Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/25/mans-neck-breaks-during-ar.html
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Very unlucky for the cops that were there when his neck broke. Now they’ll have to deal with lots of unpleasant suspicion and innuendo.
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I’ll put money on one of the cops involved saying “ouch, that’s gotta hurt, mate!” when this man’s neck broke.
I covered cops for a while as a young reporter and this is the language of arrest and incident reports.
I can confirm. While working the overnight assignment desk as an intern, the friendly sergeant I’d call at HQ to get highlights from the blotter spoke almost exclusively in the passive voice about every incident.
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So an Aussie Freddie Grey? At least he was white so he’s still alive.
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Not quite.
But predators only begin with the most vulnerable. In the end all mafias are the same…
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Could this passive language be a result of the libel/slander laws being different in the Commonwealth than the US?
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I was going to say we use passive voice here, too. But you could be right that Australia’s libel laws could make it even more pervasive. AMI got Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators banned there but it isn’t banned in the US. Their libel laws are different. :-/
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But one thing’s for sure. The cops will never,ever apologize. They never do, nor do prosecutors. No matter how egregious their actions, no matter how clearly in the wrong they are, they will never, ever apologize or admit fault. It’s a damning indictment of them. It really is. And it’s true all over the world.
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Meanwhile in Fresno, a policeman feared for his life as a 16-year-old suspect ran away from him, so he shot the kid in the back of the head.
I’d say that police shouldn’t have guns, but it’s obvious that they cause plenty of “life changing events” without firearms.
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This sort of language is the norm in the US too, particularly for local news.
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Holy shit. That’s straight-up murder.
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Agreed. Caught on film which I wish I had not watched.
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Not to mention a ton of paperwork.
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I always thought of this kind of language contortion as “agentless,” like no one did it. I use it at work.
Also, it’s really not good when media outlets simply take their headlines and information from agencies involved in the story. One local news station kept describing people hit by trains as “Trespasser Struck by Train.” Which description is straight from the Transit Authority of course. Instead of writing about how it’s not common knowledge that trains run on the weekends and the transit authority has done zero to mark the tracks or otherwise raise awareness about it and people keep walking on the tracks and getting killed. I wrote a screed to them and I haven’t seen that since tbh, but come on.
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Whenever personal responsibility is to be avoided, passive voice is spoken in.
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Listening to true crime TV shows here in the states, I’ve noticed the police use really weird, pretentious language to tell their stories, as if they think this is how smart people talk outside law enforcement. Its a similar dialect of bureaucrat as spoken by many military types, too many syllables and not enough meaning.
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It’s like in drug ads on TV, when at the end they rattle off a long list of side effect warnings, and say “serious, sometimes fatal events — including infections, lymphoma and other types of cancer — have happened.” They didn’t just happen, they were caused by the drug.
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The gun did fire. The bullet did enter the suspect’s body.
So, guns do kill people, but only cops’ guns. Got it.
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Previously:
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