That is not at all clear to me.
I'm not overly surprised by that.
If you consider it a matter of "common sense" that old folks are no threat, I hope that you're not a cop; and if you are, I hope you're never proven wrong.
Here you go my friend.
"But she was let go when police realised there were "other ways" of finding out her identity without taking her to jail, a police spokesman said." Even the officers own department is obviously embarrassed by this incident. Of course no doubt you'll dispute this too.
You see if you'd read the article, you'd know the local police department already had previous contact with the woman. In addition, it should be clear to any police officer that obtaining the name of a home owner is not a difficult task.
As I said earlier, there seems there was no common sense discretion used in this incident.
Unfortunately, it's incidents like this that really make those in law enforcement look bad.
In 20-20 hindsight, no one would want this situation to turn out the way it did. Not the cop, not the old lady, and not the neighbor who dropped dime on her. With that hindsight, and confronted with press attention, the department sent her home.
They did not say that the officer acted inappropriately. only that it should have been handled better. Which it should have, from the superiors who assigned the officer to serve the citation to the officer himself to the jailers he handed them over to.
I have a friend who was arrested for failure to appear on a minor infraction. He had already cleared it up with the county cops, but the city cops apparently didn't get the word. Some mess like that -- I don't have all the details.
This was on the Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend, so he coulndn't see a judge until Tuesday for a bail hearing. Three nights in city jail is not something a law-abiding guy like he, or I, would want. A mutual friend called me, I called in a friend who's an attorney. She knew the solicitor, got my friend a quickie hearing and ROR, and had him out for the weekend. Everything was straightened out the following week, no further damage done.
Was that a foul-up? Definitely. Should the authorities be embarrassed? Absolutely. Was it a mistake? No question. But it wasn't an atrocity, and it wasn't police brutality.
You see if you'd read the article, you'd know the local police department already had previous contact with the woman. In addition, it should be clear to any police officer that obtaining the name of a home owner is not a difficult task.
Obtaining the name of the homeowner is easy. I'm sure he had it in his hand when he drove up. Ascertaining that the person on front of him is the owner is a whole 'nother matter. She could have been a guest, a tenant or a squatter. When she refused to identify herself, he was stuck -- you can't just serve legal notice on an unidentified person who happens to be standing round.
Her refusing to identify herself is one issue, and not the important one. The officer could have radioed back for advice on how to handle this, but he did not have a chance.
When she tried to go back into the house, she escalated the situation. When she refused to stop, she escalated the situation. When she physically resisted the officer's attempt to stop her, she escalated the situation. Then she fell. And that's how things came to be where they were.
As I said earlier, there seems there was no common sense discretion used in this incident.
As I said earlier, that is not at all clear to me. I'll go a step further and say that if ther was a lack of common-sense discretion, it was lacking on both sides of this incident.
Unfortunately, it's incidents like this that really make those in law enforcement look bad.
This incident -- even under your interpretation and even accepting all of your assumptions -- is a nothing-burger. Cops beating innocent (or presumed innocent) people, or shooting an elderly widow in the face in a no-knock "drug raid" on the wrong address, those are a serious stain on law enforcement. A woman suffering minor injuries in a pointless altercation is no more of an indictment of the police than a sorority slap-fight is a stain on all of academia.