freespirit
19th November 2011, 08:46 AM
http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/police_pepper-spray_84-year-old_in_seattle_/c7e930bc
utterly disgraceful, imo...
when will this shit stop?!
Seattle police officers corralled some Occupy Seattle protesters on Tuesday night and decided the situation called for pepper-spray. Officers managed to spray an 84-year-old woman and a pregnant teen.
Dorli Rainey doesn't look like a public menace.
The 84-year-old woman's face made it onto numerous news websites yesterday after she was pepper-sprayed by Seattlepolice.
Rainey was among the Occupy Seattle protestors on a Seattle street Tuesday evening. Police ordered them to move and then started to get physical with the protestors.
"They picked up their bicycles and started shoving them at us," Rainey said of the bicycle cops.
Using bikes as weapons to herd protestors seems like a recipe for injury, but it's Rainey's next words that suggest the officers need some serious retraining. She said the police were "confining us in a very small space and they started to pepper spray."
Protests and riots are not easy places for police officers. It's often a lose-lose proposition to take on unarmed protestors. Someone is sure to say the cops were heavy-handed, while others will say they weren't prepared for the chaos and arrived with too few officers.
OK, it's a tough job. That's where training comes in.
Pepper spray is an important tool available to police. As a non-lethal weapon, it allows officers to end violent situations without having to shoot someone.
In the case of a protest march – where the goal is to disperse a crowd – pepper spray is quite simply the wrong tool for the job.
Incapacitated people laying on the ground in the fetal position are not going to disperse.
You'd think cops everywhere would know that, especially since the same mistake has been made time and time again.
In Canada, we can look back to 1997 at the APEC conference in Vancouver, coincidentally not too far from Seattle.
Protestors there who were holding a sit-in at entry routes to the summit were pepper-sprayed by the gallon by an RCMP staff-sergeant. The removal of the protestors was unnecessarily rough, likely due to the fact the protestors couldn't do much but rub their eyes and gasp as officers dragged them away.
When the Seattle police ended their pepper-spraying this week, they ended up arresting just six people.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn told a reporter that police would review the incident and change their procedures if necessary.
How many times do police forces need to learn that pepper spray can save lives when used against an assailant, but makes things worse when there are crowds of people around?
Cities, states, provinces and nations spend a lot of money to train, pay and equip their public safety personnel, so there's no excuse for continued errors when it comes to police and crowd control.
We would never accept paramedics who repeatedly treated the injured and made them worse. If firefighters kept making incorrect decisions that meant fires burned longer, there would be an outcry.
Yes, crowd control isn't a perfect science, but police have the ability to turn a bad situation into something less risky. Or as we saw again in Seattle, police also have the ability to make a bad situation something worse.
Are police departments poorly trained in the use of pepper spray or do they choose to punish protestors by spraying them? Should officers be charged if they unnecessarily douse people with pepper spray?
related video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfi38074mGE&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDu0HKyzQIU&feature=player_embedded
....rotten gestapo motherfuckers!
utterly disgraceful, imo...
when will this shit stop?!
Seattle police officers corralled some Occupy Seattle protesters on Tuesday night and decided the situation called for pepper-spray. Officers managed to spray an 84-year-old woman and a pregnant teen.
Dorli Rainey doesn't look like a public menace.
The 84-year-old woman's face made it onto numerous news websites yesterday after she was pepper-sprayed by Seattlepolice.
Rainey was among the Occupy Seattle protestors on a Seattle street Tuesday evening. Police ordered them to move and then started to get physical with the protestors.
"They picked up their bicycles and started shoving them at us," Rainey said of the bicycle cops.
Using bikes as weapons to herd protestors seems like a recipe for injury, but it's Rainey's next words that suggest the officers need some serious retraining. She said the police were "confining us in a very small space and they started to pepper spray."
Protests and riots are not easy places for police officers. It's often a lose-lose proposition to take on unarmed protestors. Someone is sure to say the cops were heavy-handed, while others will say they weren't prepared for the chaos and arrived with too few officers.
OK, it's a tough job. That's where training comes in.
Pepper spray is an important tool available to police. As a non-lethal weapon, it allows officers to end violent situations without having to shoot someone.
In the case of a protest march – where the goal is to disperse a crowd – pepper spray is quite simply the wrong tool for the job.
Incapacitated people laying on the ground in the fetal position are not going to disperse.
You'd think cops everywhere would know that, especially since the same mistake has been made time and time again.
In Canada, we can look back to 1997 at the APEC conference in Vancouver, coincidentally not too far from Seattle.
Protestors there who were holding a sit-in at entry routes to the summit were pepper-sprayed by the gallon by an RCMP staff-sergeant. The removal of the protestors was unnecessarily rough, likely due to the fact the protestors couldn't do much but rub their eyes and gasp as officers dragged them away.
When the Seattle police ended their pepper-spraying this week, they ended up arresting just six people.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn told a reporter that police would review the incident and change their procedures if necessary.
How many times do police forces need to learn that pepper spray can save lives when used against an assailant, but makes things worse when there are crowds of people around?
Cities, states, provinces and nations spend a lot of money to train, pay and equip their public safety personnel, so there's no excuse for continued errors when it comes to police and crowd control.
We would never accept paramedics who repeatedly treated the injured and made them worse. If firefighters kept making incorrect decisions that meant fires burned longer, there would be an outcry.
Yes, crowd control isn't a perfect science, but police have the ability to turn a bad situation into something less risky. Or as we saw again in Seattle, police also have the ability to make a bad situation something worse.
Are police departments poorly trained in the use of pepper spray or do they choose to punish protestors by spraying them? Should officers be charged if they unnecessarily douse people with pepper spray?
related video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfi38074mGE&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDu0HKyzQIU&feature=player_embedded
....rotten gestapo motherfuckers!