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[Peace Patriot]

62. Why didn't they just sit down and wait him out?

Your point is valid. Personal experience here in the nursing home field, dealing with dementia every day. Dementia patients can do great harm--to other residents, to staff and to themselves--and the options in dealing with that potential harm are very limited by VERY GOOD LAWS that protect the elderly from abuse (for instance, abusive restraint). There are a whole lot of issues here, too, about our health care system--inadequate staffing for one, poor doctor care for another, inadequate facilities for various kinds of elder health care, inadequate training for extremely overworked and underpaid staff, society's disregard for the elderly, society's "warehousing" of the elderly, and more.

All of this added up to out-of-control dementia patient whom the staff could not deal with. This shouldn't have happened. There are many ways to prevent it from happening, with adequate staffing, good medical care and compassionate social care--but it did happen. So, what should the police do?

Why couldn't they have cordoned him off and sat down in lawn chairs to wait him out? Maybe offered him a beer after a while. Well, no... but you get the idea. (Lemonade?) He was probably dehydrated. He may have been incontinent. And, for sure, after a while, he was going to get hungry or just collapse with fatigue and go to sleep.

WHY do police have to act like the S.W.A.T. teams they see on TV, or like Navy Seals, or whatever violent model gets stamped onto their brains? THEY acted demented, in this case, just like the elderly resident. Their actions were not only criminal, they were stupid beyond belief. They pump each other up to be hit men and there is no restraining them--no one to apply COMMON SENSE to the situation. His brain was damaged. Theirs, presumably, were not. Why in God's name couldn't they WAIT?

And where, in God's name, has cleverness gone to, in our police state culture? A sneak attack, say, from behind the demented 95 year old, with a syringe? The offer of a tray of food and drink? Pillows? A bed? A teddy bear? A chair? A TV? And what about SOUND? Don't the police realize that commands are USELESS on demented patients and often TRIGGER rage? You don't command a demented person--you entice, your inveigle, you bribe, you speak softly, you above all DIVERT. They CANNOT understand their situation. That brain wiring is GONE. They are very like two year olds, for whom the word "No" is a provocation--and they sometimes suffer something that is almost exactly like a "terrible two's" temper tantrum. They REALLY cannot understand why they mustn't put their finger into an electrical outlet. The only thing they know is that they MUST RESIST the "no." It is imperative to their being. With two year old's, this is a necessary step to establishing their identity. With 95 year olds suffering demential, it is a reversion to that primitive immaturity. That's all they've got left--the power to defy commands.

I was just thinking, why not use a clown? Or a strolling musician? Dementia patients are very distractable except when you confront them directly with your will vs. their resistance. (Then they can be as stubborn as a two year old.) That is ALL our "police state"-trained police seem to know: their will against "perp" resistance. Where is cleverness? Where is creativity? Where is common sense? Where is compassion? Where is patience? All gone, it seems, at times like this. Though we shouldn't judge all cops on one incident, there are certainly enough incidents in recent times, of outrageously unnecessary police violence and death, to call the entire police culture into question. What the hell is wrong with them--and with our health care system, and with our society--that a 95 year old dementia patient could be tasered and bean-bagged to death?