General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: In case you missed it, Stephen King summed up the Freddie Gray BS in one Tweet [View all]tblue37
(65,683 posts)when the cop knelt on his neck, which has become standard operating procedure for cops these days--and often the cops are overweight, so they will do even more damage.
The video of his arrest shows his legs dragging uselessly.
Then he was tossed into the van and almost certainly given a "rough ride," which would have disastrously (read "lethally" exacerbated the damage to his neck, even if the damage wasn't already bad enough to be eventually fatal anyway.
Since kneeling on the upper back and neck are now standard procedures, I doubt that anyone is going to actually point to that as the moment when the real damage was done. A rough ride is dangerous as hell, but if one already has seriously damaged vertebrae in the neck, then such a ride is likely to be fatal.
At the very least they had a responsibility to strap him in, even if he hadn't already sustained damage to his neck.
Since there were so many cops involved, it is hard to pin the responsibility on any one of them, but they all should be sanctioned for not strapping him in, because that is what they are required to do, and once they have someone in custody, they are responsible for keeping him safe.
King is right. This is BS.