I think the cops should have been monitoring her. She was panicky, upset and barely lucid, and they leave her alone, shacled to a bench, in handcuffs?
They arrested her, they had the responsibility to watch her.
Ed
They didn’t leave her alone for very long, and checked on her as soon as she went quiet. Frankly, there are much higher priorities for airport LEOs than babysitting self-destructive lunatics who are safely (for everybody else in the airport) cuffed and shackled in a holding cell.
That said, I agree that this woman should have received standard monitoring. IMO, this wouldn’t mean minute by minute surveillance, and the story does not go into this aspect, but I would imagine that she did receive standard monitoring, and that she strangled herself anyway. Too bad, end of story.
I don’t appreciate these people sending their problems to Arizona and when things go bad, well, they want to ruin the lives of the cops who had to deal with the mess.
How many lives do they want to destroy because they couldn’t find someone to baby sit this troubled woman?
It’s not right.
But how closely? Continuously? They had the duty to watch her, IMHO, dependent on whether or not they could have reasonably expected her to be dead 30 minutes after they put her into custody. That's all the time that it took.
From what I can determine from reports, she was handcuffed to a bench or similarly restrained. Let's assume that she was highly agitated and very angry. I would imagine that a person would calm down quicker if one of the sources of the agitation (the security guards/airport cops) were not in sight.
The did check on her relatively quickly. No more than 30 minutes or so. I just can't find that unreasonable.