Ohio Police Beating Death

The crucial thing you are omitting, Steve, is that the police were using force against this man IN RESPONSE TO HIS ATTACKING THEM.

The Deep-Fried Dusthead used force against the cops, who then had to use counter-force to get him to stop. There is no comparison whatsoever between that and your example in which you are assaulting someone out of the blue.

A more apt comparison would be a purse-snatcher who keels over from a heart attack while running from cops trying to arrest him, or a drunk driver who eats his car's steering column while trying to evade a DWI roadblock.

Look, have all the compassion you like, but temper it with cold wisdom. Some people deserve sympathy and some don't. My sympathy goes out to the cop - who by all available evidence showed remarkable restraint - rather than to some violent, high-as-a-kite bozo trying to strangle him.

if grandpa was flipping out on dope, and if you were a police officer who was called to protect him (and the public), then yes-grandpa's heart killed him. otherwise, you know as well as i do that this analogy has nothing to do with this situation, s5.
i think you are lumping all of your police experiences together and not looking at the facts of this case on their own. i said earlier that i thought there needs to be a harsh review process. i also cited an example of a police shooting in my area that made me sick.
seriously, if the police were called and told the guy to just go home and then he killed someone, you would be saying that it was their fault for not protecting the public.

i've noticed that many people on one side of the issue enjoy referring to the dead assailant in terms such as "Deep-fried Dusthead," etc. and i think it points to a couple of interesting facts about our society:

1) are drug addicts criminals? as our society thinks so (over 400 thousand non-violent drug users are in prison), many people are automatically saying that since he had coke and PCP in his system, he's a piece of shit who had it coming. is he automatically guilty for having been on drugs? and, are the police automatically innocent?

2) the situation went from disturbing the peace (a misdemeanor) to being beaten, which, directly or indirectly, led to his death. how did this happen? i believe this will be the crux of the investigation into this case, and why the chief of police is looking into the matter. again, i'm bringing up a point i made early in this thread that the police (particularly in Cinci) go into situations with a lot of preconceived notions of what they are dealing with, and they react not necessarily according to the situation, but to the fact they see a fucked-up guy in front of them and they are going to do what it takes to arrest him. let me make an analogy:

if a man is threatening to jump off a building, the police bring in a psychologist to talk him down, even if the man is completely irrational. they don't threaten him, because it might provoke him to jump.
yet,
if a man is believed to be on drugs and behaving irrationally, the police threaten him with force and arrest. they know he is intoxicated and acting irrationally, yet they try to subdue him. is it any surprise that this led to him attacking the police?could there have been a better way to deal with the situation that wouldn't have led down the path to violence?

if you've ever had to deal with someone who is FUBAR you know that you have to be careful, because the situation is delicate and could lead to escalation. the police have a tendency to see a situation and react in only one way --- violence or the threat of. our society doesn't see the drug addict as a human being who has problems but as criminal who needs to be punished. it will be interesting to see how the investigation goes to see if there were other ways that could have prevented a senseless death.

You're right.. just poor thinking on my part. My bad.

Still, I was responding to a simple-minded rant about the NAACP even being involved in the situation. Yes, "other people" are raising valid questions.. AND THAT'S WHY IT'S INCUMBENT FOR HIS DEPARTMENT TO CONDUCT A THOROUGH INVESTIGATION. See.. he's taking these questions seriously or at least acting civil about groups like the NAACP criticizing his officers.

Why am I still writing? No one really cares what I have to say anyway.

Oh yeah. No one has addressed the fact that the video is incomplete. So what basis does anyone have in reaching definitive conclusions about this? I'm sure I'll receive a meaningful reply about the evildoers at the NAACP again.

Anyhow, the video I watched showed a fierce struggle which lasted about thirty seconds, a stoppage, and then all the the sudden the guy appears to be unconscious on the ground. I'd really like to know what happened in the intervening couple of minutes. Who knows? Perhaps my intuitions would prove to be correct.. then again, perhaps not.

If you're still reading this, then answer the following question and I'll be satisfied.. how can anyone conclude that the officers didn't overreact when most of the struggle is either out of sight or not caught on tape at all?

Damn.. good point.

Wasn't he being a disturbance and they tried to move him along? This doesn't seem so much as cops interfereing with his life if he was interfering with others and a business. Obviously that doesn't end the discussion, but I don't know how well that concept about "interfering in the lives of others" clarifies this situation.

argh. he was NOT passed out when they arrived! he was passed out when fire arrived. he then awoke and went outside. fire called police. when they approached he then flipped out.

but that's not what happened. anything could have happened. maybe he would checked himself into treatment and completely changed his life. maybe his life would have just slowly crumbled until he died in a gutter. we don't know what "might" have happened. all we know is that he died at the hands of the police.




that's where we will never agree. i see it as him taking fate into his own hands. first by taking the drugs which caused him to pass out and call attention to himself in the first place, and second when he decided to assault the officers.
like i said, they can't win either way. they try to arrest-it's their fault he had heart failure. they tell him to move along and on the way home he has heart failure-it's their fault for not taking care of him. tell him to go home and he hurts someone else-again, their fault.
and STILL, no one has said what they should have done. and i refuse to believe that you think they should have left him alone. seriously, i think that's the weirdest and most bizarre statement i've read in a long time.






[Edited on Dec 04, 2003 by ava]

ava is a sweety.

But thats not what happened. We was in the WC, doing his "I'm a little meltdown, short and stout..." dance. He went outside and basically collapsed in the parking lot and people call among other things, the EMTs. Then he got beligerent, then the cops showed up and he attacked them.

Steve, you know I love you, and you know I'm only slightly to the right of Emma Goldman, but this guy did not die at the hands of the police. He died of traumatic over exertion and morbid obesity coupled with nasty, nasty CNS stimulants. I've seen police brutality and pretty much every other nasty thing you can do under color of authority and this just ain't it. It aint even close. If someone attacks you, you get to fight back, even if youre in uniform. It wasn't their job to leave him alone, it was their job to protect the the EMTs and themselves and get his unconcious ass off the lawn. To say otherwise is like saying well, if the police hadn't chased him, he wouldn't have run. Youre judging thier actions based on what ultimately happened, which was completely unforseeable. Take away the fight and the rioting and what youre saying is that we should let the paralytically intoxicated do whatever the fuck they want.

[Edited on Dec 04, 2003 by reprobate]

This was a homicide. Homicide does not equal murder. Homicide literally means
the killing of one person by another. Since the coroner found that the man died as a direct result of the encounter with police, this incident is a homicide. The ensuing investigation will determine if this homicide was a murder.

And S5.......again........the police do not have the option of leaving him alone. They were called to the scene. They have to respond. When they arrived on the scene, the man was causing a disturbance. They were forced to act. Eastern Philosohpy, while incredibly enlightening, has no practical application in this scenario.

shhh! i'm trying be all staid and serious....

(1) Robin,

For as long as I can remember, the NAACP's working attitude has been: Black people good. White people bad. White police people VERY bad.

It's one thing to "ask questions," and another to constantly and endlessly question the motives and actions of every white cop walking the planet while remaining absolutely silent about police use-of-force situations which don't have a racial angle to exploit.

An intricate critique is not required for the NAACP. A "simple-minded rant" is entirely apropos.

BTW, don't take this to mean I'm implacably hostile to all civil-rights or police-monitoring groups. But the NAACP has shot their bolt.

(2) Steve,

you're also missing the point that had the cops left him alone, there would be no problem. 3000 years ago, lao tzu once advised to do not doing, and that's all the "cold wisdom" i need to understand what went wrong. those who interfere in the lives of others and kill them in the process are not in the right, regardless of how society has defined their roles

The "interference" you speak of consisted of two things:

1. The police enforcing the rights of the lawful owner of that property (the White Castle).

2. The police using force to stop Deep-Friend Dusthead from bringing harm to themselves or anyone else.

As others have said, the whole point of having police is that sometimes "not doing" doesn't work.

Imagine I'm at your house for a vegan dinner party. Enraged by the lack of meat, I become belligerent. You tell me to leave. I become even more hostile to the point where you and Olivia feel genuinely threatened. At some point I take a swing at you and then try to grab your neck. You grapple with me and push me away, causing me to fall over backwards and smash my head against the floor. I die from the wound.

Now, the questions:

A. You have committed homicide in the strict sense. You have killed me. Was it justified, manslaughter or even murder?

B. Should you later learn that I was high on drugs at the time, would that in any way change your answer to the previous question?

Enraged by lack of meat.....BWAHAHAHAHA!

thatsa funny.

sfdeep said:
i've noticed that many people on one side of the issue enjoy referring to the dead assailant in terms such as "Deep-fried Dusthead," etc. and i think it points to a couple of interesting facts about our society:

1) are drug addicts criminals? as our society thinks so (over 400 thousand non-violent drug users are in prison), many people are automatically saying that since he had coke and PCP in his system, he's a piece of shit who had it coming. is he automatically guilty for having been on drugs? and, are the police automatically innocent?

Well, technically yes, if they're addicted to illegal drugs. But I don't think being a junkie or a drunk automatically makes someone a piece of human garbage with no rights.

And no, the cops are not automatically innocent. I don't think anyone even suggested that. But neither are they automatically guilty.


2) the situation went from disturbing the peace (a misdemeanor) to being beaten, which, directly or indirectly, led to his death. how did this happen? i believe this will be the crux of the investigation into this case, and why the chief of police is looking into the matter. again, i'm bringing up a point i made early in this thread that the police (particularly in Cinci) go into situations with a lot of preconceived notions of what they are dealing with, and they react not necessarily according to the situation, but to the fact they see a fucked-up guy in front of them and they are going to do what it takes to arrest him.

I think I'm safe in saying that cops prefer a quiet arrest. At some point, Deep-Fried Dusthead decided (for whatever drugged or conscious reasons) that he would rather fight than go along peacefully. It was his fighting, not the arrest itself, that led to what happened.

let me make an analogy:

if a man is threatening to jump off a building, the police bring in a psychologist to talk him down, even if the man is completely irrational. they don't threaten him, because it might provoke him to jump.

yet, if a man is believed to be on drugs and behaving irrationally, the police threaten him with force and arrest. they know he is intoxicated and acting irrationally, yet they try to subdue him. is it any surprise that this led to him attacking the police?could there have been a better way to deal with the situation that wouldn't have led down the path to violence?

The thing with jumpers is that most of them don't want to die. (People who truly want to die just go ahead and off themselves.) Jumpers want drama, attention, etc. So there's time for the cops and shrinks to manoeuver and make choices. It's a drawn-out process.

Also, jumpers tends not to be within arms' reach of the cops. The police are not in direct physical danger. They are not being attacked.

if you've ever had to deal with someone who is FUBAR you know that you have to be careful, because the situation is delicate and could lead to escalation. the police have a tendency to see a situation and react in only one way --- violence or the threat of. our society doesn't see the drug addict as a human being who has problems but as criminal who needs to be punished. it will be interesting to see how the investigation goes to see if there were other ways that could have prevented a senseless death.

I think "escalation" was the choice of D-F Dustie. He chose to attack the cops. Whether that choice was a conscious one or fueled by drug dementia matters not - the threat to those officers was the same.

Senseless death? A morbidly-obese drug addict with a bad heart picks a fight with two armed cops, incurs a level of physical damage that overwhelms his already-wrecked body, and dies.

Makes sense to me.

No ava, it was the struggle that caused his heart to fail, not natural causes... A ruling of homocide does not imply responsibility, it's not a ruling of murder, it just means that the death was the result of someone elses purposeful action. If someone attacks me with a knife and I manage to grab their arm and stab them to death with the knife they're holding, that would be ruled a homocide, even though I'd be unlikely to even feel a pair of handcuffs since it would be such a clear cut case of self defense.

No, it's not. I referred to your post as a simple-minded rant b/c that was a fair description. Perhaps I would be more willing to consider your point of view if, say, you provided some facts to back up your claims. You act as if your opinion is akin to some accepted truth.. as if it's so widely accepted as to be beyond reasonable debate.

But, again, you've dodged the substantive parts of my posts.. now, what were they? Oh yeah.. the chief of police hasn't so casually dismissed the NAACP.. so why should you?

Further, if there were possible civil rights violations concerning race, why *shouldn't* the NAACP raise a fuss? Oh yeah.. I forgot.. they are always "pro-black" and "anti-white".. and this absolutely nothing to do with the fact that blacks, in this day and age, still suffer under discrimination (and allow me to go out on a limb here) primarily from whites. The NAACP's purpose is to protect people of color from discrimination.. the fact that they are critical of whites in most of these cases just goes with the territory. It doesn't mean they are against white people. But this is trivial and beside the main point of this discussion.

Also, what about the incomplete footage of the incident itself? Why is everyone so damn sure the officers didn't overreact?

Moving on, why no responses to sfdeep's post concerning drug abuse/criminality.. this seems more apropos than continuing this pointless back and forth about the NAACP.

HE WASN"T PASSED OUT!!!! God, how many times does this need to be pointed out Steve? The guy had been passed out when the *paramedics arrived* to make sure he was ok, after that he woke up and started causing a problem, so the police were called. After that point THEY HAVE NO CHOICE, they have to respond to make sure that the guy isn't a danger to anybody.

Gee Steve, aren't you the one who always advocated *proactive* treatment of situations instead of reactive treatment? A drunk driver may not actuall kill someone, but we arrest him anyway because he's a danger. Yeah, he may not have hurt someone, but he was in a condition that made him prone to doing just that. Regardless, if the police recieve a call that someone is creating a public disturbance, they have an obligation to respond and ensure that everything is ok. That's why we have police.
yeah he *might* have done those things, but he might also have beaten the whitecastle manager to death for asking him to move on.
Seriously, ava is dead right. If they hadn't responded, and this guy had killed some people, you'd most likely be railing them because they were called but didn't bother to respond, and they should have locked the guy up or taken him to treatment so that he couldn't hurt anybody (and then ideally let him go when he was sober). Sorry, the police are not responsible for peoples reactions to their presence. If this guy didn't like the police being around, that's his problem, and it in no way gave him the right to attack them. Once he attacked them, they had a *responsibility* to do two things. 1) defend themselves from him and 2) arrest him. They don't have a choice in that, they had to defend themselves, and because he was violently attacking someone, they had to arrest him.

Having seen the full tape I dont' think this is what happened at all. The police weren't threatening him, they were asking him what was going on. He then charged and attacked them.

But you can't even draw that particular conclusion from the tape.. The footage starts immediately at the beginning of the fight, the audio is horrible, we can't be sure how the police approached this guy at all, etc.

Well, you just have to have a little experience with police to draw this one, rather simple, conclusion. Once they've decided that they're being agressive and going to take you down, they don't say things like "you need to tell me what's going on". That's when they're still in the "let's talk things out and not cause a scene here" stage, and that's exactly what you hear when the tape starts. Had they gone in aggressively, they would have been telling him to get on the ground, rather than asking him why he was behaving strangely.
Sure, it's *possible* that they came up and said "you're under arrest, get on the fucking ground, etc..." and then backed off and didn't draw their guns after he ignored them and started becoming violent, but that's really not likely. Also, all other accounts (from various news stories) seem to corroborate that they were not aggressive with him.

Drunk drivers hurt people not just because they are drunk.. it's because they are drunk while driving.

Also, there is no reason to assume that someone flipped out of their lid on drugs will hurt someone. I agree that they do have the *potential* but this guy didn't start attacking until the cops arrived and approached him, likely shouting questions at him. Why provoke someone who is potentially dangerous? Could there have been another way to 1) ensure the safety of others and themselves 2) still eventually arrest the guy for disturbing the peace?

Everyone agrees. But you assume that there is only one way to handle the situation.. as with a suicide threat, shouldn't there be more careful means of handling insane people?

Let's say I smoke marijuana. If so, I have the potential to break another law by driving.. it doesn't mean that I will get behind the wheel. We can only act on the information of which we have knowledge. The authorities were aware that this guy was acting irrationally and was possibly dangerous.. if there is concern for the safety of others, evacuate the area and don't provoke an insane person by approaching him.

How can she be dead right about something that never happened?

Yes they are.. especially if their actions will likely result in an escalation of the situation. And when there are possible alternatives.

What about hostage situations.. if the police were to just carelessly approach the criminal and a hostage was killed, aren't the police somewhat responsible for this?

It's not so simple.. the guy was out of his mind on drugs.

Not to mention the fact that, had they been going in aggressively and expecting to arrest the guy, they would most likely have turned the camera on earlier to document everything. The only turned it on once the situation started turning bad.

Who says the camera wasn't on? Speculation, I know..

And no.. they would have kept the camera off because aggressively approaching an insane person is a bad idea. Why catch it on tape?

If I were wearing a police uniform complete with a gun and nightstick, there is no way in hell I would approach an insane, 400 pound person. You know why? Because he would probably start kicking my ass and I would be forced to retaliate in kind. That is a foreseeable consequence of approaching an insane person, even somewhat kindly. My question is: why do it?

Stay back, wait until the guy sobers up.. or SOMETHING. Don't walk into the lion's den. Who cares if a White Castle is shut down for a few hours.. go to McDonald's down the street.

I don't need to know anything about the police to know that the situation could have been handled differently..