That’s terrible. A 16 year old is not going to complete the cause and effect thought properly that these adults should have done for him. I am also guessing that was not a pleasant way to die. Did they even tell the medical personnel what he did? Dear lord he has the choice to drink or face drug cartel known for killing when you fail.
It’s a bit disingenuous to say they “forced him to drink it until he died”, based on the actual abc story there.
Depends how you define “forced”. They basically said they’d arrest him if he didn’t and they were pretty sure what was in there and what would happen to him if he did. If you threaten someone to do something and then they do it, were they forced? One could make an argument they were, especially if they’re grown men with weapons and the power of the state behind them.
The family got paid a million bucks so it’s not like they were in the clear in any way. And Greenfield has no love for cops that abuse their power and tends to word accordingly.
Speaking of which, isn’t “paddy wagon” a racist term? I mean, it’s kind of like referring to a police helicopter as a “ghetto bird”, isn’t it? Or calling people from Memphis “Memphricans”.
I suppose, but who really flashes on Irish people when they hear the term? Maybe Irish people do, I guess. It is kind of antiquated in any case. I think most people nowadays would use “police van” or something.
!
The definition I looked up indicated that the origin of paddy wagon probably was because a lot of police in the early part of the 20th century were of Irish dissent. So doesn’t that make it not exactly a pejorative term?
That said, I wouldn’t shed any tears if the reference was ‘police van’ instead. That seems a lot less evocative though.
“Irish dissent” – Speech to text strikes again! ;-)
The term ‘paddy wagon’ predates the 20th century, and certainly predates the very late 1800s when Irish/Irish-Americans were a significant proportion of East Coast police forces.
It’s easy to forget that Irish people were commonly regarded as being not much better than black people in 19th Century USA.
Yes, I’m thinking that the term originated in the 1850s, probably in NYC, as a way of implying that the cops’ main job was to round up the (then viewed as criminal/shiftless) Irish immigrants (“Paddys” from Padraig, the Irish equivalent of Patrick, right?). Anyway, its origins are definitely pejorative.
Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish, so that police vans were dubbed “paddy wagons” and episodes of mob violence in the streets were called “donnybrooks,” after a town in Ireland.
Death was everywhere. In 1854 one out of every 17 people in the sixth ward died. In Sweeney’s Shambles the rate was one out of five in a 22-month period. The death rate among Irish families in New York in the 1850s was 21 percent, while among non-Irish it was 3 percent. Life expectancy for New York’s Irish averaged under 40 years. Tuberculosis, which Bishop Hughes called the “natural death of the Irish immigrants,” was the leading cause of death, along with drink and violence.
Merriam Webster’s says the first use of the term in print was 1909, so it may have been in use but it wasn’t seen in print until the 20th century. And some other sources I saw mentioned how the term ‘paddy’ is not strictly used as a pejorative (they cited “St. Paddy’s Day” though I’ve personally never seen it spelled like that). @kedaha I would like to know what sources you quote on its use in the 1850s if you still have them at hand.
Paddy wasn’t a pejorative, but paddy wagon was as it was explicitly linking one ethnicity with negative behaviour (criminality).
It still isn’t a pejorative, but for example calling someone a ‘plastic paddy’ is.
The quote is from https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-dagger-john-saved-new-york’s-irish-11934.html
Like every origin theory, it’s apocryphal (e.g. ‘police vans may original have had P.D. Wagon on the side to signify Police Department, which was colloquialised into Paddy Wagon’) but Occam’s favours it over any of the other competing theories. I’ve never seen any evidence that there were such a proportion of Irish in the precursors of NYPD for Irish = Police, but there is plenty of evidence for the criminality of Irish immigrants after the Famine.
One of the biggest tour companies in Ireland is called:
Trump pretty much ordered the police to rough up criminals. I expect them to slam him into the trunk and the door frame like everyone else.
“In what way was that funny?” should become a standard question when people claim their idiotic/hateful speech was “just a joke”.
I don’t understand how the cops are expected to stop all the crime if these damn body cameras keep showing the cops committing the crimes that helps them stop all the crime! Clearly the answer is to remove those pesky cameras.
Or, you know, just make it hard enough that people can’t see what’s on them.