The victim of the car accident caused by the dead suspect, yo.
I agree that the nurse is a victim too; of the police brutality and abuse of authority that followed.
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I swear cops are trained to inflict as much harm as possible. 
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While I wholeheartedly support her suing the department if she decides to, what she’s doing here is sagacious. Suing won’t burn him period. The case will be in civil court, which means a financial settlement paid for by taxes. Law enforcement have shown they don’t give half a rat’s ass about causing their counties to have to pay millions for their brazenly illegal brutality and stupidity. It’s not their own money their misconduct is spending, so they don’t care, and their unions will obliterate any elected official that tries to hold the cops themselves accountable for their actions.
While I think her pursuit of an apology and admittance by the cops of their obvious wrongdoing is optimistic, it’s also very brave. Abusive cops routinely make the life anyone that tries to hold them responsible, even in the court of public opinion, a living hell.
FTFY. Police corruption is systemic. Decades without accountability have resulted in cops that break the law instead of enforcing it. From their perspective, and therefor his, it’s not bad judgement because they’re in no danger of being held accountable for ignoring the law. It would only be bad judgement if they faced consequences, which they’ve learned from experience they won’t.
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Like I posted in another story about he police, they’re not all bad apples…just 75%. I feel safer knowing violent creeps with firearms protect my rights and liberties. It’s called LAW AND ORDER. If the police have to break laws to protect those laws, well, I’m fine with that!
That’s one factor that needs to be changed, stat; money for settlements and fines need to start being taken from department pension funds, and not citizens’ tax dollars.
Until they start getting hit where it hurts, nothing will get better.
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She should still sue. She can give that money to the nurse’s union or some other watchdog entity, so that if the police fuck up like this again, the next lawsuit comes down on their heads swifter and more forcefully. Municipalities are insured for things like this. When they get sued and have to pay out big bucks, their premiums go up if the municipality doesn’t change tangibly, to satisfy the insurer. So it’s like a double insurance: the municipality has to reform, or face even stronger consequences the next time around.
I’d put it this way: it’s her duty to sue the crap out of that police officer and police department.
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Extreme pedantry on my part, no offense intended beyond the normal ire that pedantry draws.
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None taken.
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You may have noticed a trend in terms of who -isn’t- a target of their tirades abuses and murders, and logic will dictate from that both whom they serve and who that group is protected from
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what? I swear all the time whenever I see that thin blue line.
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I agree completely. Trouble is, by this point police are a heavily-armed legally protected national gang almost a million strong and will extra-judicially punish anyone with the temerity to try and hold them accountable. Which means powerful elected officials and judges need to stand with the people.
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Curious to me after reading the full copy thank you @emo_pinata for posting it.
He tried to justify that consent was given because the patient was a victim not a suspect.
Uh. Woah. No. Hell no. I don’t care which side of the fence I’m on. You want my DNA you need my damn permission. Fully and expressly. Period. End of story.
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It’s the one case in which I shake my fist at a union.
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It must suck to be a cop. I’ve heard that job described as a social worker with a gun.
After seeing this kind of stuff all the time, the only respect I have for LEOs is for park rangers. They nearly always, in my experience, are there to help, explain stuff, watch out for you, make sure you have a good time, and if you are doing something wrong, they will ask you to stop and fix it, not firearm up and all that. I really appreciate their good, helpful, courteous attitude. (Although, we did have a junior ranger with the Calif State Parks be a complete a-hole one time, it was sad.)
I’m still not hating the CHP, either, though there have been incidents. I’ve heard them described as the AAA (American Automobile Association) with guns. That was from a member of the Salinas PD, years ago.
I just told this story to a retired nurse, and her immediate comment was … “they’re not trying to protect that off duty police officer truck driver, I don’t care what they say. They were trying to put the blame on him for the accident, because they don’t want to get the blame for a fatality in the police chase, because they’re not supposed to do that.”
I’m not sure of all the laws concerning when police chases are supposed to be called off in the interest of public safety, but … I swear this is the only explanation of these events that makes any damn sense. That in spite of the fact that that driver was a fellow boy in blue, he wasn’t from their department, and therefore “expendable” from a blame standpoint.
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The circumstances for the blood draw and how hard they were pushing for it without a warrant is very suspect. I hope with this attention they don’t try to sweep it under the rug.
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I don’t disagree, but even that ‘logic’ is faulty as fuck on the part of the officers; “oh well, the guy in truck was drunk/high, so we’re totally not responsible for the accident caused by a suspect that we were pursuing.”
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A lawsuit would require a (hopefully public) investigation into what happened. Why were the other LEO just standing by while this happened? Was he directed to arrest anyone preventing him from drawing blood? I don’t really feel like leaving to at an internal investigation will be fair and public. A lawsuit would hopefully lead to a series of news articles properly assigning blame and over a much longer period of time.
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You can hear it in the longer video that his commanding officer tells him to arrest anyone stopping him from getting blood.
Some cop somewhere thought it would be a good idea to get it on the record that the truck-driver cop was not intoxicated.
It wasn’t really important.
But what IS important to cops is PUNISHING ANYONE WHO DEFIES THEM.
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