THE PSYCHOLOGIST : What rubbish! Police bravado blamed in death

What rubbish! Police bravado blamed in death

Audrey ought to go home and mind her kids, if she's got any. I am an unrelenting critic of police thuggery but the cop in this case behaved entirely reasonably. What was the cop supposed to do? Ignore the nut? This is at best totally misguided sympathy for the mentally ill. A person behaving in an extremely dangerous way has to be stopped, mad or not. The cop is not in a position to put someone on a couch for half an hour before he decides how to repond to his behaviour

A VICTORIAN policeman is facing the prospect of criminal charges over a fatal shooting after a coronial investigation into the death of a man brandishing two samurai-style swords referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions. State Coroner Audrey Jamieson yesterday found Sergeant Samuel Cahir failed to take an appropriate level of care for his own health and safety, or that of his junior officer, when he approached and shot dead Gregory Biggs on Melbourne's Lygon Street in May 2004. She described the death of 27-year-old Biggs as "a poignant example of the tragic consequences when the police rely too heavily on bravado and spontaneity at the expense of policy".

Sergeant Cahir was driving with Senior Constable John Hawkins down Lygon Street, a popular restaurant and tourist strip just north of the CBD, when they saw Biggs wielding two samurai-like swords and damaging property. While Senior Constable Hawkins turned the car around, Sergeant Cahir jumped out of the passenger side and approached Biggs alone. Drawing his gun, Sergeant Cahir said: "Police, don't move. Drop the weapon."

Biggs, under the influence of a cocktail of drugs at the time, continued to advance, swinging his swords and smashing the rear window of the police car. Fearing for his safety, Sergeant Cahir discharged one shot into the man's torso.

Ms Jamieson concluded Biggs's death was preventable [How?] and that Sergeant Cahir may have committed an indictable offence under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. The Coroner's comments follow a scathing Office of Police Integrity report handed down in July on the use of force by Victoria Police.

Deputy Police Commissioner Kieran Walshe said the finding, to his knowledge, was unprecedented. "This is the first time that I am aware of that a coroner has had a finding such as this but again, we have to await the outcome of the DPP," he said.

The Coroner said the investigation into Biggs's death "raised issues regarding Victoria Police training and communication techniques, including dealing with people with mental illness, people (who are) drug-affected and the use of firearms." She said Victoria Police should review the amount of time given to officers so they could complete operational strategy and tactics training. Referring to the two officers involved in the shooting, Ms Jamieson said, "Their training appears to have played such a small part in their actions ... "The actions of Sergeant Cahir are difficult to reconcile with the fact that he had been a fully operational officer for some 13 years."

OPI director Michael Strong earlier this year recommended giving frontline officers "alternatives to a hands-on approach that is heavily reliant on tactical equipment such as capsicum spray or firearms". "Training must refocus ... on equipping police with the necessary skills to accurately assess situations and identify individuals who may have a mental health problem or are under the influence of alcohol and drugs," the OPI report found.

Police Association boss Greg Davies said the Coroner's findings sent a message to serving police members that, "they are damned if they do and they are damned if theydon't. "I think the use of the term bravado is a very unfortunate term. I think it is very easy, five years down the track in the clear light of day, to judge something as an act of bravado," Mr Davies said. He said the death of Biggs makes a compelling argument for the rollout of Taser stun guns for frontline police.

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

No comments:

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

What rubbish! Police bravado blamed in death

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive