Different officers may have differing responsibility for the same result. Yes, that’s messy. You have to deal with it.
Politically, one is supposed to choose a side: cops or Kelly Thomas. Reality, though, is more complicated than that. It’s possible that the truth regarding culpability for the death of Kelly Thomas in some cases favors the police and in other cases favors the victim.
Chad Merritt There is an idiot running Fullerton. She needs to go.
Paul Lucas can you elaborate? Im not following you?
Chad Merritt Sharon Quirk -Silva. She is very much on the side of the police department. Her interest is not the people of Fullerton. Her interest is the people who work for the City of Fullerton.
All this is by way of saying that the Kelly Thomas beating and killing has been politicized from the start. “Politicized” is not a dirty word; it refers to concerted political action — and in this case some of that action was entirely appropriate. But, as seen above, sometimes it turns into simple blind and petty partisanship.
My comment to Chad Merritt was as follows:
This has hardly been SQS’s decision. That’s just weird. I presume that you’re just saying that for political reasons.
One can certainly criticize Ramos and to a lesser extent Wolfe for their role in the beating (although it seems likely that they were following department policy, and that criticism depends on whether they knew that the call from the Slidebar was likely bogus.)
One can certainly blame Cicinelli for the needless escalation of violence and for the killing. I think that he belongs in jail.
But when I ask people to consider at the scene that these three other officers beheld when they arrived at the scene — where they saw three officers struggling with an unidentified man on the ground — and ask them what these officers should have done WITHOUT the benefit of hindsight or the opportunity to view and reflect on its contents, I get a lot of unconvincing doubletalk.
Nothing in police training tells you that these three officers, coming to a scene where for all THEY knew the guy on the ground WAS armed (and certainly Cicinelli’s actions, which they didn’t know were unjustified, was a cue to take it seriously), should hang back and consider whether one of the cops preceding them may be a total idiot.
I know that this doesn’t slake the thirst for vengeance of the crowd, but it’s the right call. Given what they knew, these three officers didn’t act significantly out of bounds. Had they seen the video beforehand, maybe one of them would have arrested Cicinelli, but all they knew is what they saw on the scene of an apparent ongoing fight. People need to have some perspective.
Another commenter elsewhere said this:
Fullerton set to put half of the cops that beat Kelly Thomas to death back to work! Review finds “no evidence” that remaining Fullerton officers involved in Kelly Thomas’ beating should be terminated. and 3 of the 6 cops we all clearly see beating an unarmed scared man to death are fit to go back to work.
That sounds awful, but one should ask some questions: did these three officers — officers 4, 5, and 6 on the scene — really themselves engage in the beating of Kelly Thomas? Did they even know that it was Kelly Thomas on the ground? Did they really know that he was unarmed? I’m not entirely sure about the former, but I don’t think I saw any of them beating him.
They were trying to subdue him, sure — and maybe the force that they imparted on him helped contribute to his death (though from what I can tell that looked like it was mainly Cicinelli’s doing.) But holding someone down isn’t beating him. If they had no reason to know that Cicinelli was going to beat him — or, more importantly, that he was going to beat him for no good reason because he was unarmed and trying to be cooperative — how do we hang culpability on them?
They were apparently holding him down not to facilitate a beating, but to facilitate his being brought into detention. Now maybe he shouldn’t have been detained at all — but they weren’t in a position to know that at the time they arrived. They arrived in the middle of an attempt to handcuff an apparent suspect. They had the right to rely on the good judgment of the officers already on the scene, even if that judgment turned out to have been bad.
They (and Cicinelli, for that matter) had a right to rely on the notion that Ramos and Wolfe had made a legitimate stop. They (arriving after Cicinelli) had a right to take a cue from his actions that the suspect on the ground was a serious enough danger to warrant his being tasered and beaten to subdue him — they would have been reasonable to presume that he did have a weapon, judging from Cicinelli’s reaction. They were trained to react accordingly — even in the face of the responsibility that the arrest was bogus and Cicinelli was an excitable idiot. They were in no position to know this — and they are not supposed to wait around until they can make an independent interpretation. They are supposed to be able to trust their fellow officers.
There is an alternative way of viewing police work, which is that every officer, before taking any sort of violent step, should independently assess whether the arrest was reasonable, whether the force being used by other officers was excessive, and so on — despite that in a situation like this there may have been no way for them to do it. (For all the latercomers knew, Kelly Thomas or whoever it was there did have a gun or a knife — that was the more plausible explanation for the other officers reactions.)
This is simply flat-out unrealistic. Sorry, but police aren’t going to do it — and in the heat of the struggle, unless they see something obviously out of line, they shouldn’t do it. With the benefit of hindsight, what was happening to Kelly Thomas was clearly out of line — but they couldn’t have known that at the time because they didn’t know — and probably couldn’t have know — that Kelly was unarmed. But they didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.
I think that it’s possible that Ramos and Wolfe rousted Kelly Thomas knowing that he had a right to be where he was, that the call from the Slidebar was illegitimate, and that there was a tacit or explicit arrangement with businesses there that if they wanted a homeless guy removed from the area all they had to do was to call the police and say that he was doing something like checking car door handles to see if they were open. I think that it’s also possible that they acted in good faith based on what they thought was a legitimate call. What I think of their actions after that largely depends on which of the above is true. That’s what Ramos’s trial will be about.
I think, as I’ve written often, that Cicinelli’s actions were not justified by what he saw when he showed up, that they clearly constituted excessive force, and that from what I can tell he should be convicted.
Neither of those first two cases has much bearing on what Officers 4, 5, and 6 did when they got onto the scene — especially if they did not personally act to injure Kelly Thomas. To think otherwise is to demand something from police that, if followed, would lead to the needless deaths of more police officers — and also of their suspects. If Ramos and Wolfe didn’t have the ability to expect that their fellow officers 4, 5, and 6 would back them up when they arrived on the scene, they’d be more likely to use lethal force themselves to subdue their suspect.
I do understand the temptation to think that police should be omniscient in this sort of unfolding crisis, but that’s unfair. We should expect them to do their best in a developing situation without themselves engaging in excessive force based on what they understand the situation to be. I see no evidence, aside from people making bold and baseless assertions about what the police must have known, that Officers 4, 5, and 6 did anything beyond that. If that’s what happened, we should accept their return to duty.
greg, you totally went off topic. this comment by chad was about Sharon Quirk. You went into an analysis of how the other three cops were not culpable. I dont think Sharon could be the only one who cold, if she did, give the greenlight to reinstate those 3 cops. But if she doesnt protest, her, as well as all other council members that do notprotest this reinstatement should hang their heads in shame at the least.
I’d say that Chad went off topic — you (like me) were talking about the underlying situation with Officers 4, 5, & 6. To your credit, you weren’t trying to politicize it (and reacted appropriately when he did.) Aside from some criticism of Chad at the beginning, my response was to your thinking that this was bad and inexplicable, not to him.
Yes, if Sharon doesn’t protest this, then she is stuck defending the position. But in this case, for reasons I explain, she’d be right to do so. The notion that the second trio of officers on the scene should have waited to reach an independent assessment of the legitimacy of the arrest, rather than proceeding from the presumption that their fellow officers judgment is trustworthy, makes a mockery of police work. They should not have to wait until they see whether Kelly was armed.
I’m not defending Officers 1, 2, & 3 here, just 4, 5, & 6 — who are the ones at issue in this story. They’re separate people and it’s important to keep them separate.
*Supposition….is not evidence, fact or even a consideration at this point. Read the
Gennaco Report and get back to us with your sterling assessments.
Pray elucidate, Oracle! (In other words, I have no idea what you’re talking about.)
My response was to the Fullerton Stories piece on the reinstatement of these three officers to desk duty, not to the Gennaco report itself, which I’ve not yet read (though I got some sense of it secondhand.) Some of us aren’t retired!
Greg,
I’m always a bit surprised when your analysis of the event excludes what occurred after Kelly Thomas was pummeled into a coma and restrained. What occurred during the beating was horrible and complicated, but what occurred after is equally horrible but much simpler.
None of the six officers extended aid to Kelly Thomas as he lay in a pool of his own blood. Those officers had a duty to provide care, failed to execute that duty, and may have detained those who eventually did provide care when they did arrive on the scene.
In your opinion, in light of their failure to exercise their ordinary duty to provide care, as well as any special duty to provide care as a result of oaths of public service, is public outcry that the officers be dismissed valid?
No offense intended, Ryan — and I know that your comment is well-intended — but I’m not really sure what “failure to provide care” you have in mind. They waited a few minutes for the arrival of the paramedics, who are trained and equipped to handle these sorts of situations. Any “aid” that they might have provided at that point might have been as likely to compound, rather than alleviate, his injuries. If he was spurting blood out of an artery, I’d think that you might have a point, but he wasn’t — and at that point they didn’t know that his injuries were as serious as they were. (The swelling that you see in the hospital photos hadn’t yet occurred.)
You have a “duty to provide care” in some tort law situations; I honestly don’t know of precedent that says that it would extend to Officers 4, 5, and 6 in a situation where they (1) thought that he had been appropriately dealt with by the previous officers on the scene, (2) didn’t have reason to believe that any action they took would be helpful, (3) didn’t have any reason to believe that any action they took would not be hurtful, and (4) knew that the paramedics would be there shortly.
Your theory sounds appealing, but I don’t know that it’s even the least bit true in this particular situation. Do you?
Greg,
They sat on him until he passed out due to lack of oxygen. As you’re well aware, undertaking any kind of physical force assigns a duty of care to the individual exercising force (i.e., if I hit you with my car I have a duty to stop, get out, make sure you’re OK and summon aid if you are not.)
The officers involved didn’t even bother to take vitals. They’re trained to do so, yet they elected not to. You can even hear them remark if Kelly is breathing on the DAR recording. If I sat on you until you passed out and didn’t bother to check if you were breathing afterwards, you’re damn right a jury would find me guilty for not exercising my duty to care in a tort claim. CPR is a slightly different story. The officers’ failure to properly triage the scene also falls into the ordinary category as it demonstrates that they didn’t necessarily call for aid. It DOES demonstrate that they called for aid for themselves. According to testimony, the paramedic who attended to Kelly noticed him lying in a pool of blood based on the paramedic’s own observation.
In addition to this _ordinary_ duty of care, the officers have a special duty of care as sworn officers. If they were to come across an individual lying in a pool of blood on a routine patrol, they are duty bound to 1) call for aid 2) PROVIDE aid (take vitals, stop bleeding, provide CPR, utilize a automated defibrillator, etc. etc.) In other words, it’s their job to attend to a bleeding man lying in the street, regardless of how the man got there or how quickly additional aid is going to arrive. Crisis management 101, and if the FPD isn’t going to attend to people bleeding in the street (which, for the record, I think they will!) and will only call paramedics to do it, I want to see how much it’s going to cost Fullerton to get proper services from somewhere else.
I’m interested in what FPD protocol is in such situations and whether they followed it. That would seem to matter, right? What attention were they supposed to provide in such a situation? He wasn’t apparently about to bleed out; what role did the prospect of avoiding exacerbating an injury play? You act like all of this is straightforward; I don’t think that it is.
Did all six officers “sit on him,” by the way? (It’s been a while since I’ve seen the video.) Your use of “they” is vague — which is very important when assessing the culpability of the three latecomers. One of them put his legs up on a car and his back to another officer’s back and put extra force on him. Whoever it is probably did exercise excessive force. I think that that was Cicinelli.
The common law of torts would probably be superseded by statute here — and I honestly don’t know what the statutory obligation is for police in such cases. Do you? I would think that it would address a reasonable assessment of the degree of injury, immediacy of need, and ability to prevent damage. They could probably see that he was breathing by watching his chest.
I don’t think that “triage” is the right word when you’re dealing with one person injured. It’s not like if he was too badly injured they were going to let him lie on the battlefield. He was on his way to the hospital in any event — as they knew.
And they did “call for aid,” didn’t they? (Or else knew it had been summoned.) Paramedic, ambulance — right?
Greg,
I’ve been certified by the Red Cross in first aid (that’s not a big deal at all.) I can’t tell you exactly what they should have done to provide aid, but I can tell you that huddling up and giggling about what just happened 15 feet away from a man dying in the gutter in a pool of his own blood, attending to their own scrapes, and directing EMTs to their own scrapes is not acceptable by any standard, regardless of what’s in the manual.
Basic human decency should supersede common law; not statute. I’m not talking about locking these individuals up. I’m talking about continuing to allow them to represent, protect, and serve the community. You fail at being a decent human being while wearing a badge? Well, no more badge for you.
Triage is exactly the right word. They attended to their superficial scrapes before attending to a dying man in the gutter. Again– FAIL.
I have absolutely no evidence before me (but hey– I agree that’s why we have trials . . . but we’re making a distant attempt at an opinion as to if they should be on the FPD or not) to demonstrate that aid was summoned for Kelly Thomas. The fact that responders attended to superficial wounds of officers first is troubling to say the least.
Dr. D., you are out to lunch on this thread of thought. If you read the paper (Register)
today…it mentions in passing that three of the officers involved have been terminated and the other three – have not. Evidently the DA could not come up with a charge of “complicity to delay treatment” because….of their side conversations with Paramedics when they did arrive.
As we said; Read the report in detail. In the video we saw up to 5 officers crawling all over Kelly….at one time. Evidently, all those involved should be granted “persona non grata” status and relieved of duty…..forever. We suppose we agree with Ron Thomas on that one. Where was just one officer that independently called the paramedics and demanded treatment immediately? Doing nothing is the same as watching someone jump from a bridge and not trying to stop them – while doing some cheerleading from the sidelines. Having them remain on the force at this point – is a PR disaster! Desk duty or not – relieved from any duty until the two up for felonies are either convicted or acquitted.
Don’t you think that the paramedics have their own protocol to follow when they show up, based on their own judgment of the urgency of care? How is that the responsibility of Officers 4, 5, & 6? If Kelly had been spurting arterial blood I have to think that the paramedics would have attended to him immediately.
If you show me that they knew that Kelly had a potentially fatal injury, and knew that a delay of a few minutes had a non-trivial likelihood of making a difference to survival, but that they also deliberately pulled rank on the paramedics and said “don’t take him in yet,” then you might have a case of some sort. Do you?
By your logic (in which it’s not participation in the beating, even as one not beating him, but some failure after the beating that gives rise to liability), if an Officer 7 had come along after all of the fighting, with the paramedic already present, and failed to tell the paramedic to take care of Kelly immediately, that officer would also be guilty of a tort and subject to termination. Does that make sense to you?
For Officers 4, 5, & 6, “crawling all over Kelly” means “trying to hold him down as he (understandably) violently struggled after the tasering and the facial beating.” For those who just showed up in the middle of things, why would they not think that he had a need to be held down? They did not know at that point that he was unarmed.
Firing an employee under a union contract for “PR reasons” in such a situation is asking for a lawsuit. We have enough of those already.
“Don’t you think that the paramedics have their own protocol to follow when they show up, based on their own judgment of the urgency of care? How is that the responsibility of Officers 4, 5, & 6? If Kelly had been spurting arterial blood I have to think that the paramedics would have attended to him immediately.”– GD
As I recall, the paramedic immediately attended to Kelly after he noticed him lying in the gutter in a pool of his own blood. He was never directed by officers 4,5, and 6 OR officers 1, 2, and 3. It’s the ABSOLUTE responsibility of any emergency responded to triage a scene and direct aid to where it is needed most. This duty is not divisible by the type of badge or the title of one’s union. This is crisis management 101. In my opinion, what happened before or after isn’t really relevant as failing to do this properly is grounds alone for being terminated.
Why would they have had to direct him? Do you think that they should have dragged him around themselves? I don’t recall what if any delay there was between the paramedic’s showing up in the first place and then attending to Kelly. (Do you know?) In an event where everyone’s adrenaline would be pumping and there would be reason to think that the paramedic would notice the need to attend to — and, immediately, LOOK FOR — the victim, I think that it’s a strain to say that Officers 4, 5, and 6 neglected a duty here. Cicinelli, maybe.
Kelly was laid on his side and had it been required, the officers would’ve provided CPR. He WAS breathing up until the point where he was loaded into the ambulance.
GD said it best when he said, “any aid that they might have provided at that point might have been as likely to compound rather than alleviate his injuries.”
Obviously, Kelly Thomas is dead. It is a complete and obvious untruth to state that any aid delivered would be just as likely to worsen his condition than improve it.
One cannot be more dead, deader, or have death exacerbated. One is either dead or one is not. Any aid delivered by one or more of the six officers on the scene could only have improved Kelly Thomas’s condition.
I reject the assertion that Kelly Thomas vitals were stable before EMTs arrived. The closest observation made was from several feet away. Anyone with basic CPR training will be able to tell you that it is impossible to verify that an airway isn’t obstructed, that a pulse is strong and consistent, or that a victim is stable without making physical contact with a person. Since no attempt at obtaining information on Kelly’s vitals was made, making a blanket statement that we was “breathing up until the point where he was loaded into the ambulance” is not only an obvious attempt at misinformation, it’s patently false. One can state that his chest appeared to be moving, but without proper observation and technique, in which the officers ought to be trained, one cannot state he was breathing– let alone breathing adequately.
He wasn’t dead at the time. He had a certain likelihood of becoming dead. It’s not clear whether — as he apparently did appear to be breathing and, while lying in blood, was not bleeding out — “aid” would have increased or decreased that probability. What aid do you think that they should have given him?
The points you raise may be legitimate, but it seems to me that they represent a deficit in either training or command on the scene. (Again — who was in charge there?) The officers apparently didn’t think that they had to do anything more to aid Kelly before the ambulance took Kelly to the hospital. (The weird “taking of their photos first” thing would only reinforce that impression.) Maybe it’s a bad idea to have the need to take photos and the need to take the victim to the hospital competing with one another; I can certainly believe that. But that’s a problem with FPD policy, not with the officers themselves.
Again, we’re not talking merely about whether they are worthy to wear the badge. (The city says that they violated some FPD policies and have been disciplined in some unexpressed way; you may have identified some of those violations.) People are saying that they are equally guilty of murder or other crimes as the first three officers on the scene. I hope that you agree that their failure to give some sort of unspecified aid to Kelly in those circumstances doesn’t lead to that conclusion.
(By the way — FFFF has a story up saying that Hampton in particular should be condemned (and presumably fired or more) for his actions in the Veth Mam case. That may well be — but that has no bearing on whether what he did here justifies those consequences.)
This is really a pointless argument. There is a little nugget of information that I promise you will be a big game changer. If only it were up to me to disclose it. But Greg trust me it’s a doozy.
Dr. D., “By your logic (in which it’s not participation in the beating, even as one not beating him, but some failure after the beating that gives rise to liability), if an Officer 7 had come along after all of the fighting, with the paramedic already present, and failed to tell the paramedic to take care of Kelly immediately, that officer would also be guilty of a tort and subject to termination. Does that make sense to you?”
What makes sense to us…is this: If a dog is hit by a car…..call Animal Control. If a person has been hit by 4 or 5 trucks……you probably call for an Ambulance and
immediate transfer to the hospital. That did not happen – does this make sense to you? The Paramedics were too busy putting some Hydrogen Peroxide and band-aids of Officers that scrapped up their arms battling Kelly on the ground.
You didn’t answer the question.
My understanding is that taking photos of officer injuries was, believe it or not, standard FPD procedure in a case where the person arrested was presumably going to be prosecuted as “resisting arrest.” I presume also that the paramedics (and whoever else was involved, if anyone) did not expect that the few minutes were going to make a difference to Kelly’s medical status.
Maybe doing it in the order they did (which does seem weird to me) was a significant error, although I’m not sure on whose part. Maybe it was reasonable under the circumstances where Kelly was believed to be unconscious but not bleeding out or otherwise in imminent danger. I don’t know. At most, though, it seems to me that this could be tagged onto the command officer, not each of Officers 4-6.
There were six paramedics that responded. I dont think all six paramedics stopped to dap hydrogen peroxide on the officers scraps. Get over it. There was nothing more the officers could do. He was breathing and not choking on his blood.
Really? You seem to have some knowledge about the event that the rest of us do not. Maybe you’d care to be interviewed and have your story told?
Other than restrain Kelly after knocking him into a coma, forecasting that he would awaken from said coma and go nuts on the paramedics, then having a good laugh– what exactly did the officers do for Kelly?
For that matter, what did the six paramedics do and in what order? You seem to know.
Here are the facts: Absolutely no first aid was given to Kelly Thomas by the emergency responders who were on the scene first. They did not check for vital signs and they did not positively identify that no airway obstruction impeded Kelly’s ability to breathe. To do so would require physical interaction, which did not occur.
This is absolutely deplorable professional behavior. If you have anything other than words to type professing otherwise (READ: FACTS), I’d love to see it. Otherwise, keep your obvious attempt at misinformation to yourself.
I do not need anyone to interview me. It will soon come out. Everything about the incident.
So what do you think the officers should of done. He was on his side. He was not choking on his blood. When the paramedics got there they went to give attention to Kelly. He was beyond first aide.
*We are neither Paramedics, Doctors, Police or Fire personnel. Conjecture of any
kind by any of us is an effort in futility…no doubt. None of us was there, but we did
see the video. By that standard….all the officers involved failed terribly in their duty.
*Fullerton needs a new Police Chief from out of the area and a new City Manager. A new broom will sweep clean eventually.
Maybe a new City Manger. He gave orders to the chief about the incident. It will come out in the wash.