It appeared to be an outrageous story. Cops beating a 15-year-old girl who may have been hurt by a car in an accident, but refused treatment. So they beat her, arrested her, pepper sprayed her. Outrageous!
Except the story told wasn’t the story. The Daily Beast broke the outrage. Boing Boing repeated it.
When a teenage girl riding her bike collided with a car, cops didn’t simply take her to the hospital but instead handcuffed her, pepper sprayed her, and threw her in the back of their squad car.
Certainly sounds outrageous.
Body camera footage released by the Hagerstown Police shows the girl refusing to go with polic before an officer grabs her backpack. Then she is handcuffed and pushed against a brick wall while bystanders gather. “You let that badge go to your head,” one onlooker tells an officer.
While the officers had allegedly arrived on the scene to take the girl to the hospital, they began referring to her in criminal terms.
“We’re detaining you for incooperation with an investigation,” one officer says while the girl is forcibly cuffed.
No, “incooperation” is not a word, but sometimes words come out kinda weird. At Boing Boing, it was all about writer Mark Frauenfelder’s feelz:
The girl was black, and the police officers were white. It made me sick to watch this video. She’d just been in a bad accident, flew 15 feet through the air, and was knocked out. The police were cold, harsh, and violent with her. They kept aggressively shouting at her “Stop!” and “What’s your name!” Imagine your own child suffering a head injury and then being treated like this. Her frightened shrieks are heartwrenching.
The Hagerstown, Maryland PD responded:
“The reason she was placed in custody, is first and foremost we were investigating an accident she was involved in,” Hagerstown Police Captain Paul Kifer told The Daily Beast. “She attempted to leave on a bicycle … she refused to give ay info on who she was.”
And you know what? Capt. Kifer was right. The 15-year-old girl crashed her bike into a guy’s car, causing damage. The cops sought to get her identity and to reach her parents, but the girl, screaming obscenities at the cops from the start, refused to tell them anything. Her mother, she said, was watching the football game and would be angry with the girl if she found out what happened and was disturbed.
It’s perfectly understandable that a 15-year-old girl wanted to get out of Dodge before she got into trouble. It’s also perfectly understandable that the police wouldn’t let her. You see, there was a guy involved, essentially unmentioned in either of the stories, whose car was damaged.
The young lady does not get to bike away. She doesn’t get to leave the scene because she’s 15. She doesn’t get to leave the scene because she’s black. She doesn’t get to refuse to identify herself. She doesn’t get to refuse to give the police her parents’ information. Her shrieks don’t change that.
The choice was to believe the stories, Frauenfelder’s heartwrenchingness, or spend 14 minutes of your life watching the video.
So the police did a great job? Perhaps they could have been a bit more empathetic toward this young lady, though that’s not exactly their job. Contrary to popular belief, they’re not grief counselors, child psychologists or lean-in group leaders. What they were not was improperly forceful and overbearing. Indeed, they were, in the scheme of what one can expect from the cops, calm, respectful and careful not to do harm to this 15-year-old.
And then, at 12:11, they pepper sprayed her. She was uncooperative about being put into the patrol car, and so a cop sprayed her through the window. That’s where it all fell to shit. Much as her lack of cooperation and compliance may have been annoying, there was neither need nor excuse to ratchet up their use of force (and O.C. spray is on the use-of-force spectrum) to obtain compliance from a child.
There is a difference between using the threat of being sprayed as a wedge to obtain compliance and actually spraying a kid. No, it won’t kill her, but it will cause her pain. For those whose reaction is, “well, if she didn’t want to get pepper sprayed, she should have complied,” the infliction of pain as a compliance technique has no legitimate justification for anyone, but this is particularly true for a child. You don’t harm kids because they’re just not doing what they’re told.
That said, there is nothing the police did up to that point that was improper. And the stories, both Daily Beast and Boing Boing, are so wildly inaccurate, attributing the police actions to trying to force her unlawfully to get treatment, as to boggle the mind. This was not an instance of cops gone wild, but police doing their job.
Had a reader chosen not to spend 14 minutes of their life watching the video, they would be left with the outrage, with Frauenfelder’s heartwrench, and believe that some outrageous wrong had been perpetrated by the police on this young woman. There are many real outrages out there, worthy of Boing Boing’s feelz. This just wasn’t one of them.
That they sought to turn this into a story of police abuse by flagrantly misrepresenting the story is a huge disappointment, and a reminder that not even erstwhile credible sites like Boing Boing can always be trusted. Or to be blunt, what a load of crap. The cops aren’t always wrong.
This is media today. People tell the story they want to tell, and keep repeating it until the people who know better stop correcting them. It’s tied in with the whole, “perception is reality” thing.
I watched the video all the way thru on multiple websites, and my only comment (which agrees with your stance on initial police procedures in this case) was that the girl potentially suffered from a head wound or brain injury. It could have been as mild as a simple concussion, but could have been severe enough to cause her to be violent and non-compliant as she was.
The issue I have is that both police and EMS (the ambulance) were on scene, and the cops sent the ambulance crew away. This is where I see their primary exposure on this. The girl was in an accident with a moving car, and as we always say in EMT land, any altercation between you and a vehicle with an engine means you WILL lose, every time. I did not notice a good effort by the cops on scene to get a good grasp of the severity of the accident, which means the girl could have been severely injured (and I am referring to a head injury). The cops could have easily placed the girl in the ambulance and handcuffed her to the stretcher (I rode with many a patient in custody in this manner).
And I would like to call attention to one cop on scene who was telling bystanders (and I think the person who video-taped this encounter) that they needed to make sure the girl was not injured or had a head injury. So at least one cop on scene was thinking of looking out for the girl as a patient rather than a detainee. Why was this not allowed to proceed with EMS checker her out. It was bad enough that the ambulance was sent away from the scene, but they were not even permitted to attempt to evaluate her and potentially calm her down.
The only reason I make the last point as that EMT’s and Paramedics ARE taught to be aware of certain psychological aspects of patient care. We may not be certified grief counselors or psychiatrists, but we are trained to care for combative patients and patients with psychological issues, and this includes head injury patients. If the police were concerned about her well-being (as the one officer stated) they would have done a better job than keeping her for hours at the jail. A real head injury needs immediate ER evaluation, including an MRI. The “golden hour” is very real, and by the reports that state she was kept at the jail for over 3 hours, that really upset me.
Sadly, there were no real winners in this episode.
Question: Why didn’t the EMTs on scene (if the info is to be believed, she refused treatment as if her right) not say something to the cops?
I agree 100% (and more if I can), and depending on their State EMS rules, they could very well be in hot water, both with their provider as well as their State regulatory authority if someone looks hard at this.
What I write below is based on four tours on the State EMS Commission, as well as currently working for Homeland Security, who regulates EMS in my State
To my knowledge, all 50 states have “refusal of service” regulations for when they evaluate a patient and the patient refuses treatment and/or transport. In addition, most states have “no contact” rules as well. Both require the ambulance personnel to document the circumstances of their contact or non-contact when they were dispatched on an ambulance run. In the case presented I noticed at one point in the video that the officers on scene kinda casually told the ambulance crew they were not needed. Depending on how much the crew saw or heard, they might not have had the opportunity to closely observe the patient in this instance.
Depending on how the ambulance crew documented this, their narrative could hold some interesting information and observations. Based on observation on this, I would think this was a 911 call for a bicycle/car accident, which is why law enforcement and ambulance were both dispatched at same time. If that is accurate and the ambulance crew knew that not only was the patient hit by a car, but that the patient was a minor, then they might have “screwed the pooch” by not making more effort to evaluate the patient.
After 20 years as an EMT I can document numerous instances where officers on scene kinda shooed us away on the ambulance, telling us nothing was wrong and we could move along. Depending on the nature of the call, we usually preferred not to argue with them. “He who have the guns make the rules” is one aspect, and another was that we had dual police/ambulance calls all the time. If the ambulance crew got in a hot mess we relied on the cops to get us to safety. We tended not to argue the point a lot.
I was just lucky that never bit me personally in the ass
Because of laziness and/or apathy.
There’s a plethora of short sentences that any decent, compassionate and non-judgmental pre-hospital care professional could have picked and used (at the cops and the patient) to have at least gotten the patient into the back of the EMS truck. In that more calming environment (for the cop and the patient) you now have more control because the truck is your domain and not the cop’s.
But that means effectively using your psychological toolkit to manipulate cops, patients and bystanders in ways to be the best advocate for your patient. Not standing around with your hands on your hips and saying that a 15 year old (emancipated? doubt it) who t-boned a car is refusing treatment.
Aside from the aforementioned head injury concerns, I’d also be really worried about deceleration tear injuries in such a young teenager. At the bare minimum, you get the EMS supervisor because cops are refusing to let you treat a minor who can’t sign the RMA (refusal of medical aid form).
I really do miss the work. I feel useless these days.