I love to bash Republicans and the police, but they did not kill her. They were absolute dicks and should all be fired, but they did not kill her. Cops were told she was faking. Hospital may not have used this term, but that was the clear meaning. Cops were told by people who know far more than them she was faking.
The hospital not only kicked her out, but had her arrested, told the cops she was faking symptoms. Everything that happened later was colored by this. Essentially, they told the cops to ignore her complaints. They denied her treatment and kept others from treating her.
In this case, the facility discharged her – I am not sure whether they gave her a CBoH or advice/prescriptions, but they did call the police to complain that she was there. Why the hospital did that is unclear. Sounds to me like they were just being assholes, maybe thought the police were decent people who would treat her OK, or they just preferred to not have her die in their waiting room (that is always a bad look).
At any rate, the thugs had (what they interpreted to be) the opinion of medical professionals. They said she should leave (was, by implication, OK), so any problems she appeared to be having were all just an act.
So, yeah, the police behaved like dirtbags, SOP. But the hospital does not get off the hook, here: they ordered up the dirtbag battalion when there really was no need to.
…that isn’t how it would have worked. They couldn’t have “assessed her”.
Because what the video shows is a clear deterioration in her condition. At the start of the video her speech seems quite clear.
But about a minute into the video, her speech is obviously both audibly and visually slurred.
I’m seeing signs of all of those things. Things that weren’t happening at the start of the video.
Things had changed.
The hospital may have already assessed her. And at the time she may have been fine. But I don’t think that there would be a triage nurse on the planet who, after being informed by a police officer that a person who was speaking perfectly fine one minute but was now slurring their speech, struggling to breath, and couldn’t stand up, would respond with “We already assessed her, she’s fine.”
And the thing is we will never ever be able to confirm how the hospital would have reacted here. Because the police didn’t even bother to contact them.
The cops had new information that the medical professionals didn’t have. So what I’m saying is that the cops should have shared that information with the hospital. Because:
The police didn’t do any of these things. The signs were all there. They didn’t “think fast.” They didn’t notice the deterioration. Instead they berated her because they were missing their coffee and oatmeal.
My mum had a stroke many years ago before she passed. The doctors said that the only thing that saved her was the fact that she went immediately to the A & E (she worked in the hospital, so fortunately it was only a few minutes walk) , and they started treatment right away.
Early treatment makes all the difference. She was in their custody. She died on their watch.
Why would I think this obviously stupid thing?
I call bullshit on bullshit. And the idea that “one of the cops was a brain surgeon and was able to operate in the back of the cruiser” was the only way to save Lisa Edwards life is just fundamentally absurd. You are excusing the cops in this situation. Lisa Edwards wasn’t fated to die here. It was the actions of the cops, who had her in custody at the time, who ignored the deterioration in her condition, and even kept her in the back of the police car while they conducted another traffic stop, that are at fault.
They killed her.
While I appreciate your concern for my well being and all, I’ll never be able to get over what you said to me last year.
Accusing me of working alongside Fox and Pravda to dissillision voters, imagining that I’m so passionate about my internet ramblings on an obscure messageboard that you think that it’s likely I’m up to something else, was simultaneously the oddest and funniest things I’ve been accused of since I’ve been on the dope.
I think that effectively accusing me of being a Russian disinformation bot (in Politics & Elections, no less) is a pretty good way of pushing away those who would ordinarily align with you.
At least I’m open about my “incoherent rage.” You appear to be bottling it up, occasionally letting it slip in displays of passive aggressiveness.
The decision to arrest her was made clearly by the police officers. She tells them that she “shattered her ankle and had a stroke”. The police officer tell her to “get gone” and if she doesn’t, she’s going to jail. He says “you’re gonna have to roll this off the property.” When informed that the wheelchair belonged to the hospital, he came back with “well you’re gonna have to get up and figure out a way to get gone.”
The police didn’t have to arrest her here. They had a number of options. But they decided to make the arrest.
And I can’t see anywhere where the hospital accused her of faking it. The police say on video “this is all an act. She has been discharged.” (Followed by the “THIS IS THE LORDS DAY” speech) But I haven’t seen anywhere where the hospital accused her of faking it.
You have trouble reading what people actually write, so you substitute your own fanciful imaginations in instead.
I did not accuse you of being a Russian disinformation bot, I pointed out that your abject hatred of everything American where you attack Americans who agree with you ideologically for having the nerve to live in America, is not very helpful, at least not to progressives.
Though it is helpful to Republicans.
I don’t think that you are helping the Republicans out of a motive to help them, I think you are just too stupid to realize that what you are doing is helping them.
You don’t really have any agenda other than just spewing your hatred, and that you took it that I was suggesting that you did is pretty fucked up, to be honest.
That’s pretty much the only thing you are open about.
No, I am willing to tell you to fuck right the fuck off with your bullshit and hate.
It serves me better than your constant misrepresentations.
Remember, this exchange started because you were angry that anyone would dare to put any blame on the hospital who discharged her. That’s stupid of you, like really fucking stupid.
I’ll never understand what people like you get out of lying all the time. It must be fun, but I don’t get it.
…for the sake of context, I’ll include the post you were replying too.
There is no hate there. There is no “abject hatred of everything American” there. Not in that thread. Not even in this thread. It was a typical debate. Where I wasn’t “hating on America” but was endorsing what an American politician had said. Then you decided to drop that bomb.
Your words, my words, they are all right there. You are just making stuff up.
Can you be open about why you appear to have an irrational hatred of me?
Why would you lie about this?
No seriously. Why?
Its not as if people can’t simply scroll up and see that this isn’t true.
For example:
Cheesesteak didn’t blame the hosptial. They didn’t dare do that. Cheesesteak let them off the hook. Cheesesteak let the cops off the hook. She died because of the Republicans.
It doesn’t matter that the police had her in custody, she was clearly displaying signs of a stroke, and that early intervention could at the very least prevent brain injury, and possibly save her life.
Or perhaps stuff like this:
I simply don’t accept that. She was not fated to die. You don’t have to believe me. There is plenty of evidence that tells us that if you intervene early enough you can give someone who is having a stroke at least a fighting chance.
I’ve stated over and over again that yeah, the hospital deserves criticism, scrutiny and blame. The claim that " this exchange started because (I was) angry that anyone would dare to put any blame on the hospital who discharged her." is simply a lie.
But two things: firstly, the extent of the liability of the hospital is unclear at the moment. We know that they discharged her and that they asked the police for assistance to deal with her. But that’s about all we know.
Because secondly, that isn’t the same for the police. Because we have video of the encounter. And we can see each and every opportunity the police had to change the outcome: that they didn’t take.
This is a thread about controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians. So when the police obviously fuck up, I think it’s okay that we focus on that. What we see on that video is not a hospital problem, although problems with the hospital exist. What we see on that video isn’t a Republican problem, even though problems with Republicans exist.
What that video showed was a casual disregard to the life and the dignity of a person that deserved better. That alone deserves a pitting. There is no actions that the police took in that video that are defensible. They had the opportunity to give her a fighting chance at life, but they didn’t take it. Because coffee and oatmeal. On the LORD’s day.
You can ignore all the facts I’ve presented so far and continue to make this personal if you like. I’ll just keep throwing the facts right back at you. I can do that all day.
The thing is, sometimes assholes do show up to hospitals just to be abusive to hospital staff. And faking symptoms can be something that said assholes do. Given that this happens, what should hospitals do? When they get an asshole who’s abusing the staff and faking symptoms, if the systems were working as they should, the proper response would be to call the police and have the asshole arrested. And presumably, this has happened before.
When the police arrived, that’s what they thought had happened. They thought that they had someone who wasn’t really having a stroke, and who was just faking it to be an asshole. They thought that because the people best-qualified to determine that told them so. They may or may not have said so explicitly, but they definitely said it implicitly, because that’s what it means when a hospital calls the police and asks them to arrest someone.
And even with this starting assumption, and even with the cops’ much lesser degree of medical expertise, they still eventually came to doubt what the medical professionals had told them, and took her back to the hospital. That was the right decision, and the only reason it took them so long to come to that decision was because of the malpractice of the medical professionals.
According to a proposed class action settlement filed last week, the city agreed to pay $4.91 million, or about $58,500 per person, to 84 people who were protesting in downtown St. Louis.
The lawsuit claimed the protesters’ rights were violated when they were caught in a police “kettle” as officers surrounded and arrested everyone in the area. Three people who filed individual lawsuits settled from $85,000 each.
Hopefully that will have stung enough to inspire them to rethink tactics in volatile situations. ie. What can we do to de-escalate rather than making things worse.
…you are acting as if we can’t see the video. We know what the police thought. That was pretty obvious when they were yelling:
at her.
But none of that is reasonable. That isn’t how one would expect police in a civilised nation to act. Even if she was faking it. She was sitting quietly in a wheelchair in a parking lot surrounded by at least 3 cops at the beginning of the encounter and more when the wagon arrived. According to the records they spend 30 minutes trying to get her into the wagon and we only see a fraction of that. She keeps asking for her inhaler, and at first they say she doesn’t have one, but they eventually find it. She is in visible distress. Displaying obvious signs of a stroke.
They leave her lying on the side of the road and start joking about how she’s going to get more charges now. “Disorderly, impeding a sidewalk. Anything they can think of.”
Does any of that sound like reasonable behaviour to you?
They end up not even putting her in the wagon. They throw her into the back of a patrol car instead. Then drive around, continuing to do cop stuff, where ultimately she (probably) dies in the back seat while the cop is on a traffic stop.
Even if she was faking, the videos don’t show that she was causing a scene. She wasn’t yelling, or swearing, or doing anything much more than sitting in a wheelchair. She wasn’t dangerous, or impeding anyone. She was sitting in a big, giant empty carpark.
When her condition deteriorated, (and we can see her condition deteriorate on the video) the police were in the best position to observe that happening, and the only people who were capable of intervening at that moment to try and save her life. Because in a sane world that’s just part of their job.
I’ve yet to see evidence that the hospital called the police and asked them to arrest her. We can hear the cops tell her to leave. When she said that she couldn’t because she had shattered her ankle and had a stroke, it was only then that she was threatened with arrest.
WE CAN SEE THE VIDEO.
The caption says after around 20 minutes in the car, Lisa goes quiet. The officer doesn’t notice until later, during a stop of another driver. He then calls for an ambulance. Then yells at her to sit up. He yells again, even louder to sit up. Then he grabs her by the hair and yanks her up, and the last we see of Lisa Edwards is the ultimate indignity: her face in the frame for just a split second, enough to make it obvious that she was probably dead, with the officer still insisting that it was all still an act.
I don’t know what video you were watching, but they didn’t “come to doubt what the medical professionals had told them”. They thought she was faking even after she (probably) died.
And it doesn’t matter that the cops had “much lesser degree of medical expertise.” Because the symptoms that anyone with basic first aid training are taught to look out for are really not that hard to pick up. The slurred speech at the one-minute mark of the second video was about the clearest indication that something had changed in her condition. The stroke protocol here was clear. The police didn’t have to do anything more than get back in touch with the hospital to let them know that her condition had changed, she was slurring her speech, she was having difficulty breathing, she was unable to stand up even with assistance, these are all things that weren’t happening when she was discharged, but were happening now. She was under arrest. They were taking her into custody. The cops were the only people in any position to keep her alive. This isn’t on anyone else. The video makes that quite clear.
No, the cops were never in a position to keep her alive. The people who were, kicked her out.
And yes, the cops saw her symptoms. But stroke symptoms can be faked, at least to non-experts. Which the cops thought she was doing, because the experts told her that she was healthy.
The cops should have been more polite to her, because they should be the better people than the people they’re arresting. The fact that they weren’t is a problem. But impoliteness didn’t kill her. Getting kicked out of the hospital killed her.
…the cops had agency here. Of course they were in a position to change the outcome here. Forget about dying for a minute. She was at risk of permanent brain damage. They did nothing, absolutely nothing, to mitigate that risk.
I mean, what does this even mean?
Were the cops physically incapable of using their judgement here? Simply unable to figure out that sometimes people are just fine when discharged, but could rapidly deteriorate without any notice shortly after?
Are you unable to figure that out? If a doctor said to you “that person is fine”, and an hour later after you left the doctors office that person was fine, but then all of a sudden their arm fell off and started splurting blood everywhere, would you still insist that the patient was fine? Because of what the doctor said an hour ago?
Because sometimes people are fine. And the next minute they are not. That’s a thing that actually happens. And when you watch the video, that’s what we see happen.
So the reason why she didn’t end up getting transported in the wagon was because the driver effectively refused too. Because if she died, then it would have been on him.
The driver knew she was in distress. He didn’t want to take her. So they threw her in the back of the car, on her back, in obvious distress.
You’ve watched the video.
As a non-expert, did you think she was faking?
Because nothing about the way she was behaving looked fake to me. I’ve tried to fake the slurring she was doing with her speech, and I can’t do it. It looked real to me.
Because it was real.
There is no evidence that the “experts told her she was healthy.” All we know was that the hospital deemed her well enough to be discharged. And she may well have fit the criteria at the time. But the slurred speech was the clearest indication that perhaps something had changed. And the police had a distinct advantage over most everyone else here, they were already at the fucking hospital.
The best people to determine if she was faking the slurred speech (when her speech was not slurred at the start of the video) were the “experts.” And the experts were right there. The police chose not to seek expert advice. They decided, on their own, that she was faking. So they let her lie on the concrete for half-an-hour while they taunted her. Then threw her into the back of a police car where she probably died.
That’s not on the hospital. That’s on the cops.
The person they were arresting was a 60 year old woman whose crime was being unable to get out of her wheelchair and walk out of the hospital on demand.
The bar here is really fucking low. It really isn’t that hard to be better than this.
She was alive when the police arrived. She had already been sitting there for an hour. Getting kicked out of the hospital didn’t kill her. Failure to get “expert advice” when she developed new symptoms after they tried to drag her into wagon after she told them she couldn’t walk, taking away her inhaler when the cop decides she wasn’t using it properly, then ignoring her increasingly deteriorating state while they drove around doing traffic stops was what ultimately killed her.
And that’s on the cops. Its all, right there, on the video.
A close friend of mine had it happen to her 18 year old daughter. She was taken to the ER with the following symptoms [paraphrased quote from something her mom posted] “Entire left side of her body was numb, she could not walk by herself, she lost vision, she had a terrible headache on only one side of her head, and her blood pressure was abnormally high”
She was discharged with a diagnosis of dehydration.
After they left, she kept going downhill so they drove her to a different hospital where it was found she had two strokes.
Saving her would have required some combination of drugs that the police didn’t have, knowledge of how to use them that the police also didn’t have, and possibly brain surgery that the police couldn’t do. So no, they couldn’t save her. All they were even capable of doing was to take her back to the place they took her from, that had already decided not to do any of those things that they actually could have done.
What’s the alternative, that the police refuse to take anyone away from a hospital if it looks, to medically-untrained people, like they have symptoms of something? In that case, what do you do about the people who really are being abusive to hospital staff?
I’m being serious here. Why would they need drugs? Why would they need to know how to use them? Why would they need to know how to do brain surgery? Are you just trolling now?
She was sitting in a hospital wheelchair. They spent at least 30 minutes trying to get her into the wagon. Then a bit longer to get her into the patrol car. They had all the time in the world to do something different that didn’t involve brain surgery.
Because they didn’t even try.
They were literally still there. They didn’t have to take her back. Have you even watched the video? Read any of the stories? Or are you just making this up as you go?
What’s the alternative to this?
Are you telling me that you can watch that video and conclude that this was the best course of action, and that nothing further could be done? That this is the best we could ever expect from the police.
How about following standard protocol when someone exhibits signs they are having a stroke. The things that everyone who does a first aid course would know, and that the cops (unless they were uniquely incompetent) must have had as part of their training.
If they think she is faking, then do FAST. Every single piece of advice says you have to act quickly. Leaving her to die in the back seat of the patrol car is the opposite of acting quickly.
And if you don’t know any of this, if you don’t know what the symptoms of a stroke are, and what to do if you think someone is having one, then read some of the links. You might just save a life.
Just to be clear here: there is zero evidence that Edwards was being abusive to hospital staff.
So if this was another case, and someone who was being abusive to hospital staff was having a stroke, you fall back to whatever procedures are in place to deal with an abusive patient that is needing life-saving care.
You don’t just throw them into a cell and let them die.
If the same thing happened to someone you know, that is, you thought they were having a medical emergency, the ER said they were fine but they’re acting like the woman in this video, and since you can’t administer drugs or preform surgery in the hospital parking lot, your only option is to let them die?
Seriously? You wouldn’t go back in say “She’s going downhill fast, I need someone to take a look at her”? Or go to a different hospital? Or call 911?
Now, I’m not suggesting that the police are supposed to be second guessing doctors, but doctors are hardly infallible and if a patient is released back to their care is clearly not okay, it’s on the cops to do something about it that doesn’t involve pulling them out by their hair (is that what I heard, I haven’t watched it) onto the sidewalk. It could be as simple as going back in or going elsewhere or asking dispatch to send EMTs.
Again, I haven’t watched the video but it sounds to me like they got it in their heads that she was faking and it’s not that they couldn’t do anything about it it’s that they were never going to do anything about it.
We’re not talking about symptoms of ‘something’ we’re talking about symptoms of a stoke (which, it sounds like, were on full display in the video). Surely police are trained in recognizing the symptoms of common life threatening acute illnesses. Heart attacks, strokes etc and even if they aren’t, they have a walkie talkie literally a few inches from their face with a direct connection to a trained dispatcher, as well as the FD which likely has EMTs or Paramedics on staff.
People are regularly restrained to beds for exactly that reason.
Perhaps you should read my previous post just above yours. I personally know someone that had a stroke and was discharged regardless. Her mom didn’t say ‘oh well, I guess you’ll die’, she took her elsewhere.
I don’t know if strokes cause more damage the longer they’re untreated, but that teenager ended up in and out of the hospital for a few years, had to do a ton of PT, lost part of her vision and it even cost her a fastpitch scholarship.
Also, see the linked article explaining that this is hardly an uncommon thing to happen.
I mean, most hospitals wouldn’t need to be forced to admit a patient that was clearly exhibiting signs of having a stroke. Normally, merely telling them “hey, this patient is showing signs they are having a stroke” and that would be enough.
And if it wasn’t? Joey_P has some suggestions. But a person who went from speaking just fine to obviously slurring their speech is exactly the sort of thing hospital triage would prioritise.
I was in Vegas the last week of January, and went to a bar to watch the semi-finals for the NFL, to determine who would be in the Superbowl. The place was almost empty, with only one table full. The national anthem was playing just as I arrived, and the people at that table had all stood up for the anthem. In a bar. I’ve never seen such a thing here in Canada. We’ll stand if we’re actually at the stadium, but while chilling at the bar? No freaking way.
I was a bit discombobulated, trying to figure out if I should wait for the end of the song to find a spot to sit…