So not only is this thread RO, it’s RO about something that happened over six months ago? :smack:
Good job, Guin.:rolleyes:
Good job, Carol Stream, you almost got through the day without saying something snarky.
There’s a problem with snark in the Pit, now?
Well let’s face it SA, you were in the square crowd back then while the beatniks were off being cool and using naughty words.
Having read the transcript, what the cop did was wrong, but what the girl did was determinedly stupid, so while I have sympathy for her father I have none for her.
I don’t really see how it’s stupid. She was obviously upset and panicked and the cop wasn’t helping. The swearing was a non-issue. He shouldn’t have made an issue out of it at all–he should have just sent the ambulance. A scared upset person on the other end isn’t going to suddenly calm down because you scold them. I don’t think she would have continued cursing if he hadn’t made an issue of it in the first place.
No, I just didn’t really see how necessary your comment was.
How necessary was your comment, or this thread, for that matter?
Why you haven’t been banned as a troll by now, I have no idea. You never even add anything useful.
No, MY dick is the biggest!!!
Anyhow, for more blood pressure raising stories like (and including) the one above, check out 5 Horrifying Tales of 911 Incompetence
What he did wasn’t just wrong, it was potentially life threatening. He wanted to flex his “I have authority!” muscles and could have been the cause of a death. For what? To show the he can? Bullshit.
People who deal in life and death situations are trained to ignore a certain amount of profanity. He didn’t even try to get past it, he simply hung up on her as if he was a scolding parent. His ego and arrogance are more important to him so he shouldn’t be able to have a position of any authority. He shouldn’t be able to keep that job.
This isn’t a job answering the phone at a pizza place. This is 911. If he is that incompetent, fire him.
What is useful about a RO thread, about something that happened six months ago, to people you’ll never know or even meet? So you can say “Ooh, big bad mean cops?”
To me, that’s trolling.
I’ve never met Nixon, but when they release more of his stupid fucked up tapes I am interested. When a murderer is found who committed the murder before I was born, I want to read about it.
Hell, why are people interested in anything that happens in the past? Why do you care why they care, they do.
For the most part, I support the police in most circumstances. I think things like this can bring awareness to these horrible situations to bring this incompetency to light especially when the officer received such a light reprimand.
No, societal mores back then were such that the kind of behavior described by the girl in the OP simply wasn’t tolerated.
There were faux-curse words to be sure. “Criminy” for Christ, “Jiminy Christmas” for Jesus Christ, “shucks” for shit, etc. But it was mostly old people who used those. 
The same words were around then, but most girls didn’t use them and boys didn’t use them in mixed company, and nobody used them around little kids or out loud in public like they do now. So what would be shocking is the open and aggessive use of them nowadays and not the words themselves.
As is usually the case, my comments were merely in response to mischaracterizations of comments I’ve made in the past. (For example, see Dissonance’s post which first brought me into the fray here.)
And I see you’ve been to the Rubystreak School of False Attribution. 
I’ve never said that everything used to be perfect.
But even if I had, the answer would still be: No.
This is an excellent example of how modern-day lefties think everything was like a TV show and have no idea what things were really like back then.
The real-life Fonzies were badass mofos who wore taps that came up over the toe of their “Wedgies” (heavy shoes with solid soles), all the better for kicking and stomping in fights. They generally carried switchblade knives and would fuck you up just for looking at them the wrong way.
Kids may have looked and dressed like Wally Cleaver, but they occupied the real world and didn’t act anywhere near as wholesome (or boring). However, they didn’t do drugs, and they didn’t stand around in crowded 7-11’s saying right out loud as if nothing at all was wrong, “Dude, I was so fucking stopped up this morning I couldn’t fucking breathe” (approx. 17-year-old girl) or walk past people at the grocery store saying “I told that motherfucker I’d kick his fucking ass” (two teen boys) in a perfectly loud and conversational voice, or stand around in the lawn in front of their two and four-year old kids talking about their exes and saying “asshole” and “motherfucker” (approx. 23-year-old woman) every other word, both of which I’ve witnessed recently here even in my white bread suburban neighborhood. And their teen idols were not people who were singing about killing cops, “popping caps” in peoples’ asses, and sucking dicks…all of which I’ve heard emanating from teenagers’ cars…again, here even in my white bread suburban neighborhood. :D)
As I said, it’s only in comparison with the way things are now that the fifties seem so idyllic.
Trust me, nobody thought beatniks were cool. They were made fun of, even in liberal circles. To a certain extent folk music grew out of it later on, and to the extent that beatniks - with their coffeehouses, their idiotic finger-snapping-as-applause, and their moody, downer poems - had any influence, it came from that.
The real fucking-up of America was still a decade off by the time the beatnik movement, such as it ever was, had more or less died out.
Exactly! She was every bit as determined to use the word ‘fucking’ as the dispatcher was to refuse to let her get away with it, and IMO she played a key role in his not taking the call more seriously. He very likely felt that if the emergency was real, she would shut the hell up and do whatever was necessary to get help on the way.
I’ll sound like a broken record, but RO is not what the Pit was for, in the past.
My mother was 20 in 1963. She was raped in 1963. Her rapist was not prosecuted in 1963. She had no birth control and an illegal abortion in 1963.
I say fuck 1963.
And yet, Starving Artist, as I said, you can bet my grandmother was swearing back in the day. Now again, shut up. You seem to come from the same mindset as the cop.
They’re WORDS. Words. Hell, I had a nun in fourth grade who told us when we giggled at hearing the word “penis,” “Why? It’s just a word.”
Take your nostalgia and stick it up your ass.
You sure put a lot of thought and blah-ditty-blah into me making a joke about your stupid “exactamundo!” Keee-rist. Also, do you see “lefties” everywhere you look? I’m hardly a leftie, no matter how much you believe Rush Limbaugh that they’re taking over the world!
See, here’s the thing. HE was at work supposedly doing his JOB. She was not. He has a responsibility to put the PUBLIC need above his need for AUTHORITY. Also, you can clearly see that he knew he was wrong when he said that he didn’t get a chance to find out what she wanted. He was trying to minimize his own culpability in the situation. He didn’t get a chance because he hung up on her like some offended schoolmarm.
When I deal with patients some of them are in terrible pain and very abusive verbally. I do my job and take care of them. I don’t cry like a little baby that I don’t have to listen to their foul language and refuse to do my job. I think police work may be something he’s not fit for anymore. I would guess that’s why he was taking 911 calls instead of out doing other police work.
So your grandmother was ill-mannered, back in the day. Somehow, that’s not surprising. In any case, you’re not in a position to tell Starving Artist, or anyone else, to shut up.
Damned straight she was!
Clearly the cop was wrong. I hate to totally indict the guy and destroy him over this. Mistakes in judgement occur, even egregious ones. It happens all the time. It’s interesting that the officer in question is reported to have an excellent record, and no history of disciplinary action.
What is most interesting is trying to figure out why it happened.
My experience of police procedure comes from watching “COPS” so feel free to correct me . This guy is not a full time dispatcher, but an actual policeman if I interpreted that correctly.
Situations like this usually require a quick judgement. The girl said to send an ambulance but she never said why. The assumption might have been that she wanted the ambulance sent her. It was a bad mistake not to find out why she wanted an ambulance before he judged her as a frivolous fruitcake abusing 911. Had she been a fruitcake his response would have been appropriate.
Once he made this misjudgement the girl did little to correct him. In fact, her behavior reinforced it. She didn’t say “my father is dying, please send help!” She didn’t sound in serious physical or emotional distress. Instead, she engaged him in a pissing contest. She didn’t ask for help or describe her problem. She simply ordered him to send an ambulance, and cursed. She called him back and said “Are you going to send an ambulance, or what?” and “What is your name? Do you want to get sued?” She was being a bitch and not acting like an injured person, or a panicked person or a person who was overwrought with concern over her father who was supposed to have been dying on the floor.
Again, this is not to excuse the officer, but to understand why he made his misjudgement. She did not behave as I would expect a person to behave in her circumstance. once she got into a conflict with the officer she didn’t behave like a person with a serious health emergency on her hands.
In a panic situation, people don’t always behave the way you’d expect them to. The officer should have known that, and should have asked questions to competantly assess the emergency before making a snap judgement.
Then too, I am always suspicious about these kind of stories. When the police came, she was arrested? Hmmmmm. I also notice that there was no information about the results of what the ambulance found when it arrived, or what the police found. What was the condition of the father? Was he rushed to the hospital?
She was arrested for abusing the 911 line, and even though that charge “doesn’t exist” according to the story it also tells me something. Had it been a serious medical emergency, I doubt they would have arrested her for wasting their time.
Was it, or was it not a legitimate medical emergency? We are not given that information.
At any rate, her mistake was that her focus was not on her father but rather her conflict with the policeman. Whatever the seriousness of the condition that response of hers really didn’t send the message that there was a legitimate emergency.
Secondly, her refusal to stop swearing didn’t help anything. To me, they didn’t sound like inadvertent panicky swears. They sounded bitchy challenging don’t tell me not to swear curses. Like, she was doing it because he told her not to.
Again, she doesn’t sound panicked or concerned. She sounds bitchy, challenging, and demanding.
Also, I speculate that a policeman on the scene needs to act differently than a dispatcher. A policeman’s first job (as derived by me from watching COPS) is to control the scene. A lot of people get in their faces and that can escalate a situation and interfere with their ability to do their job. A policeman who ignores a challenging or aggressive person does so at their own peril.
On the phone, it’s a different story. He needs to assess differently. He needs to get information. He failed to do so.
I’m not trying to be an apologist for the cop here. I think he clearly screwed up.