DENVER (AP) — A police recruit who had to have both of his legs amputated after losing consciousness and repeatedly collapsing during fight training at Denver’s police academy is suing those who allegedly forced him to continue the “barbaric hazing ritual” after paramedics ignored warning signs.
Victor Moses, 29, alleges in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that aggressive officers knocked him down multiple times in the second round of “fight day” last year, with one of them shoving him off the mat and causing him to hit his head on the floor. He said he was pressured to continue, with officers picking him up and setting him back on his feet, before paramedics standing by were asked to check him out, the lawsuit said.
Moses told them he had the sickle cell trait, which puts him at an increased risk of medical complications from high-intensity exercise. He also said he had very low blood pressure and complained that his legs were cramping, according to the lawsuit. The symptoms are danger signs for people with his condition.
Nevertheless, paramedics cleared Moses to return to training, which the suit alleges was a decision made to support the police.
I don’t have much thought experience in this realm so I’m happy to be shown I’m wrong. I put all the blame on the paramedics who foolishly, probably, gave deference to non-medical folks who wouldn’t know better.
But on the surface I see a benefit to that being a rite of passage in becoming a cop. If I’m a cadet expecting to, in a couple of months, have a non-zero chance to encounter someone trying to kill me at, say, a domestic violence call, I’d want to know what such an encounter would be like before it happens outside a controlled environment. No?
*I am distinguishing this from the bullshit fake fear that gets Black Americans murdered by cops seemingly every day.
I’m an electrician and although there’s a risk I may get an electric shock at work my training did not include being electrocuted because that’s just stupid. This hazing is pretty much the same.
Hi, thanks for that. Im not an electrician but I work for the IBEW! In the given example, electricians in my state have years of training and on the job experience*. To a non-electrician like me, my thinking is that they can control their environment- cut off power, and have an idea of what they’re going into at a given time. You don’t know what is behind the door at a domestic violence call.
ETA: *before earning a license. And FWIW, I’m not the one downvote; I was the second upvote. People be out here voting their opinions, not discussions.
Cops can control their environment a lot more than “you don’t know what’s behind a door.”
They can wear armor, can use their legal powers to compel people to act, can call for backup, can kick in doors, can call in helicopters, can get intel about the enviroment or suspects via the legal system, can have advanced weapons that most people can’t easily get I.e tanks/full auto guns, can restrain people, access to immediate and free healthcare and sickeningly have near full immunity up to an including murder, on and on.
All of these let them control an enviroment, much like an electrician can toggle off and tag a breaker. Both are in dangerous situations that have tools to mitigate that danger.
These tools must mainly work too, as police are not even in the top 20 most dangerous careers in the US. They rank under pizza delivery. The kid in a hat with a box of pizza that has none of these advanced tools to protect them.
Train them for longer. Actually train them to fight. There are ways to bring someone down safely and if you know them you are less likely to hurt the person you are trying to subdue as well as yourself. Put them in a ring once they know how to fight and have them fight each other in a safe and sanctioned way. Once they graduate that level, have them spar against two partners to see what it’s like to be outnumbered. Train them to be honourable in combat ie. defensive and not out to hurt people as a priority.
And of course train them that civilians are not their enemies.
None of this requires barbaric hazing.
Oh and just as a matter of note: people don’t learn skills through chaos. You learn through repetition and once you have burned the action into your muscle memory through hours and hours and hours of practice, only then do you put your skills into chaos. Nobody gets into the ring in combat sports off the street. They practice until they can do what they need to do without thinking and only then will they be able to hopefully maintain the discipline to take the right actions under stress and chaos.
