Oh, certainly. Escalating to the point of “you leave us no choice but to expel you” happens because the carrier’s policy leaves them no other avenue.
OTOH I doubt the airline policies require removal to include busting your face against an armrest;* that* happens because of the police officers’ methods. Which may or may not have been reasonably predictable. Had he been escorted out on his own two feet with no direct physical violence it would still have been reported and shared and mostly found unfair (but I don’t think it would have blown up like this or led the UA management to finally come to their senses about how stupid it was to be so rigid).
From Robert E. Howard’s mouth to God’s ears.
[ I can’t work up even the faintest interest in this imbroglio. ]
No. Legality and morality aren’t the same thing.
I don’t understand why people find it so hard to understand that Dao may have acted poorly at the same time United acted poorly. Why is this hard to comprehend? Why can people not grasp that in a given scenario, it is not always the case that one side did nothing wrong and was perfect in every way?
You don’t need a media firestorm. A little social media flareup, and you’ll get compensated.
Just a week or two before this some Canadian lady got bumped from a flight she had reserved tickets for, raised hell on social media, got a little media coverage, and was compensated.
Personally, I would rather NOT be beaten up in the hopes of getting a settlement, but that’s just me. Having your head bashed against something could quite conceivably cause a far more serious injury than a bloody nose. People have been killed by cops just trying to “restrain” them.
I’d say that in this case, there is concern it would come across as victim blaming. In the same way that we as a society are working towards (we’re not there yet) not blaming sexual assault victims for the crime against them, I think a lot of people don’t want to blame Dao for the assault against him. Honestly, blaming Dao at this point would feel to me like asking a rape victim how much she had to drink that night and how short her skirt was.
Ehh … I feel that depends on how sympathetic you are. It’s definitely not a guarantee, as it is in this case. I also feel that even if you do get something, it will be an order of magnitude smaller than what Dao is likely going to get.
One blow to the head is not being beat up in my book. On the other hand, everything else you say is correct. I’ve seen a dude take one punch to the head and drop to the ground, he died in the hospital a few days later. Then again, I’ve experienced enough pain and could use the money enough that it seems like a fair risk-reward ratio to me. However, I’m a bit crazy, and I do concede that reasonable people could disagree on that.
Actually, it appears United may well have acted illegally.
The orders must be obeyed as long as they are legal orders within their legal authority to so give. It appears United did not have such authority.
I didn’t even hear about this event until yesterday (Wednesday). Instead of trying to apportion blame, how about we discuss how the situation should have been handled?
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we all can agree that it was handled poorly. The outcome was disastrous for United.
My own take is that United should be able to bump a passenger that’s already seated if they really need to. Doing this too much would be bad publicity for them, but I can see that in rare situations it has to be done. If the passenger refuses to get off, you try to change his mind by letting him know that he WILL be arrested if he doesn’t, and again ask him to get off. But instead of calling the police to get him off now, they should have let him know that he would be arrested when he got off the plane at the destination city. Then they pick another passenger to bump.
I can’t fault United too much however, because generally passengers will get off when they’re told to, and they didn’t foresee this even coming up. But now they should know.
Their procedures are based upon DOT regulations. It appears they were not acting within the limits of those regulations. Thus, their procedure was not lawful.
As to the fierce intensity of the disagreements, well, come on… someone’s wrong on the Internet.
Simplest answer: this is an incident EVERYONE can relate to. We’ve all been treated like cattle by airlines. We all see what happened and think, “That could easily be me.”
The weird thing for me is that, as a European, I have never felt this far apart from US society and culture.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter that most people in the US were appalled, it’s more that some thought it was okay, that the CEO didn’t see a a problem until the share price fell, that they found people willing to drag a 69-yeat old out of his seat and along the ground, and that people sat there and filmed it.
Maybe it’s also the passive acceptance of an outrageous example of corporate disregard of basic human dignity and decency: it’s so off the scale; in what kind of society could this be anywhere near the spectrum of acceptable behaviour.
If no one had filmed it, there would not be visual evidence of what happened, and there would be much less outrage on behalf of the passenger. That people filmed it is *why *it became so well publicized.
Because that’s a strawman. We don’t think Dao did wrong because we don’t see anything he did that was actually wrong. He was standing up against an unfair system.
The only reason they wanted to forcibly remove him was to save money. Otherwise, they could keep increasing the buy out price. But they didn’t.
They called the police on a paying customer because he insisted on getting what he paid for. That’s something most of us think is our right. If we pay for something, we get what we paid for. Hence why you have to buy us out.
Had Dao gotten violent, then I’d agree that he did something wrong. He should stick with passive resistance. But everything says he just calmly refused. And then he got full out police brutality, to the point he passed out and later threw up.
The only reason I can come up with to believe that Dao should have given in is if you think that following an unjust authority (the airlines or the law) is the right thing. And I find that sort of thinking dangerous.
It’s authoritarianism. It means that an evil authority can always win, because the good guys won’t fight. Sure, fighting has its costs, and I don’t begrudge people who can’t pay those costs.
But I will never vilify the person who stands and fights. Not unless what they are fighting for is actually immoral. And, in this case, it is not.
The correct way to handle this is to have assured seats and cheaper reserve seats. That makes far more business sense than paying people to leave. But as long as people keep accepting the status quo, this won’t change.
To take this back to the OP, this is why I’m personally so passionate. I see the type of thinking needed to vilify Dao as dangerous to society in general. It is the mindset of authoritarianism. Sit down, shut up. It doesn’t matter that it’s not right.
Though I will say this is the only place I’ve seen any real fighting over it. Everywhere else I go online, most people agree. United were stupid and bad, and deserve bad press. The cops were absolutely horrible. And Dao was the innocent man who stood up for himself.
That goes a long way in keeping me from getting too angry about this. Dopers be Dopers and argue, but even Redditors get it.
That’s just begging the question. Because you don’t know that they were forced to call the police. In fact, I and most of the other people I’ve seen allege they had other options, and thus were not so forced.
They could have easily just offered more money, or just moved on to a different passenger once he said he was a doctor (and they verified that).
The police are always, always a last resort in any situation, precisely because things like this can happen. It’s very predictable that police can get violent removing people from places they don’t want to leave. It’s been done in schools, too.
I think his issue isn’t that they filmed it, but rather that they* sat there* and filmed it. And he’s right. In other countries, where the police aren’t as respected and/or feared, the cops would have had a riot on their hands.