In the few instances where liberal cities have chosen to address police brutality and corruption, they’ve generally created glorified suggestion boxes and Byzantine mazes of meetings you can go to. What they haven’t done is hold anybody accountable for anything.
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Just more reasons to never go to America, your police are violent scumbags and your government is so corrupt that it should be a plotline on a TV show. (Not saying my country is any less shit, but I don’t have a choice about living here).
Maybe they should focus on serving and protecting and less on being pissy little snowflakes. I know when POTUS is an infant, it trickles down. Still.
I’m sure even Mussolini had is fun moments.
Heck, 90% of the time people don’t even spell HIPAA right, much less know what it is.
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“Act like a lady” - only acceptable if performed as musical theatre.
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- How does a law supersede the Constitution? My understanding is that it’s the other way around.
- Are these cops ex-priests or ex-nuns? If I had a nickle for every time a priest or nun told me to “act like a lady,” I’d be a millionaire.
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Good point, that was pretty much the reason why there was little done in Eric Garner’s case. There is an organization meant to handle policy abuse in NYC, but it’s long, convoluted, and ultimately at the whim of the chief of police whether any action is taken.
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Most US citizens don’t have a choice about what country we live in, either - especially those of us who are the descendants of a stolen people.
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If they were acting in an official capacity on behalf of the entity covered under HIPAA (example, if the man had escaped from a care facility), I think HIPAA could apply.
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Well, don’t tease me like this… How?
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Not even in that scenario. Nope. The reporter is not bound by HIPAA.
If I call a Hospital and ask if a certain patient is being treated there and the person who answers the phone says “YES, THEY ARE”, then the HOSPITAL violated HIPAA. Not me.
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This, exactly. Several years ago, a dentist violated HIPAA when his records blew out of his convertible while driving down the road. (Why did he have his records in an open box with the top down? No clue.) But he was in violation, not the folks who found the papers. You have to be subject to the law in order to violate it.
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I didn’t mean the reporter. I never had the impression that the officers were trying to protect the reporter but they may have been sincerely viewing the naked guy as a patient with rights to privacy.
Edit:
This isn’t excusing their condescending language, decision to cuff her or the bullshit phrasing of “stop resisting,” but there is obviously more to it than the reporter’s view here. Watching the videos again only reinforced this for me.
Here was a similar situation. Not saying the cops are right to “hide behind HIPAA” but that could be where their heads were at in the case in Denver. The officers may have had HIPAA training where they would have learned that hospitals protect the patients’ identities under HIPAA unless there is an imminent threat to public health. In this stressful situation in the field this could also have been jumbled up and they saw it as their duty to protect him from being photographed in this condition.
What I see is someone probably off their meds, the cops there to assist with the ambulance crew - so this is already a medical situation. Someone else trying to photograph them and a (compassionate?) response to protect him from this that turned into her being cuffed and led away. I don’t see her identifying herself as press in the limited bodycam footage (not that this matters with respect to her rights, but it might have led to a different result).
From her own piece:
Note: As of Friday afternoon, police had offered no information except to say that the incident was a “medical call” and that the man in question – whom they wouldn’t identify – had been transported to the hospital without being arrested. I asked why he had been handcuffed, and department spokesman Jay Casillas said he didn’t know. “That I can’t tell you. I wasn’t there. It was a medical call,” he said in an account that seems curious given the message about “indecent exposure” I saw on the screen from the back of the police car.
She’s reading a lot of conspiracy into this. There was most likely a 9-11 call from someone who saw a naked man walking down the sidewalk. That would be worded as “indecent exposure.” They know it’s probably related to either taking the wrong drugs or not taking the right ones, making it a medical case. She casually mentions - 12 paragraphs in - that there happened to be an ambulance there without saying whether or not it was there when she arrived (from the video, that does appear to have been the case). The medics may be forbidden from dealing with this situation without police assistance.
After covering him up with whatever they had, handcuffing may be the first, most obvious way to protect the safety of the medical responders so they can assess. His being sat on the curb sounds like an assessment phase. It doesn’t seem like they were standing around kicking him - she’s got this viewpoint that she must go bear witness because of horrible things that happened in very similar circumstances. That doesn’t mean that’s what these responders were up to.
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Dude. Some of the most corrupt police departments with long records of brutality are in major urban areas - LA, NYPD, Chicago. This isn’t a rural problem, it’s a police problem. It’s happening likely in every single police department that doesn’t grasp that they are not authoritarian brutes, but public servants whose role is keep the peace, not shoot black people for existing.
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Righto. Mere admin tactics to bully. Been there since first passed as acute care social services
Sure but the first amendment applies even when people are sincere about their belief that there is a good reason for suppressing constitutional rights.
When is the last time you heard of a cop arrested for threatening someone’s actual right to privacy on a public street by physically forcing a degrading illegal search?
Yup, which is to say training and reinforcement on the whole suck. I’ll bet cities & PD’s are more afraid of HIPAA fines than payouts for unjustified searches, and train/emphasize accordingly. If you really mean “arrested,” no, no cop is going to arrest another on duty cop (unless they do something that shows they are clearly off their meds. 
)
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