It is the nurse’s place to do that at that moment, because if she complies with the officer’s request, that is a major HIPAA violation which can come with enormous fines, losing her license, and getting fired from her job. It doesn’t matter if the illegally obtained evidence is later thrown out, it’s still a HIPAA breach on the hospital’s part.
Yeah, the full video recording shows the cops as sleazy and mean - they knew very well that what they wanted was illegal. More than that, they heard the nurse’s boss tell her not to comply - if she’d knuckled under, she would likely have lost her job and the hospital could be (rightfully) sued, and I find it hard to believe either officer would care or accept responsibility.
I also find it really annoying how many people dismiss the refusal as invalid because it was hospital policy. The policy was obviously based on the law, which is why Nurse Wubbels noted the police had been notified about it (and agreed to it) last year when the SC ruling came down.
Is stabbing someone in the arm and taking their blood without legal authority and without permission assault in your state? It is in my state and it’s punishable by up to ten years in prison. How would you respond if someone wanted to stab you in the arm with a needle for no medical reason while you were unconscious? Would you want someone else to protect you from that? I would appreciate that effort on my behalf.
In this case, the person who wanted the nurse to commit assault came into her workplace, threatened her (while visibly carrying a gun no less), then kidnapped her illegally when she wouldn’t cooperate. The officer’s actions were not a reasonable mistake of law. They were an intentional abuse of power. The nurse who stood up to him is a hero.
The officers on the video conspired to commit assault against an innocent patient. Then they assaulted and kidnapped a woman who stood up to them. In a truly just world, the officers all would have gone to jail that night. In a world we can aspire to based on reality, the arresting officer would have been fired immediately along with the supervisor who told him to make the arrest. The other officers should get retraining. In actuality, I expect this to have no effect on any officer’s career because we’ve become inured to police abuse of power and people don’t expect or demand any more from law enforcement.
If you won’t “defend the officer in this specific case,” why would you criticize the nurse for respectfully standing up for her patient? What do you believe is the appropriate action for people to take when cops are doing something patently illegal?
Doubtful that it would count as a violation in the face of a peace officer threatening arrest. You’re talking about an extenuating circumstance here.
Some of you are misunderstanding my point. My point is, the burden in a case like this is entirely on the officer. Had the nurse complied the HIPAA violation was coerced by threat of arrest not voluntary.
Just like any other situation if you think an officer is acting outside the scope of law the time to do something about it usually is afterwards in a legal setting, not right then and there.
I posted the actual law in the IMHO thread and since I’m on my cell I can’t quote it here, but the law clearly shows that the officer could not insist on a blood test based on implied consent as there were no grounds for an officer to require one. The driver was under no suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol or other substances and thus the police could not rely on that law.
In the same post I quoted an article by a University of August law professor who stated that the Supreme Court had struck down a law on implied consent, but took the narrow view that the law was unconstitutional because there were criminal sanctions in the provision while Utah’s code only had civil penalties and the professor believes that the Utah law is still legal. However that does not change the fact that the officer didn’t have grounds.
So do you think she should have disregarded the direction of her supervisor and hospital admin, & allowed the bully on the wrong side of the law to break it? If so, I could not disagree with you more. We need more people like her to stand up for what is right. She absolutely did the right thing.
Put this in another scenario. By your standard there would be multitudes of people (beyond what we already have) obstructing and resisting officers when they are certain they are right and the officer is wrong, rather than letting the system work and having misconduct officers get hammered in the legal system.
In this case, “letting the system work” would have meant allowing a violent crime to be perpetrated against a patient to whom she owed a duty of care. She wasn’t a random bystander to a trespass against property rights. She had an actual patient to care for, and he was actually going to be a victim of police brutality. Physical violence against an innocent person can’t be taken back by “the system” after it happens. It either happens or it doesn’t.
It just occurred to me; if this yutz is a police phlebotomist, how many illegal blood draws might he have done prior to this incident?
Back to the incident. This is exactly analogous to the officer attempting to deliver a few swift kicks to the patient’s nadgers, and ordering the nurse to stand back and not interfere. “I was just following orders” doesn’t cut it as a defense, either.
Any other situation? Suppose the officer is about to commit murder? Should we wait to see the legal system perform the miracle of resurrection, or say it’s very, very sorry to the family and here’s some money to make you feel better?
Your argument is certainly sound for a case of minor or fully reparable law-breaking. No reasonable person would argue on the spot with a cop about to commit a traffic violation or taking the wrong person into temporary custody (which is almost fully reparable). But at the other extreme there are situations where the action is not reparable by the legal system, and doing nothing is at least morally abhorrent.
The question is where on the spectrum this particular crime – assault with bodily injury – lies. Reasonable people could disagree on this point.
pkbites, thank you for participating in the thread. I sincerely appreciate getting a law enforcement officer’s perspective on police misconduct issues. You are the closest thing we have to a proxy for the officer in that room and I respect your viewpoint. That said, I disagree strongly with your views.
Would you please answer, consistent with this worldview, how to address the theoretical harms noted by LordFeldon (a violent assault on an unconscious patient), doreen (an officer demanding the nurse stop treating another patient so that she can work on a less severely injured officer; an officer ordering a nurse to administer Haldol to a patient, which could cause permanent side effects or death), and CarlPham (a police officer about to commit murder)? How is a court going to fix any of these after the fact?
What if the officers had demanded that the people nearby stop recording this encounter? This only became a story after the video was released. In the absence of the video, there would have been no outcry because the police officers’ violations would have been ignored.
When in your experience or knowledge has an officer been “hammered” in the legal system, rather than being treated fairly and with great deference?
Recently, police have been accused of fabricating evidence in Baltimore - no charges so far. The worst outcome so far for any of the officers was a temporary paid suspension. Some would view that as a paid vacation. The police commissioner is defending their actions and does not seem inclined to pursue charges against the officers. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-body-camera-react-folo-20170807-story.html I could find many more examples of police officers not being charged for questionable shootings. When they are charged, they are almost never convicted. When they are sued, they are protected by sovereign immunity. I could find many other examples of police receiving great deference in prosecution but I don’t want to belabor my point. There is almost no legal recourse against police officers for even the most serious misconduct.
Furthermore, I don’t agree that people trying to prevent police misconduct makes the police’s job harder. The police’s job becomes harder when they act like criminals and disregard people’s rights. When the police get away with assault, murder, fabricating evidence, and theft (in the form of dubious asset seizures), it undermines the legitimacy of police everywhere and makes good people like me less willing to cooperate. If you want our cooperation, earn our trust. If you want to earn our trust, start by strongly and publicly condemning the actions of the rogue police officers who abuse their authority. Report them to their superiors. Go to the press if police administrators won’t take action against them. Arrest them. Testify against them in court.
You said you won’t defend those officers’ actions. My last question for you: What would you have done if these events took place in your jurisdiction and you were on the hospital floor with them?
If you listen to the full tape, you’ll learn that he DID know the laws. He knew they had no probable cause to get a warrant but was in the habit of strong arming hospitals in to giving him what he wanted anyway. He was pissed off at this nurse because ‘no one has ever taken it this far’-IOW she wouldn’t cave to his illegal demands. His behavior was outrageous & demonstrated that he was used to using bullying tactics and threats of going to jail to get his way, regardless of how illegal or unethical.
So you think the nurse should have drawn the blood? That’s fucked up. If she had seen the cop drawing blood from the patient and physically tackled him and slapped the needle out of his hands, yeah, that would be obstructing and resisting.
But she didn’t obstruct anything. She didn’t resist anything. She just said she wouldn’t draw the goddam blood, just because he was threatening her.
EVEN IF it would be legal for the cop to get that blood sample, it still wouldn’t mean that the nurse had an obligation to get that blood sample for him. Your statement above is crazy talk.
This brings up the question of how many times this officer has pushed his weight around in the hospitals, abusing the rights of patents and staff alike, until he finally got caught out on it. Obviously, nothing was going to happen to him until the media made a deal out of it, so any incidents that are not on tape, or were acquiesced to immediately because the medical professional was following pk’s advice of just follow the instructions of the leo, regardless of how illegal they are.
There is no question that the SLCPD bullies & threatens healthcare workers into violating HIPAA as a matter of practice. Later on in the tape, you can hear Lt. Tracy talking to Payne about how ‘this hospital is always giving us trouble’ & telling the nurse ‘your hospital’s policies are interfering with my investigation’. The hospital’s policies are the LAW and this PD clearly operates as if they are above the law. They also knew full well that their cameras were rolling, suggesting that this is common practice and they feel it is their right. I hope she sues the shit out of them. She will definitely win.
I hope that other cases of police abusing hospital staff surface as well, showing that this isn’t just a single bad apple, but a systemic problem that needs to be addressed.
Excellent post.
pkbites I would also appreciate your further input.
I would imagine that you, as have I, have been in this exact situation.
In my experience, the police have been cooperative with the nurse (me). When something was unclear, both parties attempted to clarify. As did indeed happen here.
This situation, IMHO, had a vastly different outcome because the officer knew what he was asking was wrong. He knew he wouldn’t get a warrant. The details of the accident combine to make his motivation suspect. He also SHOULD have known that the blood test for ETOH is part of a routinetrauma panel. If that information was needed in the future it was already available.
I believe this officer needs to be fired. He reacted poorly in a low stress situation. He had none of the usual good reasons for making a mistake. He had years of experience, nobody’s life was at stake, and he wasn’t being threatened in the slightest. He needs to be in a different profession.
People are becoming tired at the routine lack of accountability that police forces are demonstrating. NOTHING was done in this case until the press conference.
Being a police officer may be the hardest job in America these days. That is no excuse for letting what happened happen again. Because that would have been the result if the nurse had not come forward.
Maybe a little clarification here.
Violating HIPAA was not likely part of the nurse’s thought process in this situation. She was acting as a patient advocate, one of her primary roles as a nurse. She was preventing an unneeded procedure from being performed, ordered by someone who had no authority to do so.
The hospital’s policies are NOT the law. They are simply the hospital’s policy. One would hope that they agree with the law, but that is not guaranteed.
The cop in that situation, there to enforce the law, is expected to know what the friggen law is.
An unfortunate reality of today that it should even be mentioned: that the cop is also expected to respect and follow the friggen law.