I hope sometime when you’re in an argument and you choose quietly sit down to make your point that they fucking kick your head in and then over your bleeding body tell you that your non-violent actions clearly indicated you elected for confrontation. Or maybe they should beat your wife until she miscarries to teach you not to defy them.
You’re being a complete asshole apologist for excessive force.
It’s an Internet debate. Are you seriously unable to hold your worse emotions in check?
Holy God it’s LITERALLY a “if she didn’t want it she wouldn’t have worn that” defense!
Is this what you do when somebody warns a pregnant woman against riding a roller coaster? I didn’t shift the blame for violence. What I did do was to question the soundness of the pregnant woman’s judgment, and thereby depth of moral outrage over the outcome of a lost life. It’s one thing to regard that incident as a tragedy, which it was, and another to wave it around as evidence that the police are especially awful people who, with malice aforethought caused a pregnant woman to miscarry, or else were negligent of their responsibility to protect during a mass scuffle. Keep in mind that I don’t know the particulars of her story, so I can’t say for sure whether she was a bystander caught up in the mess, or somebody who stuck around long past that moment when a reasonable individual would have concluded that violence was a strong possibility.
And the next time that somebody is swinging a baseball bat at you and you put your hands up to keep your skull from being smashed open you elected to confront that person.
I’m making a specific point about how the protestors responded to the police. Many times, I’ve pointed out that, depending on where your sympathies lie, their behavior might be considered perfectly ethical, perfectly legitimate. Even beyond reproach. At that point, it boils down into a question about whether the police were at fault for enforcing the Chancellor’s orders – clearly, you believe they were, since their moral obligation to the public exceeds their formal subordination to hierarchy – and then whether you believe that pepper spray is an appropriate substitute for “soft hand” techniques. Honestly, considering that “hard hand” techniques unambiguously involve using pressure points and pain to compel obedience, I’m inclined to place them in the same spot on the force continuum as OC.
Too fucking bad. If they can’t control themselves then they need to find a different job. One that doesn’t come with the implicitly understood assumption that the life of a police officer is worth less than the life of any civilian. And yes, I mean that. One random police officer’s life is worth less than one random mentally unstable homeless person.
I agree with the requirement for self-control, which protocol suggests that Lt. Pike did not follow.
I disagree that a police officer’s life is worth less than that of a civilian, however. I think a police officer is expected to risk his or her life on behalf of civilians. That is clearly what is meant by service. However, I don’t think that should be taken as evidence that the civilian is always more important in a purely qualitative sense. Police must expose themselves to risk in part because there is a presumption of innocence, and in part because society correctly expects them to apply the minimum of necessary force in each case. The question here is what that minimum was, and whether the use of pepper spray as a preventive measure exceeded that minimum. Procedurally, the answer is ambiguous. Apparently, UC Davis procedures authorized use of pepper spray against protesters in cases like this. Morally, the answer is ambiguous if one holds that the police shouldn’t have been under obligation to overwhelm the crowd with still greater numbers. Then, you get into a question of whether police should be expected to try to separate crowds at hazard to themselves, and deploy pepper spray and the like only when met with violence, not just passive resistance.
If they aren’t violently resisting then that is the only ethical choice.
I can appreciate that point of view. I have even stated that I don’t think the police should have been ordered to disperse the crowd in the first place, based on the information I have. However, there is a broader issue at stake, which is precisely how we should resource our police departments for crowd actions. It involves calculating the opportunity costs of deploying more resources to one event rather than others.
Consider firefighters. Fire departments do not scramble all of their resources to a particular scene: they always hold some assets in reserve to deal with other contingencies. This reflects their responsibility to protect whole jurisdictions rather than particular individuals, families, or pieces of property. In some cases, sending only part of their strength makes sense purely because there are diminishing returns: only so much apparatus can fit into any one spot. In other cases, however, holding back resources clearly makes individual fires harder to control, increasing the resulting threat to life and property, but enables the fire department to cover a larger area – multiple potential incidents – at any one time. It works the same way for police.
“I was just following orders” is not a valid defense for behaviour of any kind.
Knowing what we do about psychology, I don’t wave that flag very confidently. Most human beings are highly susceptible to authority. The personal responsibility imperative is a good one, and should be fostered more than it is, but I caution you against having confidence that it will be exercised early, or even often. It is wonderful to wax moral when seated in front of one’s computer; it is another thing to assume implicitly that procedures are in place for your protection, and then to openly question them at a moment of confrontation. Soldiers and security forces are in the unique position of being trained to accept somebody else’s thinking – an officer’s – most of the time, but being encouraged to challenge that thinking at particularly stressful moments. “I was just following orders” is rarely a blind catch-all: it rarely reflects careful thinking beforehand about where ultimate responsibility rests. Soldiers who invoke that defense didn’t necessarily know that what they were doing was clearly wrong or avoidable, and didn’t necessarily go along with it thinking they could later pass culpability to somebody else.
Lt. Pike appears to me to be guilty of using the pepper spray improperly, and the UC Davis force is clearly guilty of callousness and negligence, seemingly malignant, in terms of not providing immediate medical attention. I’m not sure, however, that pepper spray was an unsuitable tool (leaving aside the fact that it appears useless in law enforcement settings like this one, which is not Pike’s problem) given the other options, which involved getting into physical contact with the crowd and would have necessitated the presence of many more officers. I don’t know that society gains more from withholding use of pepper spray than it does from the availability of more officers on the street (or fewer on the overall roles of the force). I also don’t know how comfortable I am declaring that the officers were never at risk, and that therefore they should have used “soft hand” techniques because this crowd was especially fluffy, although evidently it was.
Before I jet out of this thread, I feel compelled to mention that pepper-spraying did not, in fact, magically disperse the crowd to their respective homes. You might have noticed that the protesters were still sitting there.
As I understand it, that was not the point; the point was to render the crowd less able to resist being hauled off.
DJ, it’s clear you haven’t read or haven’t understood the mentality behind blaming the victim. There is no point in calling you on it when your response is essentially to shit out a paragraph that doubles down on it. Uh, ok. Cool story bro. I’m going to be over here with the non-sociopaths.
Defend to me why it is reasonable for a pregnant woman to place herself in a situation where she is likely to be subject to physical harm.
The students clearly chose to make victims of themselves. They wanted to compel law enforcement to make a choice. One can then blame law enforcement for making the wrong choice (action) by claiming the students were in the right. Clearly, you are doing that. However, the gauntlet was clearly thrown down. Sometimes, that’s okay.
I also wanted to make the discussion point that police represent an institution with a vested interest in maintaining perceptions of authority, as well as fear. Fear compels “black blocs” of armed protestors to think twice before engaging in violence. Obviously, these students were not a black bloc. However, from an institutional perspective, police are going to treat all of these situations as variations on the same type, since there is a macro-assumption that each police action sends a message about police capability and intention to potential law-breakers. In other words, none of this is simple, nor cut and dry.
