally agree with their response (it might be they were too harsh physically, but they had good reason to be physical, and the guy fully deserved to be arrested).

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...

> 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.

Woosley's behavior wasn't solely passive resistance according to the report. He was resistant until the cops tried to move him (reasonably), at which point he flipped. The cops put the drunk guy freaking out in an arm lock at that point. Could they have handled things more ideally? Probably, but they didn't do anything particularly wrong given what they were dealing with.

Parentsky was a drunk guy insisting he was a medic and pushing his way past the cops. He was told by the police and EMTs to get clear of the scene. The guy was buzzed and acting like a complete fool, trying to push his way through the cops when they blocked him. There was a scuffle, one of the cops got a minor injury from the scuffle, and Parentsky was cuffed. Then when he was in jail he acted like a drunk fool and started screaming.

If they were sober I'd probably look at it differently, but having dealt with enough drunk idiots, I recognize that they don't generally respond to reasoning. The cops were dealing with a couple drunk guys interfering with the EMTs doing their job. I think they handled the situation as best as they could given what they were dealing with.

Parentsky's bizarre self-justification sounds like a stringing of excuses and railing over narcissistic injury.

What you're saying about the pressures on police officers is true, but the conclusion you draw from it is not. It is not actually the case that police officers must be managed in such a way that their professionalism is degraded by contact with the worst parts of society. One can think of many kinds of management interventions that could mitigate this problem --- or, for that matter, read books about modern police patrolling and the day-to-day work life of police officers to see good ones already written down.

I'm not sure what you're hinting at. Do you have any specific articles/books to recommend on this subject?

I liked Moskos "Cop In The Hood", as a quick easy read; a lot of the rest of what I've read are cop blog posts or policy papers.

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.

Interesting! Apparently I don’t read enough police blogs :) I’ve put the book on my ”to read” list.

I've witnessed two horrific wrecks and been a witness for the cops one of those times. There's a time and a place for projecting your importance as an individual, but assisting someone else in an accident is not one such time. Do what you can until the authorities arrive and be helpful and respectful, and for fuck's sake, follow directions.

Obviously the cops should have handled the situation better, but the mature response would be to walk away.

So, in effect the correct response for seeing someone you happen to know get hurt in the US is "don't give a toss". As if caring for someone was a crime in itself?

I am left speechless.

No, the correct response is to help in an appropriate way, assisting until emergency response arrives, and then walk away.

Cops here are imperfect, corrupt and what not. That being said, I'm very happy I live in a place where I would not be arrested in these circumstances. It is kind of cool that I do not have choice between clearing the place immediately when cops come in and being arrested.

Cops here seem to be used that people stop on streets to watch what is going on. They also seem to be able to make people leave (when they jam the place) without arresting them for first slight tiny hint of possible disobedience.

You're kidding, right? Obviously the correct response when you see someone get hurt (btw, the author of the article did not know either of the people who got hurt in the bicycle accident; he asked them what their names were) is to assist them and call 911 if necessary. Nobody is saying otherwise--unless you count the author of the article himself, who at the end says that calling 911 is often a bad idea (which I don't agree with).

Thank you for saying this. I don't think the author necessarily meant harm, but by constantly questioning and trying to take control of the situation ("Is that protocol", rolling over after being placed on his stomache, etc.) he was digging himself deeper and deeper in a hole.

It is also hard to take the article at face value. Literally every other sentence screams of hyperbole. Basically, he got arrested and had to spend the night in jail. He makes it sounds like he was locked in Guantanamo Bay. He didn't get sent to a "safety cell" (what he refers to as isolation) until he (by his own account) threw a temper tantrum demanding to see a doctor.

When Deputy Terry walked away muttering, “I have had enough of you,” I banged on the door repeatedly and screamed, “I want to see a doctor. I WANT TO SEE A DOCTOR.”

I don't even understand what the original accident really was. It looks like the girl fell off her bike and hit her foot on the ground. Was it really necessary to call 911 for this? I apologize if it was more serious then it appeared, but from the photo it does not look that bad.

In the 911 call audio, he states that the accident victims asked him to call 911. In a situation like that, I'd say it's proper to call 911.

Yeah, she was asking for it.

Oh, sorry, this isn't victim-blaming.net? My mistake.

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