Occupy Pepper Spray Cop

fo real doe hmu

Um the appropriate reaction would have been to ticket each person who refused to leave when they were required to by law. Hey look, money! Money for things! Like education and parks and such! What's that you say? There was no regulation, ordinance or other thinamajig on the books that said they had to leave? Well then, surprise! They get to stay.

You don't have to do things because the police say so. That is not how it works. How it works is, the police tell you to do things because the law says you must do them, and if you do not obey the law, the police will take steps to ensure that you do, or in appropriate circumstances, punish you for not doing so. If there was a legal basis for making these people leave, the correct steps were:

1. Ask them to leave firmly

2. If they refuse, issue each one a ticket / fine, then just sit back and let the situation play out, so long as they're not hurting anyone.

3. If it's causing a serious problem for them to be there, i.e. public safety or somehow going to cost the city a bunch of money to clean up, i.e.  if there is some overwhelming justification for doing so, arrest each one and remove them from the area.

4. If someone physically resists, subdue them using as little force as possible. You're a big enough dude that you probably don't need to taser a 120 lb girl.

5. If someone becomes violent, NOW is the time to bust out the pepper spray, tasers and riot gear.

I think these people are absolute idiots in terms of what they're "protesting", but this is clearly not acceptable. Two of them were hospitalized, others were lucky enough to just cough up blood for an hour or so. As a result they'll all probably sue the city, costing taxpayer dollars. The officer has no incentive whatsoever not to be brutal because his union will prevent him from being fired and his department will stick up regardless of what he does basically up to "eating children". I think the chief actually already said she was "proud" of how the officers handled the situation which is a farce. Both should be fired. Neither will be. At most, a slap on the wrist.

The best quote I've heard on this was from an Iraq vet who said "If I'd done that to a group of insurgents over there, I'd have been court martialed, and rightly so."

Why the hell not? It's not difficult. I'm pretty sure it happens all the time, it's just the fuck-ups that actually make national news and turn into a big deal like this. Most cops do their job well and aren't assholes. Unfortunately, when they are assholes, or when they just plain screw up, there is no accountability: the department can't admit to any wrongdoing because it would just invite a lawsuit, and the union won't allow an example to be made because "there but for the grace of God go the rest of us, because anyone can screw up". 

so there's little standing in the way of shit like this happening aside from cops being people and people generally not being complete dicks who like to effectively torture people for sitting around chanting. Hey, you know, that might actually be a better thing to protest than, "successful businesses and the people who run them have lots of money and I don't even though I stumbled through college and that seems vaguely unfair to me".

Well mine doesn't involve torturing people, leading to massive lawsuits against the PD and the municipality. So I think mine is relatively good, while his really really sucks. Seriously, what does this even mean? Had he gone around lopping the protesters' heads off with an axe, you could still say "he had his way of doing things, you have yours", that doesn't somehow make them morally or pragmatically equivalent. What a strange comment.

As for "WOW I REALLY NEED TO GET THESE PEOPLE OUT OF HERE RIGHT FUCKING NOW"... why? Was there a train coming through? Was a bomb about to go off? It looked to me like they were sitting in a walkway. Not a lot of urgency involved there. Actually, not even a lot of inconvenience for everyone else, and even if a group of people are being a huge nuisance by standing in the way, balance that against excruciating pain and potentially blinding someone for life and maybe inconvenience is the better route to take here.

Yes, you can individually ticket every occupy protestor. That's the beauty - they're just sitting there. Walk up, issue ticket, if someone cannot provide ID, take them into custody, all very calm and no one gets hurt. Hell, where I live they had one of these "occupy" things in a park here. They were allowed to stay for a while, and then when they stayed past that point, people started handing out eviction notices, and then tickets. Chemical weapons were not necessary.

"We don't live in an ideal world" is a huge cop-out. That does not mean that there aren't clearly better and entirely feasible ways to deal with protests than to put kids in the hospital for sitting on the ground.

Yes, the use of pepper spray is a form of torture, in that it is intended to cause people excruiciating pain in order to subdue them. If you want to compare that to you playing with your girlfriend, that's quite a stretch. Sometimes, hurting people into submission is necessary. However, this is only true where the alternative is worse. People continuing to sit on the ground is not worse.

The problem here is if they'd done that, just given up, the results would have been far better than the results ended up being. It would have cost no one anything, no one would be hurt, no one would be hospitalized, and no one would be sued. People might have been annoyed. That's about it. But you're drawing a false dilemma: the other option was not to throw their hands up in the air and go home. They locked arms together? Oh wow, there's an impossible hurdle to overcome. "Chief, we caught these bank robbers, but we just can't seem to get them in handcuffs since they locked arms together!" Come on now. Somehow, I think you'll manage.

Cops have pepper spray and guns because sometimes, instead of taking the fine, the guy you're trying to arrest, instead of going quietly, tries to hit you in the face with a rock. At that point, you use the weapons. You don't fucking start with them.