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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
Even involving the police in the discussion misses the root of this problem by a mile.
Bryant was going to stab someone over an argument about housecleaning. I can understand how something like this happens over drugs, money or cheating. Without condoning, I can at least draw from point A to point B and see how it escalated. But housecleaning? This is a total failure of Bryant’s family and community. The police were responsible for the (justified) shooting, but they bear no responsibility whatsoever for providing a climate where things like this happen.
As I read the abstract, what the article is saying is that they don’t think they have adequate documentation tracking deaths from medical errors, and so they’ve looked at a small group, and extrapolated what they think is the number to come up with a total.
If only it were that easy.
Mr. She’s family doctor, cardiologist, electrophysiologist and I spent his last couple of years juggling his meds and procedures to try to give him the best quality of life possible given his very weak state and all the risks, complications, and interactions that had to be managed. By and large, I think we succeeded pretty well, but there’s no question that along the way we had a couple of situations where a drug that I’d been warned might cause a problem, actually did, and we had to back off. If it hadn’t been caught in time, I suppose it might have been considered “malpractice” or a “mistake.” But I was aware beforehand of the risks.
My mother-in-law died as a result of the nurse at the nursing home where she was recovering from MRSA or C-diff, can’t remember which at this point, giving her the potent drug cocktail that was intended for the lady in the other bed. Mistakes do happen, and that was one.
I look at the panic that ensues from a handful of adverse outcomes (most not fatal) from the Covid vaccine, when tens-of-millions of shots have been administered, and I don’t even know, in such a risk-averse culture, why anyone would want to go into medicine.
The days of throwing fists then grabbing a beer with that person the next day require a code of honor that simply doesn’t exist anymore. Collapse of religion, social isolation, poor fathers, blah, blah, blah…. I repeat myself.
There are so many problems with the post-modernist views on morality.
Correct. At the end of life, when things get desperate, we try all sorts of things. We take risks we wouldn’t normally take. Because the situation is so dire. Why not try it? Sometimes it helps. What do you have to lose?
But you’re right – in retrospect, it can look like a medical mistake, when in reality it was a calculated risk, at a desperate time in the patient’s life.
We do the best we can at the time.
SOmeone willing to pull a knife on someone else is risking deadly force being used against them.
The policeman acted correctly 100%. That anyone says otherwise is to in fact, lie. If they were the one threatened with a knife, they would be fine with deadly force to protect them.
Let me say that again: Anyone who claims that they don’t think deadly force was called for is lying.
Funny you mention that…
A quick internet search reveals…
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html
https://patch.com/california/san-diego/10-medical-malpractice-statistics-you-should-know
https://mymedicalscore.com/medical-error-statistics/
Likewise, I don’t believe for a second that 500,000 Americans have died from the corona virus. It is in the interest of far too many politicians to have that be a large number for me to accept it as true. I would need a list of names, and the names scrutinized for correctness before I would believe it. It’s much easier to inflate the number of deaths than it is to stuff a ballot box. Politicians know how to do both readily.
Agreed. I’m amazed at how quickly he did it too. I don’t think I could have analyzed the situation and acted so quickly and clearly as that officer. He needs to be awarded a medal for lifesaving.
It doesn’t get better than this. It can’t.
I wouldn’t say lying so much as deluded.
Speaking as a professional, I can say they are not psychotic and delusional. They are lying. Now, denial is a lie to the self so that me be it, but it is still a lie.
I think there’s too much variation in local cultures to make national standards that are workable. I often recall the police chief of the upstate New York suburb (40,000 people, median household income well above the regional average, heavy concentration of “professionals,” especially engineers) in which I then lived talking with our church mens group about how different policing was as compared to the city of which our town was a suburb (population 250,000, extremely high rate of poverty and single parenthood, very low rates of employment, lots of gangs, especially of two often warring dominant ethnic groups). The local suburban police chief said that an officer who had worked more than a couple of years in the city would be quite unhelpful in the suburb, as during his work in the city he would have developed an attitude toward the people with whom he interacted that would be completely inappropriate for an interaction with a resident of our suburban town. Interactions between a police officer and a resident were completely different in our suburb than such an interaction would be in the city.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of those “medical mistakes” being the “third highest cause of death in the US” or whatever, are really those kinds of desperate measures.
The left denies this too, of course.
Someone who actually believed (somehow) that deadly force is justified in the defense of THEIR OWN life, but not someone else’s, might cross the line to evil.
This is what really gets me about the situation. There were two people involved, and only one is being talked about. The girl who would have probably died had the officer not reacted as quickly and decisively as he did isn’t being talked about all. Does her life not count for anything? Was her life not important too?
Oh, well, that is pretty much any race baiter
There’s much more, if you keep searching.
The fact that it makes no sense becomes less relevant if you get enough hits on Google.
Again, there’s just no way that 10% of the deaths in this country are from medical mistakes.
I’ve been involved in a couple deaths that might reasonably be attributed to medical mistakes. I was not the doctor in charge, but I was familiar with the case. A couple of cases. I’ve been practicing for 25 years. I could recite the whole case to you. It was memorable, unfortunately.
We always have to remember that statistics are complied with a mission. There is the whole “one in five” children go to bed hungry in America. That is utter BS. We have a rampant obesity problem. There are not “food deserts” in America. It is more like we have a dessert problem.
There is more than a whiff of ‘one of your guys killed one of our guys’ in this.
Yep. The fact he saved another one of “their” guys does not matter at all.
It is sick and tribal and the pathway to sectarian war.
Hospitals kill people all the time; consider the huge number of ambulances that show up to the ER, and the minute the doctor gets to them the patient is pronounced dead.
I read this as mortality. Seems to be work.
But 17 intelligence agencies have said so.
Obesity can be caused by eating badly, not just by eating too much. But it would probably be a good idea if every young person in school received a copy of the excellent book “How To Lie With Statistics.”
Police practices didn’t just pop up with Michael Brown. Police trying to apprehend criminals must be able to use force. It’s not supposed to be a fair fight, otherwise cops would all have to be MMA champs or martial arts experts. Derick Chauvin is 140 pounds, subdued 232 pound Floyd. The procedures and techniques have been developed over decades. There is no Spiderman web to cast at a criminal.
There was a time when people understood that criminals had committed violent acts before the police arrived at the scene. In Floyd’s case there was something about holding a gun to the belly of a pregnant woman in Texas after he broke into her house. That scene didn’t make it into the video. The Bryant case kind of gave the viewer all three acts of the program. The criminal was in the act. Most of these videos are like the last two scenes of a cop show, we don’t get to see why the cop is even there.
The solution is to have only minority officers deal with minority police emergencies. Our surprise at regular girl knife fights in the cafeteria means that whites can’t process a crime scene to minority satisfaction / standards.
I am playing to my Pathfinder. I see “17 Intelligence” and think it is a characteristic. +3 on the D20 roll btw
Obesity is caused by taking in more calories than you expend.
Or we could teach them statistics.
I tell everyone that it is impossible to lie to someone using statistics. If that person understands statistics.
Do you have Floyd, accused of kiting a bad $20 bill, confused with another person?