News editor/director: We want all the sensation and ratings/clicks of covering the crime but we don’t want to actually assist the (fill in the trendy vituperative adjectives) police in [del]ruining[/del] catching someone.
I think the problem is when you label them as criminals.
When we notice hundreds of dollars of merchandise missing and find a clear shot of the person putting it in their purse or down their shirt and walking out the door, I have to keep my crew from posting their picture on facebook with a caption along the lines of “this person was shoplifting, if you have any information…”.
They don’t always understand if that person isn’t caught and/or found guilty of shoplifting (or charged but acquitted), they’ll have a defamation case against us, especially if it caused them to lose their job or apartment.
I didn’t label them criminals. What they were doing was a crime. 
Nobody is guilty of anything until some judge says they’re guilty of it. That’s the difficulty with “pictorial evidence is conviction in the court of public opinion” thinking.
Do you think that if you ended up in court and presented that defense, winking at the judge will help you?
Even Trump couldn’t successfully pull that off, how does some random Australian plan to do it?
I love one of the remarks by the Judge hearing the case:
“Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat”.
Dead-set, he should have just sucked it up, seeing as the original CRIMINAL case was declared a mistrial. By now, everyone would have forgotten who he was, but instead the stupid fuck thought he’d go for broke with a defamation action.
What happens when you have someone who is really, completely factually innocent, but who just happens to look a lot like one of the perpetrators in the video?
Quoting myself from upthread for context …
I’m on a cruise right now. It’s Day 2 of 7. We’re planned to sail all day today and all night tonight and arrive in our next port well pre-dawn tomorrow. Planned.
Around 10am there was a medical emergency and the ship turned and sailed in the “wrong” direction for about 6 hours to get in range of land so a US Coast Guard helicopter could take the passenger off.
Then we turned around and started sailing in the right direction again. But we’re 12 hours behind where we expected to be by now.
About 3 hours later the Captain comes on the PA:
We’re going to arrive at our first port at noon tomorrow. And leave at 9pm. Substantially everyone’s shore excursion there is cancelled and refunded. And you’ll only have a half-day on land.
With that late departure we won’t have time to get to our second port timely either. So we’re switching our second destination to a closer port where we can be there a full day. Of course all the shore excursions for the planned second port are cancelled and refunded since we won’t go there. New excursions are being set up in the new port and you can start booking those in a few minutes when your phone app shows our new itinerary.
We expect to be back on the original schedule and destination(s) by Day 5, 3 days from today.
There’s slack in the schedule, but not 12 hours’ worth.
Anyone who had booked a shore excursion on their own = not through the cruise line is scrambling now. And may not be getting any refunds.
Shit happens. Glad it’s not my problem any more.
Some stupid news from Britain-whoever authorized this post hopefully was sacked: Tory Party Deletes Bizarre Social Media Post | HuffPost UK Politics
And depending on the port, there may be a requirement for the cruise liner to arrive when the tide is at a certain level.
Do you mind if I ask where you are? I’m kinda wondering how much time was saved for the patient by turning around rather than proceeding and evacuating them once you were within helicopter range of your destination. I suppose it’s possible your destination didn’t have the equipment or people needed for that kind of rescue.
Also, did you see the patient taken off by the Coast Guard? Did the helicopter land on the ship, or were they winched aboard while the 'copter was hovering?
I’ve never seen a helicopter perform a rescue by landing on a ship. (Not that I’ve ever been in the position. I’ve only seen videos of rescues.)
I was thinking the same thing, but I’m sure I’ve seen pictures of a cruise ship with a helicopter landing pad painted on the foredeck.
I saw a helicopter evacuate a medical emergency on a cruise a few years back. We were off the coast of New Zealand. Not sure how far from the nearest port. There was definitely a helipad (it was one of those really big 3500 passenger ships) but I did not expect to see it used.
Yeah. On first and so far only cruise they turned to ship and steamed full speed ahead to get it close enough to land.
They winched the guy and his wife off.
But they either broke something, or used so much fuel on that high speed run that we limped to our final destination. About 24 hours late Pretty much every one missed their flights and or had to massively reschedule.
And, it was announced that since this wasn’t on their schedule, all the bars would be closing on board. Well, they had a mutiny on their hands now, and immediately opened them up.
We’d left Miami the previous evening on the way to Cozumel. At the time of the medical event we were ~10 miles north of Cuba ~50 mi west of Havana. It started with an all-ship PA directing a medical response team to somebody’s cabin. Which piqued my professional curiosity so I took a quick GPS fix and time hack.
It was going to be be another 18 hours sailing to get to our port of Cozumel, which is an island with limited medical facilities. We could have stopped short in Cancun with bigger facilities but that was still 15 hours ahead of us.
Stopping in Cuba for medical just isn’t done. The Cubans don’t like that. We had the same issue in the airlines. If you’re on fire it’s OK to make an emergency landing there. Anything else near or over Cuba, but especially medical problems, take it to Miami.
The issue was had we continued westbound, real quickly we’d be out of helicopter range from the US. So the turning back wasn’t so much to save time for the helo; we were making 20 knots, they can do 140, but to save range for them to fly out, join with the ship, then fly back.
As to the pickup itself …
The ship has no flat spot on which to land a helo.
The ship stayed underway and the ship crew chased all the passengers indoors and guarded all the exits to the outside. Which left none of us with a direct view of the operation. I got a good spot to watch what I could from inside.
The USCG helo (Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk - Wikipedia) came alongside the ship’s port side amidships maybe 50 feet above top deck level and just cruised alongside the ship. Then they translated sideways over the ship and out of sight for a few minutes then back to alongside. I assume they lowered a rescue crewman on their hoist. Then after a few minutes they rigged a large basket on the hoist then slid over the ship again for longer few minutes. When they reappeared alongside the basket was not visible, presumably inside the helo with the casualty. Then they translated back over the ship a third time more briefly, presumably to pick up their own crew. Then they slid out alongside the ship again, stayed there for a couple minutes to wrap up, closed their side doors, and they flew away. All told they were adjacent to the ship for probably 45 minutes.
A USCG Alenia C-27J Spartan - Wikipedia was circling the ship at a couple miles distance the whole time.
By the time the passenger was off the ship, it had been 7 hours since the initial PA. I suspect the situation with the patient was one of those “bad, and might recover, but then got much worse” situations. I simplified the original story a bit because the relevance to this thread was all the disruption to shore expeditions, not the medical event itself. Anyhow, after the initial PA we heard nothing more for a couple hours. But then I watched us turn about 90 degrees. Then awhile later the Captain came on and said we’re diverting for a medical heli-pickup. Then we promptly turned some more.
So that smells like they hoped to continue to destination, then the patient condition caused them to filibuster by basically turning to parallel Florida northbound, then later decided to go for the medevac and turned back sorta towards Key West until the helo had come and gone. All of this parallels how we did it in the airline biz. This is just happening in super slo-mo by my standards and with lots more available bodies aboard to help and “help”.
Ouch! We didn’t have that problem. What it did cause is that when they evacuated all the passengers from the pool and sun decks and such, everybody decided it was a great time to go get a drink or eat. But the many outdoor eateries & drinkeries were closed. So the indoor ones were absolutely mobbed.
Okay, that does it. I’m not going on a cruise until I can find one where we all sign a waiver that says:
"In the event of any serious medical problem, a burial at sea will be scheduled with no decrease in ship’s speed.
Food and drink stations will remain open, and all passengers will be invited to a Celebration of Life on the Carnival Deck (bring plenty of photos just in case). The cruise line will provide a complimentary open bar for half an hour."
(“Also available will be a performance by a magician or ventriloquist, at no charge to the family.”)
A burial at sea with a GoPro attached to the body and livestreamed by request? For science!
Especially if you enjoy watching Hagfish dining in.