The officer didn’t do his job correctly because he didn’t stick to policy. That’s why he’s on administrative leave for now.
And bullshit on your remarks about common sense. It’s not some contrived, meaninglessly moral idea. If someone sleeps too close to a campfire, and their sleeping bag catches on fire, you don’t just sit their and watch them burn because, “Hrrrm – Uhhh — Errrm – Well, if he didn’t want to catch on fire, he should have followed proper camping safety protocol 49.86-5 from the ‘Proper Guide On Recreational Camping Safety’ and slept at least 4.325 feet away from any campfire.”
No, common sense kicks in, you wake the person up and/or help extinguish the fire.
And NBC5 Investigates has found that – at the time of her death last Friday – she still owed a total of $7,579.00 in court fines resulting from five traffic stops in various Chicago suburbs (including a DUI), and she had been cited several times for her failure to pay those fines.
One of those stops was for, among other infractions (such as DUI), failing to signal when changing lanes.
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Maybe that was part of the problem in getting her familiy to bail her out. It wasn’t (possibly) just the $5K, it was the $7500 that she would also have to pay, eventually. If they didn’t have $500, I suspect they didn’t have $8000 either.
Reminiscent of the results of the Ferguson investigation - people just ignored their fines and continued to drive, assuming it would all just go away. “I can’t afford to pay my fines and my insurance” sounds like a good enough excuse to some people.
Maybe the family spent all of their money on hiring a Slip and Fall lawyer off the teevee.
He advertises locally, in between commercials for Victory Auto Wreckers, and a “college” where you can learn either medical coding, or HVAC repair, I forget which one.
Its entirely possible that these are people who lost a family member because they didn’t have $500. And here you are, making snide remarks about their intelligence and character. Knowing next to nothing about them.
The whole business of her not getting out on bail is a red herring. We know next to nothing about her family and speculation about what they should or shouldn’t have done is irrelevant to the fact that she committed suicide while in custody.
Can we just leave the family out of this?
Bottom line, we should not have a system where someone is permitted to kill herself while being held in custody for a minor offense. That’s what we need to concentrate on.
I’ll agree with that in that the biggest fuck up (and IMO the only important one of the whole deal) is that she was able to commit suicide under custody.
Then again, how many people here KNEW they could hang themselves with a garbage bag?
Did the local jail know?
Just HOW far should you have to go to prevent someone from commiting suicide?
And, ironically, if you go too far, you are probably mistreating them or violating their rights some other way.
I have seen interviews with some woman held in the cell next to Bland’s. They asked her all kinds of questions except the obvious one: did your cell have a garbage can?