Toshio Meronek has a thoughtful piece about police violence toward mentally ill people. I appreciated the article, but one part stuck out. Meronek writes:
Statistics and history show there’s little accountability for cops who use excessive force, like in central New Jersey, where a 2014 study by the Courier News and the Home News Tribune found that 99 percent of police brutality complaints went uninvestigated. Last year, a police officer in Monterey, California was fired not for using too much force, but for using too little. In February of 2014, Corporal Thanh Nguyen a campus officer at California State University Monterey Bay, refused to tase a mentally ill black student when prompted by officers from the nearby Marina, California police force. After the Marina police filed a complaint with the university citing “failure to act,” Nguyen was fired. (In an interview with The Huffington Post, Jeff Solomon, president of the Statewide University Police Association, the officer’s union, explains that Nguyen refused to participate in the tasing because he believed it was unnecessary. Nguyen is now suing his former employer for wrongful termination.)
via Cops shouldn’t be above the Americans with Disabilities Act | Fusion.
There is an interesting groupthink dynamic in the firing of Nguyen. Seems similar to the Border Patrol firing border agents who humanize people who cross the border.
Life of refinement 