California rescue workers watch man drown for an hour because they lacked water rescue certification
Kitty Genovese alert: Rescue workers in Alameda, California allowed a suicidal man to drown while watching for more than an hour from shore because they didn’t have the necessary water rescue certifications:
Rescue workers in Alameda, California were forced to watch as a man drowned after they realized they could not save him because they did not possess the proper certifications for water rescue required to legally do so.
Had the workers attempted a rescue without the legal certifications, they could have faced lawsuits leading to massive fines and career ending rulings.
The victim was a suicidal man who waded into the waters to take his own life. Onlookers, including police, firemen and other rescue workers were forced to watch from the water’s edge hopelessly.
In fact, because of certifications and laws, rescue workers could not even legally enter the water to retrieve the body after the man had died. The police asked an onlooker to do it for them.
After the drowning and outrage from the local community, the policy was changed Tuesday night:
At a hearing Tuesday evening, the policy that prevented trained people from intervening and rescuing people in distress was changed.
One man told the board during the meeting, “It just strikes me as unbelievably callous that nobody there with any sort of training couldn’t strip off their gear, go in the water, and help this person.”
Zack’s body was recovered by an off-duty nurse who swam out 50 yards to get him.
Ted Kennedy was unavailable for comment.
A sad, tragic example of how an over-regulated, over-legislated, too-restrictive government keeps people from doing the right thing.
But Wait, it gets worse!
California Courts have also struck down the Good Samaritan Law making civilians who attempt to make rescues legally liable as well.
This is why you could not pay me to live in Kali. And given a choice, I do not buy products/services from Kali (okay, movies are a bit of an exception). Good luck with the prisoner release, California.
I’m pretty sure this story is wrong and that it was actually the U.S. Constitution they were watching.
There are no laws only rules and outside of that is morality on a revolving door. Illegal immigrants can’t be simply grabbed by the scruff of the neck and frog-marched to Mexico, no.
They have to go through a layer of stifling bureaucracy so Byzantine the actual effete Byzantines look like a steroidal Rambo holding Gatling guns in each arm.
Common sense in the U.S. died in 1992, the day a woman sued cuz her legs got burnt with hot coffee that was some guy’s fault she’d never met. Since then it’s all been pretty much what the Irish call shite.
Yes, it’s crazy out there. Remember there was that guy in California many years back who decided that he wanted to protest something by sitting on the railroad tracks. The train came on, but could not see the man in time to stop. The idiot decided to wait too long to jump off the tracks before being hit. He lost both legs.
So far in he story, I say that if the idiot wants to protest something so badly, then fine, as long as he’s prepared to live with the consequences.
However, the a**hole had the chutzpah to sue the state and, unbelievably, won, thus screwing the taxpayers of some huge sum of money. One more small nail in CA’s coffin.
These people are very-well trained in their jobs. They know precisely what they are NOT allowed to do. They get paid by the government, and the government tells them when to eat and when to s***.
Hmm, they can be sued for doing something to save someone. Can they be sued for not doing something to save someone? After all, isn’t saving someone their actual, you know… job?!?
Better yet, just shoot them, as a lesson to the others, and we will no longer have such silliness. Seriously. Maybe lynch a few, and that will be the big stop sign they need.
People will say this is extreme. Perhaps they will block my post. I’m simply making the point that, until you draw the line, they will keep pushing until they find the line. Until violence is done to the vile idiots undermining us, they will never stop. You think this is extreme? Folks, I am predicting the future. Sooner or later, this is where it will eventually lead.
They will not stop, until you say stop and make them truly understand you mean it. For them to know you mean it, you have to know yourself that you mean it. Do you mean it enough that you are willing to hang them from the town square, if they do not stop? Do you? Will you ever resort to violence to defend yourself and your society? Or can these tyrants just keep pushing and finding that there are just no consequences they cannot deal with… that you will just never, ever take up arms?
You do not wish to kill. I get it. However, they see this decency as weakness, and in a way, they are right.
“When in the course of human events….”
Marc,
I believe the government employees are protected by official immunity while acting within the scope of their jobs (to include stupid regulations such as this). In addition, our courts have repeatedly ruled that our Government suffers no legal penalty for failing to provide aid or police protection in a timely manner.
Call 911 and die, or take care of you and yours on your own.
I suggest the latter option.
Yup, you’re spot on. The lunatics running the asylum will keep it up, looking to push people of common sense and common decency further away from any semblance of rational life. Unfortunately, humans usually kick the can down the road until they’re backed against the wall, so expect this madness to continue, and, in fact, increase before a tipping point is reached. It’s even got a dark spiritual element to it, altogether overlooked. Mark these words: darkness is ahead and we will end up fighting this with real violence.
Guess what I would have done with those so called rescue workers if I had been the father of that boy?
Those rescue workers (How do they dare to call themselves that?)have no morals and are absolute scumbags.
A normal person would have saved the boy no matter what!!
Andy;
Unless your state has a Good Samaritan Law (wherein untrained volunteers trying to help someone can’t be sued if they screw up), don’t go blaming the rescue workers. The problem is with the American cultural practice of suing everybody. The inevitable, and understandable, reaction to the fear of sued (and losing your career or assets) is what is described above.
We Americans need a sea change in our personal values in regards to our lawsuit culture.
Suing everyone is not a part of the US culture. It’s part of the corruption of the US, brought about by a glut of lawyers and the imported delusion that laws make reality.
But it is morons like you who hire the lawyers to do the job that you are too stupid to do.
Marc: Check Deshaney v Winnebago
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0489_0189_ZS.html
The Supreme Court has already ruled that any agency, be it police, fire, or child protection services, have no duty to protect. Lower court finding for plaintiff rejected.
Same with Castle Rock v Gonzales.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-278.ZS.html
Even if a woman has a restraining order, it doesn’t give her a special relationship with police. Lower court finding for plaintiff rejected.
Tell people this the next time they tell you to give up your guns, because a ‘civil society’ relies on police.
They were not forced to watch a suicide in progress. There was nothing stopping them. One or all of them could have dove in and drowned along with the suicidal individual who, in point of fact, wanted to be left alone to drown. What makes everyone think the suicidal individual would have cooperated with his rescuers, calmly doing the doggy paddle while he was saved for another suicide attempt? If the boy want’s to check out, let em check out. Had they saved him without drowning themselves, highly unlikely, I find it improbable that their employers or the DA would have filed criminal charges for attempting to save a drowning person without a license; peace officers are required to provide first aid and CPR, but they’re not required to commit premeditated suicide in the performance of their jobs.
if i were trying to kill myself the last thing i’d try to do is drown
i’m sure even suicidal people have the survival instinct inside them and the process of drowning would be sure to activate it
Make sure you blame the right idiots here. It isn’t the fire and police on scene. It is their management who imposed unworkable rules that they then didn’t fund.
It happened to me when I was with the Feds. They got a bunch of compliance types who were going to bring things in line with private sector and international practice. Sounds great, right? Well, it costs money, some meaning our gear or personnel were never going to to comply. They set hard rules with lots of shalls and wills and musts. With black and white rules, there was no room to argue judgement for taking a risk. But the bosses were covered, they got to claim compliance but with a wink. Asked how we would operate, the response was use your judgement. Everyone knew that meant when it went bad, they would claim you violated policy. Fired or prosecuted with no way to argue professional judgement for a hard violation was the only possible outcome. I even pushed hard to follow the rules and got tossed out for it. See, the rules are hard to follow, cost money and lead to down time since it was only paper compliance anyway.
We are being led by a bunch of academics with not understanding of the real world as they can’t get their heads out of their brilliant, yet unworkable, ideas of how things should work. God save us from the early Baby Boomers, who avoided adulthood as they rose in government.
The private sector has had to put of with this BS for decades. It is now pervading government services but instead of going out of business, people are going to die.
I recently took an extensive first aid course for remote wilderness settigns, or for massive disasters where “official” aid may be delayed for hours or days.
At one point, the instructors went over epi-pens. One of the other students asked “should we carry epipens with us, just in case someone has an allergy they don’t know about?”
The instructor said, in a very dilerbate voice “You are not authorized by your level of training to dispense perscription medication. I am not authorized by my level of training to do tha. All we are authorized to do is help someone administer their own epipen.”
He paused. Then he took an epi-pen out of his pocket. “This is the epi-pen I carry for cases like that. I will not let someone die if I can save them.”
The other instructors pulled out their epipens. One was a nurse, another an EMT. Both of them mentioned that they could lose their license and their careers if they used their pens on someone else, but both also said they would rather take that chance than let someone die when they might be able to save them.
But, ah, the class wasn’t in California.
“All we are authorized to do is help someone administer their own epipen.”
No problem. Hey buddy, you dropped your epi-pen. Let me help you use it.
Is this any surprise? Americans are too litigious, too quick to sue. So now we have the result.
Unless you create a squatter’s shanty town and demand sewage and electricity and Jesse Jackson and Lady Gaga show up to protest for their rights cuz they can’t speak English, have no identification and use GoogleEarth to find their buttocks.
It’ll be tomorrow’s most commonly bitched about headline.
Is this you Boy James?
Cuz…? Cuz!
These are your careerist public-sector union personnel in action– do you feel safe? Their posteriors come first, the heck with anybody else.
Due to budget cuts the fire department was forced to discontinue water training and maintenence of recue gear.
Err, Jim, I think you meant to say that, due to budget cuts, the fire department chose to discontinue water training and maintenence of recue gear.
Budgets are about priorities. This department decided that water rescue was not a priority, so they chose to cut it instead of something else.
Sounds like a union problem to me: making productive people less productive, making responsible people less responsible.
This is sad
this is the perfect example of the dementia california wallows in
but it is also an example of how fast the dunderheads that vote for these idiotic buffoons to legislate incompetence “change sides” when the reality of their decisions affects them personally
Every single one of those first “responders” should be tried for depraved indifference to human life. And then executed. Marc Malone has the right of it. They won’t stop until we stop them. It is the job of the good guys to kill the bad guys. Sometimes it’s easy to identify the bad guys like a screaming jihadi. Other times it’s more difficult to see the insidious evil of the fully indoctrinated school teacher who is working to indoctrinate our kids or the first responders who don’t.
“They” like to talk about direct action and taking it to the streets. But, it’s our side that has the rifles and the training to use them. So, I think it’ll work out all right.
Lock and load.
It’s a sign. Maybe one of the worst. What’s becoming of us?
I read that some were concerned that this man might have been armed??? Up to his neck in water???
Or that it’s because “there wasn’t enough money…”???
Back in the 60′s or early70′s — a young woman was being murdered while her neighbors watched and did nothing — not even call the police. The nation was outraged. Here we have the “police” doing the same — worse.
That we’ve come to a point where human decency is trumped by having to have every basic impulse legislated … and we don’t know what to do or who we are — unless some “authority” tells us, permits us, instructs us …
The third incident this brought to mind — in our changing society — a young man was arrested because he was taking photos of a train station in Baltimore. This, alas, is no one’s fault … it’s a symptom of the fact that our good people … our decent society … has been allowed to be massively infiltrated by those who would do us great harm … neutralizing the power we’ve always had … which our freedoms depend upon … that we are basically a good and decent people.
What is becoming of us?
While all of the above is or has been true in California over the decades, for several recent years (after an initial outcry) there was an appellate court decision on its books, written by a distinguished jurist, which held that law enforcement has the authority, but not the duty, to respond to a 9-1-1 call. Is has since been quietly de-published…
you people are making shite up ultra right wing bullshite. I’m really glad you live in texas. please stay there
The highest courts in the nation have ruled multiple times that police have no duty to protect any individual. Whether the protect anyone is entirely discretionary.
It may be against department policy not to protect someone, and an officer could be fired, but they commit no crime for not protecting someone unless it is someone in their custody.
Ready Warren vs DC for an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
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