Posted on 06/04/2011 12:46:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Not just cops and firefighters, either. Spectators watched too, including his elderly stepmother, who was too frail to dive into the water herself.
Weaver noted that a 2009 policy – revoked this week – prohibited firefighters from participating in water rescues. The policy was implemented after budget cuts ended water-rescue training. OK, I counter, but surely some first responders had been trained before 2009. Weaver’s answer: Yes, but they lacked the right equipment.
Weaver assured me that the firefighters who were on the scene feel horrible about what happened. “Every one of our members who was on that scene wishes that the policy would have allowed them to do something at some point,” he explained.
Any firefighter who broke with policy could have landed in a world of bureaucratic payback. That’s the problem. No government worker in America gets fired for following the rules.
As Russo put it, “We need an approach toward public service that is less rule-bound and more willing to take risk.”
That’s Debra Saunders, wondering whether the PD and FD would have been as respectful of bureaucratic rules if it had been a kid out there drowning. Cops note that there was no way to tell whether Zack was armed and dangerous, but of course that’s true for almost anyone attempting suicide. A guy sitting on a bridge rail is as likely to be concealing a weapon as this guy was, yet police will still try to grab him if they can. The city’s not buying the excuses, in any event: Given the national outcry over what happened, they’ve already decided to relax the policy against water rescues.
Wondering how the body was brought back to shore, incidentally? Turns out … a bystander decided to swim out there and get it, once Zack finally went horizontal in the water and started floating face down. Exit question: Isn’t this story just a darker, more tragic version of this one?
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO
Yes. I was referring to the spectators whose only swimming skill would be the ability to dog paddle in a pool.
There you go. They could have always appropriated one from a boater.
That’s what I think — there was not one watcher there who did a thing, either. They are blaming the guys in uniform, but they have arms and legs too. And they watched and waited for someone else to do something.
I don’t know. It’s not as simple as ‘blame the FD’ to me.
Spot on about the “spectators union”.
There’s not a lot of information in the SF Gate link except for the fact the drowned soul was standing with at least his head above. No mention of surf if any or type of bottom, but in any case those are not go-no go factors. Nor was his estimated weight of 300 lbs.
I’ll make only one assumption; he was standing in salt water. And even that makes a difference only because a fat man is more buoyant than one with less body fat.
I was trained for life guard certification by toughest teacher in the DC metro area. At age 52 or so he was no more than 5ft 6in tall and maybe 150 lbs. Yet he had no trouble in turning any of my forty or so male classmates and locking them up in a cross chest carry and taking them to the shallow end even we were told to fight him as hard as we could. We were all extremely good swimmers with excellent endurance and probably at our peak fitness levels and most substantially stronger, yet he took us all. Note I did say that he lifted any of out of the water, just to a shallower depth where the victims head was safely above water and non swimmers could even help.
A key element of the training was to assume that every victim was panicked and should be approached carefully as they tend to try and climb your head. A chest kick and turning the victim quickly gave one a hard hold. A feistier victim was taken under utilizing the panic reflex to release the rescuer.
To cut a long story short even th smallest woman in our class succeeded against her largest male counter parts.
End of story is that he could have been swept off his feet put into a hold and walked his floating whale carcass to shallower water where further assistance was available. I’ve done with big nasty drunks and have seen women do the same.
Anybody could have twisted a shirt, slacks or a towel to offer this soul a chance to change his mind withou endangering themselves.
No comment on the union folk.
‘If anyone had tried to save him, they would have been subject to prosecution’ is a topic best taken up after the fact. Break a stupid rule, deal with a prosecution that will be laughed at when it becomes public.
Yes, he did have “plenty of survival time” but he was unconscious within the 1 to 2 hours that the chart predicts and this comports with what happened here.
Why wasn’t this a “wait it out” matter? He will eventually go unconscious at those water temps (in an hour or two) and can be watched and dragged ashore without the feared fight ever occurring.
The water temp/unconsciousness data is not looking good for the “we can only watch” argument. DainBramaged has not replied, I note, after asking for a debate. He seems to have ceded the argument.
And I read the article you posted. This troubled me:
“But water rescue policies are in the process of negotiations between the firefighters union and the city, so what they can and cannot do is not set down in writing.”
We now wait on union negotiations being completed in emergency situations?
If the guy weighed 300 lbs, there wouldn’t have been anythinf I could have done for him.
The most that I could do for the guy was coax him ashour with a bucket of KFC or something.
The water in Alameda is not particularly cold. It is very shallow for a long time, it’s the Bay, and it’s Spring.
I grew up in a rural area where rescue is seldom readily available.
A few years back, a friend of mine ended a hostage situation while police watched from the road. A drunk next door was holding his family hostage with a crossbow.
My friend’s house shared a driveway with the house next door so the houses were pretty close. The hostage taker asked my friend for a cigarette. When my friend went across the drive the police didn’t like it much but it was over about 5 seconds later.
When the guy reached out the door for the smoke, my friend grabbed him by the arm and yanked him out so fast the guy dropped the bow and was on the ground before he knew what happened.
In retrospective, its probably a good thing my friend ended the situation rather than police.
Yeah i lived in Alameda for 5 years, this year spring has not arrived in Northern California yet, it has been unseasonably cold..
As we speak it is raining heavily and forecasted to continue for the next 2 days.
Some people in such situations act without consulting with authorities consequences be damed. And your right that the intended victim and perp were far safer as a result of his actions. One acquires the mind set to assist in the course of growing from one’s parents, church, and good teachers. Absent their influence it’s a “Lord of the Flies” comes of age dog eat dog kind of world.
I wasn’t happy when we lost our small local police force. They were a pretty big expense and mostly they sat on a main road and wrote tickets. On the flipside they were local and knew everyone which meant they could go into a tense situation and talk to a perp like a friend and defuse tension.
My biggest concern with losing them was out of town county cops treating all situations the same. Fortunately, a county car rolls though town only once or twice a week. Again, its a result of the behavior of the people in the community. We don’t need heavy police protection because we have a minimal crime rate and people work things out among themselves.
I still worry about the domestic dispute cases with the out of town cops.
So he’s suicidal.
So some policeman could have pulled his gun and ORDERED him out of the water ...
Wanna bet he’d have complied?
The odds are that he didn’t really want to die, he just wanted the attention.
If it’d been me, I’d have yelled at him ‘citizen’s arrest, come out of the water, now.’
D@mn Liber@ls and their D@mn Feelings.
Well that's understable.
We have a strange situation where there are 'city cops', who are almost totally affirmative action hires, and county cops, all too many of whom have bulked up with whatever and treat any disturbance as a prelude to "SWAT TRY OUTS". The city cops have single officer patrol cars whose primary function seems to be that of rolling meter maids. But both departments roll out to the same calls.
Things start approaching the comical when a 5'-4" female gets out of her vehicle with an equipment belt that's bigger and heavier than she is, while county mounties are already in vests dragging out shields and helmets and all begin jawing over who has jurisdiction over the staggering and profanity screaming hispanic with a forty oz bottle in an semi-legal paper bag. And usually four more units arrive by which time the drunk has stopped screaming and fallen, passed out, to the ground. That doesn't stop the negotiations, though now it's question of successfully foist the now disarmed and cuffed drunk to the other party.
I actually witnessed this event from a parking lot, drove off after 20 minutes of watching, went about my business and they were all still there 45 minutes later as I drove by on the way home.
And I'm saying this as one who has had good and dear friends in a variety of LEO departments. The retired ones just roll their eyes and shake their heads at the current crop.
Don’t “blame the cops” on this one.......
A lot of times, (this one included) cops - and other responders’ hands are tied by rules/restrictions and funding for equipment/training neccessary. I’m the father of two “responders”, (they’re my heroes ) and have some training myself. “Responding” without proper equipment/training means just more bodies to recover.... >PS
300 pounds, eh? They could have floated a trail of Twinkies out to him and lured him back to shore.
Seriously, though, the water wasn't deep and if he'd physically resisted rescue and they couldn't overpower him, they could have just waded back. They didn't even try.
I don’t have issues with police because I grew up in small town and rural Michigan. My hometown had a constable who was on duty when he wasn’t working his regular job in town. I saw him make exactly one arrest in my whole life. Mostly he dealt with us teenagers drinking and stuff like that. Usually he’d chase us off to get out of sight or take us home. He found me drunk driving once and took me a good 3 hour walk back to my house where my keys were waiting in the mail box.
I guess I just see most bad cops as a product of their environment. It doesn’t absolve them of blame or anything it just treats them as a symptom resulting from a root cause.
As for older cops vs younger cops I think there was a certain truth to the movie “Colors” starring Robert Duval and Sean Penn.
And one union employee looks at the other and says “Hey, that’s not in my job description...I ain’t gonna do it. Call the shop steward if you have any gripes about it!”
Think God the union thug did not have to overstep his job duties to go after the man. Hell! He could have been driven out of the union for this unauthorized act!
My ex wife’s father was a rural fire chief. A good bit of his job was scraping up remains after accidents along heavily traveled 2 lane US 12 in southern Michigan.
His worst day was when 1 of his friends flipped out and killed his ex wife, her boss, her parents and himself. He had no sooner gotten home that night when he was called to a housefire in a neighboring town where 2 adults and 7 kids had died.
Then they should be ashamed of themselves. The politicians usually give the citizenry what they want and the police and fire brass do what the politicians tell them to do. Nothing new under the sun.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.