sugar land dave wrote:baldeagle wrote:sugar land dave wrote:You repeated the claim that this story came from a press release at least 6 times that I recall. Not once did you cite a source or provide a link, yet used the statement to the detriment of others.
Yes, he has, and now I simply have to insist that a cite be provided to verify this claim. Otherwise it is false. Without proof, it's simply a device to attempt to preclude discussion.
I understand, but I do want to make it clear that I admire his tenacity and energy in posting. I wish I had one tenth of that.
But in the end, is the approach beneficial?
I propose different measurements based on a couple of principals.
1. Like medicine, the goal of police work should be to deal with the malignancies of society
by the least invasive means possible. This is the mastectomy versus lumpectomy view point. We would not tolerate a doctor who's post surgical speech started with. "while I was taking out your gall bladder, your intestine got in the way so I removed it, too." How about a biopsy where the surgeon says "while I was in there, your lung didn't look quite right so I took it out." Won't you want some verification that the outcome was the least invasive possible?
2. Society is best serviced by professions which are self-regulating. As a laymen, I'm never going to understand that Aunt Patsy's hepatic artery was erroneously ligated during her gall bladder surgery. I need to doctor to explain what happened and what can be done to prevent re-occurrence. We have those mechanisms in place in the form of surgical review boards, coroner's inquests and in LE, Internal Affairs.
But the tendency is for the professionals to close ranks in the face of criticism. For any group to be self-regulating, there has to be a feed-back loop. I don't need to understand how it happened to know, at a gross level, that Aunt Patsy went into for gall bladder surgery and now she is dead. Someone had better figure out why. There is a Boeing 777 laying in pieces at SFO and there was a reason. A wounded veteran was stripped of his uniform in order to board an airplane because his wound wouldn't let him raise his arm to normal height. These are all cries for process correction. The professionals need to deal with them.
Our military is a good example of the minimally invasive regulation. Gone are the Viet Nam era carpet bombing techniques and they have been replaced by laser guided munitions and drones. The idea is to deal with the BGs without damaging the surrounding population. This is very hard when the BGs always surround themselves with human shields. At the cost of the lives of our soldiers, great strides are taken to avoid coll atrial damage.
I don't see this ABC situation in a vacuum. For me, it is another example of the Boston bomber chase tactics and, to some extent, the recent spate of police shootings of dogs. Again, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement and recognize their value and service to all of us. But if they are held beyond reproach, regardless of what they do, the feedback loop and the correction mechanisms will never work. The Boston bombing suspect was caught, but not by the Constitutional violations but by help from some of the various citizens who were violated. Just because you CAN do something legally, does not mean that you SHOULD do it. Does it pass the "this is the only way" test?
We should continuously examine police outcomes with our "minimally invasive" glasses on. For me, it is a great disservice to the vast majority of hardworking, dedicated police professionals to allow a few and sometimes isolated events to taint their service.
