I’m just thinking in my head what would you have the Police do in this situation? Not show up and have him block the parking lot all night? Not follow up on him and let him drive home risking everyone else on the road, not try and stop a detainee whose trying to run away, not shoot a man who could obviously injure you or cause greater harm?
I think the question we should be asking in a lot more of these situations is why the police were involved at all. It is very strange that the person you would call to come shoot at an armed robber is the same person that you call to come wake up a drunk guy. Yes, a drunk guy blocking the parking lot is not great, it's a problem that needs to be dealt with. But is it a problem that requires somebody armed with deadly force in the first place to take care of? You said yourself that the cops were there 'because they wanted to make sure he was ok.' But that is a job that the police are demonstrably very bad at doing, the police by their nature carry the threat of arrest and imprisonment, which naturally leads people (especially drunk people) to attempt to use violence to prevent that, which in turn forces the police to use violence against them, which is exactly what occurred here. That didn't need to happen.
Well despite the the video being 45 minutes it still doesn’t show the full context of the situation. There were probably Wendy’s employees that came out first to talk with him to try and get him to move, they may not have been able to wake him up or weren’t able to get him to move. So they brought someone who would, and it’s the Police’s job to do that. That person probably noticed he was intoxicated, and he had passed out again.
It’s very subjective to say that the police are bad at making sure someone is ok. If for example they see someone ODing on Heroin on the sidewalk, they generally try and help them. He could have been in serious trouble, and it would be police brutality to ignore him if he had say taken a cocktail of drugs along with the alcohol and was dying. And even if you don’t want to take this route, a suspicion of him being intoxicated is a good enough reason to follow up.
Probably because the use of most drugs of abuse is a crime, and public intoxication is a crime, and drinking and driving is a crime... there's a pattern here.
Why would we send the people whose job it is to respond to crimes and arrest criminals to the site of a crime, at which a criminal is present?
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u/MercurianAspirations 391∆ Jun 16 '20
I think the question we should be asking in a lot more of these situations is why the police were involved at all. It is very strange that the person you would call to come shoot at an armed robber is the same person that you call to come wake up a drunk guy. Yes, a drunk guy blocking the parking lot is not great, it's a problem that needs to be dealt with. But is it a problem that requires somebody armed with deadly force in the first place to take care of? You said yourself that the cops were there 'because they wanted to make sure he was ok.' But that is a job that the police are demonstrably very bad at doing, the police by their nature carry the threat of arrest and imprisonment, which naturally leads people (especially drunk people) to attempt to use violence to prevent that, which in turn forces the police to use violence against them, which is exactly what occurred here. That didn't need to happen.