lso, I can tell you that pulling two people apart doesn’t require dislocating shoulders and breaking wrists, it just requires at least one person per each person you’re separating because your two arms are stronger than one arm from each person. They aren’t fighting back, just making it difficult for you to arrest them, and you can just pry their arms apart in the exact same way you’d pull a child away from something they were clinging to in a temper tantrum, and you don’t cause serious (or really any) harm there.
There you go, just like separating an unruly child!
Also quote Sir Molecule:
As someone who works with kids who often have tantrums and blowups, and occasionally do get physical and start hitting me or the kids around us:
Yes. You can control them, physically, without hurting them. My job is on the line every time I bear hug someone and pull them away. “Gentle” is a bit misleading, in this sense - I would say “calm” and “deliberate” are better adjectives, but in any case you don’t have to use pressure points or cause permanent damage to pick someone up and drag them away. It’s a lot easier when someone is helping me, but from my experience I would say there is less gray area than your post indicates.
Children again. Just for reference here’s my first post on the subject:
As with any thread about the police we’re talking about subtleties as if they’re binary events. On the one hand you have the Family Guy writer who says he was mistreated after submitting; we all think that is wrong, correct? On the other hand you have the situation where I am doing everything in my power to remain entwined with another person doing the same. In that situation I can see how there’s no recourse but to hurt the person. Either that or just leave them where they are, which isn’t up to the officers at the scene. Then there’s a whole planet of gray area in between, but I don’t think it’s correct to suggest there is a way to break two people apart without hurting them in every situation.
Part bolded where I made the very distinction I’ve now had to make six more times.
I was thinking, “How do cops move big fat people who you can’t get a good enough grip on?” and suddenly I had the answer to pain-free protester removal: SNOW SHOVELS. Slide the blade under the guy’s butt, set the toe of your boot as a fulcrum, and pull down on the lever. No can defend.
Police departments, you owe me $1.75 for each protester removed painlessly by my ingenious method.
I haven’t looked for any articles and no I can not give any description as to what happened but like I said I found multiple things wrong with his story when I read it.
I missed this as I was eating lunch, but I wanted to let you know that 16, 17, and 18 year-olds that regularly go to the gym are not exactly the bicycle to nonviolent skinny hipster motorcycles. I think of them as children because they are, developmentally and emotionally, but definitely not really physically.
Edit: Yeah, Houngan, I think we all realize that distinction. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what you’re arguing anymore - the point of my post was to outline the fact that it is possible to be in control of a physical altercation and to direct it in non-damaging directions.
Just as an illustration, police are more than capable for moving people who are trying not to be moved without bashing their heads in or using pain as a motivator.
All good, and sure it works great when they’re fighting with each other. I can just see a circumstance when my whole being is focused on holding on to someone where you’re going to hurt me prying my arm from his. Since I can’t be picked up until you’ve done that, then there’s probably going to be some sort of nightstick leverage used which may very well damage me.
I’m thinking JMJ is on the right track. They need show shovels and double-sided mats, one side flypaper and the other slick. Lift, stick, then slide the whole chain out the door!
When it comes to you, no, I really don’t. I asked you to clarify what you were talking about above, maybe you missed it, maybe you ignored it, I don’t know, but you seemed to be reading my comment as being reversed from what it was that you quoted. So maybe now you’ll respond?
As to my experience, I was a wrestler and was in the midst of the WTO protests before they became riots and had to break a human chain to get some goddamn lunch at the only open place selling food the first day. So I know more than some, but have no formal training.
To clarify my statement you quoted above, yes, it’s like separating children, in that you don’t stomp on them or twist their arms around. You grab their arms and pull them apart. Can this result in injury? Yes. Is it a purposeful, inevitable, intentional effect? No.
Then let’s be entirely clear: Incidental bruising while prying people apart to carry them away is both regrettable and expectable. Not ideal, but at least both cop and protester are well aware of the other’s use of force and lack thereof. Incidental pain in minimum force situations is not a problem to me.
Intentionally elevating the use of force to pressure points simply to assert physical dominance is an abuse of power, plain and simple, and should be censured whenever possible to prevent it from being a common occurrence.
I don’t think those quotes you cited are saying what you think they’re saying. Rasputin talked about causing harm, which is not the same thing as momentary discomfort or “any pain whatsoever.” Molecule said “without hurting them,” which is close to what you’re railing against, but went on to further clairfy that “you don’t have to use pressure points or cause permanent damage to pick someone up and drag them away.” You’re arguing against something nobody has said.
As an aside, I think it’s better to reserve the term “torture” for its more well-understood meanings - most explicitly, the use of pain for interrogation (or sometimes punishment) of prisoners, and more broadly the types of mistreatment sometimes categorized as torture-lite or coercive interrogation - sleep deprivation and so on.
I say this not because the illegitimate use of pain in other contexts isn’t very serious, but because the torture vs. torture lite argument (protip: they are all wholly illegitimate) is still a running battle in politics and western state policy, and the semantics are complicated enough as it is.
So, you’re in favor of stomping on people’s legs and inflicting pain on unrelated limbs in order to gain compliance from a non-violent person? Such as punching someone in the head or applying an ankle-lock to get them to put their hand behind their back, for example?
I’ll let you split that hair. MrMol stated it admirably above, we’re all on the same page now (with a few exceptions.) If I had to boil it down to a sentence, “If you are causing pain to get a secondary effect, that’s bad. If you cause pain while achieving a lawful, minimally violent primary effect when no other nonviolent recourse remains, that’s understandable.”
