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Failure to Communicate
In regards the Ma’Khia Bryant shooting, once the body camera video was produced there didn’t seem to be much to talk about as far as the incident itself. A police officer showed up for a call and within less than ten seconds had to shoot an aggressor with a knife. But I was wrong; apparently, there is a very large cohort of Americans who honestly believe that the officer was wrong to take the actions that seem obviously necessary to the rest of us. I read this morning about an encounter with a radio host and a guest that was sort of enlightening, but in reality disturbing. After the quotes I’ll tell you why:
“DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God had argued over Ma’Khia’s case. “Every case is different, and in this case, if I pull up to a scene and see a girl chasing another girl [and] about to stab a girl, my job as a police officer is to make sure that girl doesn’t get killed,” Envy said at the time. “And the law allows me to stop that killing or that stabbing by any means necessary. That’s what the law allows me to do, on both sides.”
On a later broadcast: “On Monday, April 28, Dr. Umar delivered a passionate statement regarding the case and condemned officer Reardon’s deadly use of force. “I work in schools, Charlamagne,” Dr. Umar explained. “I have seen lunchroom aides with no police training. No bulletproof vest, no knife-proof vest, no gun in the pocket. I have seen elderly Black women and elderly Black men take knives and other weapons out of the hands of students during lunchroom riots. You mean to tell me … a trained, armed police, with a bulletproof vest can’t get the knife outta the hand of a 16-year-old?”
Here is the thing: I have literally no point of reference for a discussion with someone who thinks students possessing “knives and other weapons” during “lunchroom riots” is an occurrence anything short of catastrophic. There appear to be millions of Americans who aren’t outright shocked at a 16-year-old girl attacking other people with a knife while making deadly threats. I’ve seen the interview with the neighbor and the street looks like a fairly typical suburban neighborhood, but the people involved in the dispute seem to be anything but typical. If you watch the body cam video you see what appears to be an adult male kicking one of the women to the ground and then again when she is down. He immediately starts yelling at the officer after the shots are fired.
I just don’t get it. I don’t know if I could have any sort of conversation with people that do this or defend it. It’s a different America than the one I live in. What is going on?
Published in General
You are right, it is a different America. Here is the school cafeteria behavior, just this time in a restaurant https://twitter.com/i/sta
tus/1387174889736609793
This behavior is now common, in a different America.
I don’t know what’s going on, and it is troubling that in order to find out, one might have to consult social media. Which, with regard to the guy kicking the girl, somebody has: The headkicker in the stabby Columbus brouhaha was Ma’K the Knife’s dad, by Steve Sailer – The Unz Review
Here is what baffles me. There are 800K cops in the country and they are not working together to improve their performance or their image. The cop unions and fraternal orders are failing. Hospitals kill 250,000 people a year and nobody is calling for them to be defunded, so public relations can work.
If I was king of the cops here’s what I would do:
1) establish national standards on use of force
2) establish national standards on care of detained persons
3) establish national standards on courtesy and service standards
4) train the crap out of cops
5) establish something like the NTSB, to study incidents and correct standards annually
6) invest billions in new technology (we can do better than clubs and guns)
7) purge the bad apples. Chick-fil-a does not tolerate unfriendly workers
8) run a PR campaign. pay people in Hollywood to write scripts that show cops being friendly and respectful
I am an engineer and I just see a daily parade of human factor and technology problems in policing. When a plane crashes, pre-flight checklists get reviewed/updated. When a surgeon removes the wrong kidney, the procedure is updated to use a sharpie on the patient before they are sedated. Our problems are fixable, but the people in charge don’t have the knowledge or incentive to fix them. This problem is going to have to get fixed by the cops themselves or by some national pro–law citizens group.
That’s an absurd number.
Regardless of how you quantify a “hospital killing someone,” that’s not close. That would be more than 10% of our deaths in this country.
I have seen cases where the care received by the patient in the hospital could have been better, and I’ve seen cases where it turned out to even be harmful. Those cases are rare, but they do happen.
But a quarter of a million people a year?
That’s absurd.
Incidentally, I’m not criticizing you, Don. I’ve seen that number at anywhere between 2,500 deaths per year to over a million. You picked one. Ok, fine.
And I don’t pretend to know the real number. It depends on how you define “kill,” I suppose. But it’s not 250k.
We withdraw drugs from the market that kill only 2 or 3 people. Banned by the FDA. That’s it.
We would never tolerate a system of concentrations camps like that.
You sound like the Democrats who thought our country needed a national mask mandate and national lockdown measures.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us
There have been many similar studies over the years. Whenever there is a push for nationalization of health care, there is a surge of such articles.
Again, though, as someone who works in hospitals, this makes no sense to me.
However. Consider this.
Mr. Smith can’t breathe because he has severe heart disease and lung disease. I tell him that I can help his lung disease, but that the drug might worsen his heart disease. His heart disease treatment is already maxed out – he’s end stage. He decides to try the new lung medicine, despite the heart risk. Because what the heck, he’s dying, right?
So he tries it, it helps a little, maybe. He dies 3 months later.
A chart audit later finds that this patient was taking that lung medicine despite its documented risk for his heart disease. The death is classified as a medical mistake. Which, just looking at the chart, you can see how they might think that.
But it was an informed decision, with no good options. And maybe it even helped. Maybe it didn’t. Hard to say for sure.
But he died of heart disease. Or possibly lung disease. The doctor was just doing his best in an impossible situation. And the patient understood these decisions, and participated in them. Again, it’s an impossible situation.
I’m not sure if that’s where they get such inflated numbers. Most deaths have something in the chart that might have been done differently – might not have mattered, the patient was dying – but in retrospect, we all get smarter, right?
Perhaps that’s where they generate these numbers, I guess.
But having spent 25 years in hospitals, I can’t believe that 10% of our deaths are due to the care they receive. That’s not close.
That number is not zero. But it’s not 10%. That would be an incredible number.
No I don’t. I didn’t say government should do it. Most professions have national standards. Cops should act and be treated as professionals.
There is a different world out there in many urban areas. In the northeast US city I lived near until a couple of years ago knife fights among girls were fairly common, and actually were rarely fatal. But they tended to be vicious and protracted. The girls tended not to be strategic in their fighting moves, making the fights tended to be chaotic and unpredictable, and extremely dangerous for authorities to try to intervene and break up.
The fights among boys had a different dynamic, more often being short and then pausing until someone went off to get a gun and return to conduct a drive-by shooting, often fatal. When doing hand-to-hand fighting, the boys tended to be more strategic than the girls, but that also made their fights more predictable and therefore easier for an authority to intervene and break up.
Since the Bryant event took place at a foster home, I wouldn’t necessarily assume the placid suburban looking setting was necessarily the environment in which the girls had spent most of their lives.
I think a large number, maybe half of those killed, is from hospital acquired infections. That is probably not anybody’s fault, it is just a a result from hospitals being full of sick people and opportunities for infection.
Comparing doctors to cops is interesting. Doctors (and hospitals) have malpractice insurance. I would guess that bad apples become uninsurable before they loose their medical license. I assume that the big malpractice insurance companies help doctors to follow best practices through continuous education and maybe some inspections and such. I further assume that doctors following best practices are unlikely to be punished professionally, financially, or criminally and that doctors *not* following best practices are going to be in trouble, when people die in their hands.
A fair point. That may be true.
One additional point on this.
You’re right, in that hospital-acquired infections are a known risk, which makes sense when you have a building full of sick people. It happens, right?
But consider dormitories. They are much more densely packed with people, and the sanitation in dormitories is generally, um, not quite hospital-level. Dormitories do not have fatal infection rates like hospitals. Why is that?
Because anybody in a hospital is generally very sick, and very weak. And very prone to atypical infections.
So hospital-acquired infections are not only because of the hospital. It’s because of the patients – only people who are that sick are prone to such unusual infections.
Again, people who are near death sometimes die. The ultimate cause of death can be all sorts of things. But people who are that sick sometimes die. The cause of death may be listed as ‘hospital-acquired pneumonia.’ But that patient got that pneumonia because they were near death. It wasn’t exactly the pneumonia that killed her. It’s all the events of the past months or years that led her to be in that condition.
Did the hospital kill her? Of course not.
Put her in a field somewhere, far away from the hospital. She’ll still die. Did the field kill her? No. She was very, very sick.
In America, very few people die because something goes wrong. They die when everything goes wrong. Which one caused the death? Hard to say. Pick one.
Developing standards is fine (the more the better) but you said you wanted it done by the king of the cops.
There is a problem with nationalizing local law enforcement. Britain, and Germany have nationalized policing. At a certain point political objectives become the norm. Transparency disappears to protect the political narrative of the party in power. This has happened with the Ashli Babbett shooting in the Capitol building, Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Operation Fast and Furious. The Feds protect their own, and that will include so called nationalized policing in the States. Border Patrol Officers are being silenced by the current administration to include moving migrants from the border into different parts of the United States.
Britain’s Rotherham scandal, as well the German government putting the lid on crimes committed by Moslems by silencing local German LEO’s from speaking to the press about crimes committed by migrants in their cities.
There are already laws in each state that pertain to the use of deadly physical force by both police officer’s and the private citizen.
And a Federal Police Force.
Me neither. And yes, catastrophic is precisely the word.
Maybe if a few “lunchroom rioters” were shot, they’d stop.
Let me also point that this girl was swinging the knife wildly; the generally accepted closest distance to let a knife wielding attacker approach is 21 feet when the defender is armed with a firearm. Inside that distance a knife wielder can close up and attack in roughly the same amount of time as a trained shooter can draw and fire. Before anyone starts another argument this is an old standard and has been subject to lots of criticism, but the point is that officer walked into a life threatening situation for himself as well as the intended victim of the attack.
Which I’m sure would be used by some as “proof” that he shouldn’t have been there to start with, or should have left without intervening.
Until the perps are brought into statistical control, the cop training will still yield mixed results.
Cops are the government.
He wants to be the
kindking of the cops. Which has a certain appeal, I must say.I am and have always been a lead foot. That results in interactions with cops. I have never met one who wasn’t well trained, was courteous and professional. Yep, I got tickets, but never saw or was treated in a way that I might remotely consider unprofessional.
Does it happen, of course it does, because they are human. Humans can both make mistakes, and occasionally be bad.
I see the problem lying much more in the Police Union protecting mediocrity and wrong doing, than a lack of training or lack of “professionalism”.
Based on my experience with someone wielding a knife during a lunchroom fight, I would heartily agree with that assessment.
OK, I did sort of get some humor out of the fact that this restaurant was called the Kickin’ Crab. Apparently the clientele took the name literally.
From what I can tell, it is a foster home. I have a lot of experience with them in Texas, and that’s what it looks like to me. It’s either a business running a home or it’s a do-gooder trying to help unfortunate children. Sometimes those children are there for a very good reason.
The adult man is the father of the stabbing girl. He’s the reason the child is in the foster home.
My guess, based on watching many such child clients, is that the stabbing girl felt that someone was disrespectful to her. In the puny minds of such poorly raised children, this is an ultimate crime that is unbearable. In her mind it was not only justifiable to stab these disrespectful girls, it was a requirement to her survival. She would never be convinced otherwise, were she not blessedly dead. She thinks this way because she was raised in a home full of violence, as evidenced by her psychopathic father who thought it necessary to kick a teen aged girl in the head.
This child might have progressed into a civilized person but didn’t and had to be put down. Let’s hope her father is charged with the death of his daughter. I’d love to see the howls of outrage from the familiar parties.
That’s a respectable, if wrong, analysis. The difference is that engineers and doctors have paying clients. The police are power and force and their role is to inflict that power on the people. We absolutely do not want such people to be anymore united than they might already be. They need to be on tight leashes held by their masters. Their masters are the communities they serve, not some lobbyist in DC.
There was a time in our history when bar brawls and public fights were considerably more frequent.
But none of the participants were surprised when the police came and arrested them.
Then the brawls and public fights became less frequent. We could probably benefit from studying the history of public fighting, its flow and ebb, its cultural adherents and cultural detractors, in order to find out what makes it acceptable behavior. Because what the reaction to this event suggests is that there is a wide perception that the officer interfered in, and overreacted to a normal private dispute.
What Dr. Bastiat said.
What baffles me about the vagueness surrounding how many people hospitals kill annually–I realize that everyone who plucks a number states it as a unarguable fact; I’m talking about the lack of evidentiary specifics backing it up and the wide range of options–is that I know from experience just how much documentation and information is collected during a patient’s hospital stay, and the exorbitant amount of investigation and (more, and often redundant) data gathering that’s done in the event of an adverse outcome. Even what I think is probably the least-well-documented consequence of a hospital stay–that of a serious, hospital-acquired, infection which proves fatal is rigorously traced and explained. I don’t believe the 250K number either. Just as I don’t believe that it’s impossible to come up with a rational, reasonably accurate assessment of the number based on data, if it were in someone’s interests to do so.