All you anarchists who criticise our heroic police officers – who are you going to call when you need your bedridden grandmother suffocated, tased, and lacerated?
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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But this was just an isolated incident, just like all those other isolated incidents. Palin! Gaaawwwd! Flags! Bald Eagles! Bombers and Fighter planes! Der de der der der!
I suppose I would say that if you absolutely need to have your bedridden grandmother tasered then the free-market and mutual aid will get it done… but somehow I suspect your statement is tongue-in-cheek.
Local media have different, and much less one-sided accounts of what allegedly happened.
Here’s an example:
http://newsok.com/oklahoma-granny-gets-shocked-by-taser-sues-el-reno-police/article/3471297?custom_click=headlines_widget
Some of the reports indicate 911 was called because the woman was threatening suicide, not because of a medical emergency. that might explain why they sent police officers instead of paramedics.
How does that justify their actions in any way? Using potentially lethal force to prevent someone from committing suicide seems a bit counterproductive, and the woman posed no significant threat to the safety of any of the officers there. Even if we concede for the sake of argument that they had a valid excuse for barging in on the woman and attempting to subdue her (to the extent that a bed ridden octogenarian can be subdued) their actions seem like overkill. Had a group of non-police officers done the same thing in the same situation, they would be awaiting trial.
The latest report is that she is schizophrenic. They didn’t barge in they were called by her grandson. He says it was because he wanted an evaluation. The police say he called in that she was threatening suicide.
If the police had left, and she killed herself, what would have been the reaction from the family? What would have been the reaction from the public?
Yup — suffocating, tasering, and lacerating a potential suicide is standard practice, is it? Makes ’em love life and cling to it, I suppose.
I prefer the interpretation that they believe your body is the property of the state, and therefore how dare you try to determine when your life will end.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. The response of the public or her family is irrelevant, they don’t own her life so shouldn’t forcibly prevent her from ending it.
I can’t help wonder how the move was made from “suicide in need of an evaluation” to “potentially lethal force is neccessary and justified”.
Suffocating, tasering, and lacerating helpless people is part of the order of being (don’t know what exactly this means, but it has this nice conservative-Thomistic ring), so you are obliged to support it, you silly atomistic individualists!