It can be difficult to restrain a person of any size, who is actively resisting you, without hurting them. The officer had a size advantage over that girl - he could have restrained her no matter what she did - if he wasn’t concerned about breaking her arms. The effects of pepper spray are much shorter-lasting than a couple of broken arms.
A client watched me restrain her 1.2 kg Blue & Gold Macaw. She figured that in the future she could do what I was doing and save a few bucks. Except she allowed the bird enough leverage to fracture both humeri (upper wings).
Christ, trying to get my six pound cat into her travel cage can be a ten-minute chore.
No, there aren’t.
If you think there are Aikido moves that will magically subdue a fighting suspect, you have been watching too much television.
Data point: When I was first married, I was waiting for my wife to get off work at the department store she worked at. Two police officers were escorting a shoplifting suspect out from the security office. The suspect was a teenage boy, say about 5’10" and maybe 170 Lbs. Not what I would call overly large. He was not cuffed. When he saw the doors, he made a break for it. The officers, the security officer, and myself all took out after him, and got a hold of him against the bed of my pickup truck. It took 4 of us almost a minute of struggling to get his arms into a position that we could cuff him.
Also you cannot forget that a police officer has to protect his sidearm when struggling with a suspect. if the suspect gets their hands on his weapon, he could wind up dead.
Those people recommending that the cop should have used aikido techniques should watch that video again. He’s GOT her in an arm-lock. Against a rational person, the struggle is over, because it’s got to hurt like hell to have your arm twisted backwards like that, and the cop can break your arm any time he wants with just a little pressure. Except against an irrational person it might not work, because they aren’t responding to the pain. The cop is clearly afraid he’s going to break this kid’s arm if he keeps going like this.
Pepper spray worked to de-escalate this situation. The arm-lock wasn’t working, the cop had to abandon that approach unless he wanted to break her arm. So he pepper sprayed her, and was able to cuff her, and the struggle is now over.
As for the contention that he shouldn’t have smacked her after she bit him, well, maybe so. But cops aren’t unfeeling robots, and expecting them to be unfeeling robots is stupid. If he had kept on hitting her to punish her for biting him, that would be wrong. But instead he thought for a second and decided to use the pepper spray, which was the correct decision because it ended the problem without causing him further injury, and without causing her serious injury.
I agree that pepper spray shouldn’t be used as a punishment. And I’ve seen videos of cops using pepper spray as a punishment against cuffed arrestees…a guy lying quietly face-down on the ground in cuffs, and the cop walks up, lifts up his head, and sprays him in the face. That’s an abuse of pepper spray, and grounds for the cop to be fired, in my opinion.
But that’s not what happened here. He didn’t spray her to punish her. He used pepper spray against a struggling, biting, screaming unrestrained arrestee, that’s perfectly legitimate, because in my opinion pepper spray is LESS VIOLENT than slamming someone to the ground and levering their arms behind their back and using pain compliance.
Exactly. If all he wanted to do was cool her out he could have done so at any time.
There are ways to be spoiled that have nothing to do with material possessions.
She’s out after curfew with a bag of (probably) stolen items at age 15. When approached by the police she CHOOSES to fight and bite and struggle even though she knows she’s in the wrong. She’s basically sending him every message she can to let him know that she’s not going to do what he says to do. For me, ALL of her actions (illegal and otherwise) show a person who has little regard for any authority figure let alone the law.
If that would have been me at 15 years old, I’d have wanted the police to keep me in jail so I wouldn’t have to go home. The curfew violation would have just gotten me grounded for a short time. Stolen items? Biting an officer of the law? Resisting arrest? Keep me in jail, thanks.
Perhaps a crack in the head and a shot of pepper spray might wake her up a little. Naturally most people hope it wouldn’t come to that, but she chose to make it that way. Better to get your wakeup call with pepper spray than to continue your law breaking and bad attitude ways until they’ve perhaps progressed to doing worse things and you’ve turned 18 and made your life harder than it has to be with felonies and jail time. Personally, I am hoping she learned a bigger lesson than biting & resisting = pepper spray.
I’m curious why you believe way the bag contains stolen items.
You know, if my dog tries to bite me, I smack his mouth away and say “bad dog!”
That’s my reflex.
This girl was acting like a dog. Smack her mouth away and say “bad girl!”
But don’t most human children learn not to bite sometime after toddlerhood?
Maybe this girl needs some radical regressive therapy or something. Normal humans don’t bite. Chimps bite. They also fling poo.
Normal humans don’t when they encounter authority.
<< clap, clap, clap >>
Well, because she’s black, obviously. Or perhaps the fact that the tags were on the articles in question, and she was carrying them in a garbage bag. Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
The Fox affiliate WTVT in Tampa reported that this wasn’t her first run in with the law and that further charges may be filed regarding the clothing. It was believed they were going to wait to see if she or her parents could produce a receipt for the clothing which were still on store hangers with the tags attached.
That plus her behavior gives me an idea that they were PROBABLY stolen. You’ll notice I did say probably. Since my opinions are not held to reasonable doubt/court of law standards, I hope you’ll permit me to arrive at them with this bit of common sense deducing.
Thanks for the link.
It’s nice to see your posts continue their bizarre support for prejudices. Let me know when you can spare the time to respond to my earlier post:
“Here’s some of your other gems in this thread”:
“I suspect the Policeman would be in a great deal of trouble were she not Black.”
"Who’s playing the race card now? (in response to “She also looks like she’s been hitting the meth pipe a little too much.)”
“Of course her parents should have taught her to cooperate with the police, like Amadou Diallo.”
These statements are nothing but race baiting, and should have no place in a rational discussion of the issues.
By all means, explain your point of those statements. To me, they seem to be completely based on your own prejudice about someone’s race. Maybe you can explain why the officer would be in more trouble if she were not Black? Do blacks not complain about police misconduct? <lack of civility removed> Or is it that the officer and all his superiors are racist and make their determinations of the propriety of his actions based on the race of the person? Why is mentioning meth the race card? Only black people use meth? Please, by all means, debate these little prejudices of yours."
Garbage bags full of apparently new clothing is suspicious. However, I see nothing in your cite about the tags still being on them.
I see it there. Thanks.
It is interesting that neither article mentions theft as one of the charges against her.
No problem.
I mentioned that in #252 because I’d wondered about that as well. I guess they’re giving them time to produce receipts for that.
It was on a television newscast so unfortunately I don’t have a cite for it, but I would imagine it’ll come out one way or another eventually.
I didn’t see that post. Sorry.
If she in fact was stealing, and had had prior legal difficulties, that could explain why she resisted being arrested so vigorously.
She’s a child in a world where there’s a law called the “Youth Protection Ordinance” that says she has to be indoors during certain hours.
When you tell someone that they need to be “protected” from their own desire to go outside their home, that’s proof that you think of them as a child (or an animal, or a mental patient). If you don’t consider them responsible enough to decide something as simple as whether they should be inside or outside, how can you expect them to be responsible in any serious situation like an interaction with the police?