I think they were afraid he was going to hurt himself and that’s what started it
All of them watched Jason just burn
I do not recommend watching this video of a man being set on fire by cops inside of a police station in Catskill, New York. I instantly wished that I hadn’t. If you do anyway what you’ll see is a twenty nine year old man named Jason Jones pacing around inside of the station clearly agitated and in some kind of mental distress. There was reportedly an incident at a nearby bar earlier that night in late October and Jones had gone to the station to express his displeasure with how the cops had handled it. At one point in the surveillance footage he removes his shirt then pours hand sanitizer all over himself as three cops stand by and watch. Apparently realizing they need to do something and knowing only how to do the one thing they ever do one of the cops fires his taser at Jones. Jones is just offscreen when it happens but you can see the sick unnatural glow of the flames explode as they engulf him and soon he’s writhing on the ground trying to put the fire out. Not with the help of the cops though. Upon seeing the fire two of the three bumble out of the room in a panic and shut the door like fucking cartoon characters while the third cowers in the corner. It’s the perfect illustration of the police mindset. There are only ever two options. Cowardice and then shortly thereafter violence.
It’s all horrible and extremely hard to watch like I said but there are two parts of it that really broke me one of which was after Jones had put the flames out himself one of the cops goes toward him and you think he’s maybe going to help but the first thing he thinks to do instead is to try to put his arm behind his back as if to handcuff him before apparently thinking better of it. The second is when a civilian bystander who seems to have watched what transpired from another room comes in and simply hugs Jones at which point he calms down. He seems so relieved by the simple gesture of human kindness even after what he’s just endured.
Jones would nonetheless die forty five days later from damage done to his lungs by the flames.
“Jason was unarmed, not threatening anyone, and not committing any criminal offense,” Kevin Luibrand the Jones family attorney said. “Rather than render aid, the officers ran out of the room, shut the door behind them. Another officer stood in a corner. And all of them watched Jason just burn.”
“I think they were afraid he was going to hurt himself, and that’s what started it,” police chief Dave Darling told the Times Union.
If that line of thinking sounds familiar it may be because of a related justification given by police in Texas who set a man on fire in 2017. In that case the police who tased a suicidal man named Gabriel Olivas setting him on fire and burning his house down were granted qualified immunity. They had no way of knowing a man doused in gasoline would catch on fire when tased the courts reasoned and so it was a blameless kill.
“Here the Fifth Circuit decided that setting a guy on fire wasn’t merely excusable in the typical way police are given broad allowances to cause harm, it was actually, they said, the correct decision,” Charles Star wrote for Hell World.
He had poured gasoline on himself and around the house and he was threatening to set himself on fire. Olivas getting set on fire is the one thing that everyone was trying to prevent. To stop him from setting himself on fire, you’d have to subdue him. It’s possible, but not certain, that the only way to subdue him was to tase him. Here’s the problem, though: if you tase him, you will set him on fire….
In a hypothetical case, it’s possible that the officers didn’t know that a man covered in gasoline would ignite if you tased him, in which case I think any court would grant the officers qualified immunity. They had to make a split decision, with lives at stake, and courts give that kind of thing a wide berth. There were two important things to consider here though. First, the officers had recently attended a training session where they were told that if you tase a guy covered in gasoline he’ll catch on fire. Second, and even more important, one of the officers on the scene literally warned his colleagues that if they tased him they would set him on fire.
Two officers then tased Olivas. The gasoline ignited, setting Olivas and then the house on fire. Olivas later died of his injuries at the hospital and the house burned to the ground.
Whether or not the Catskill cops will be held responsible for setting Jones on fire remains to be seen although in what may be setting the table for a qualified immunity defense — if the family does end up suing — the police seem likely to claim they had no way of knowing that hand sanitizer was flammable. It’s an argument just stupid enough that a lot of judges would probably fall for it.
For more Hell World coverage on the scourge of qualified immunity see here or here or here.
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Under our current system there is almost no amount of police incompetence or violence that can lead to any real consequences which makes this next story in the news today about useless cops surprising. The ones in this case actually got shit canned.
A 2017 firing of two Los Angeles police officers was upheld by a court of appeals this month. According to court documents the two officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were terminated for “willfully abdicating their duty to assist a commanding officer’s response to a robbery in progress.”
Instead of responding to the call they were busy playing Pokémon Go. Apparently there was a rare Snorlax in the area and this was understandably very exciting for them.
The Guardian explains:
According to court documents, minutes after the officers were asked to respond to the Macy’s robbery, “Officer Mitchell alerted Lozano that Snorlax ‘just popped up’ at ‘46th and Leimert’.”
The court reported: “After Mitchell apparently caught the Snorlax – exclaiming, ‘Got ‘em’ – petitioners agreed to ‘[g]o get the Togetic’ and drove off.
“When their car stopped again, the [digital in-car video system] recorded Mitchell saying, ‘Don’t run away. Don’t run away,’ while Lozano described how he ‘buried it and ultra-balled’ the Togetic before announcing, ‘Got him.’
“Mitchell advised he was ‘[s]till trying to catch it,’ adding, ‘Holy crap, man. This thing is fighting the crap out of me.’ Eventually Mitchell exclaimed, ‘Holy Crap. Finally,’ apparently in reference to capturing the Togetic.”
The video system recorded Mitchell adding: “The […] guys are going to be so jealous.”
As I was saying in here the other day…
We finally got rid of our Christmas tree this week and then I saw this poem by James Merrill being shared. It’s quite lovely and sad.
I can’t remember if I shared this little piece of last week’s The Small Bow already my memory is for shit even though I have been doing a fairly reasonable job of not-drinking so far into January. Made it 165 hours (a gentleman’s week) on the first try and now I’m back at it after a fuck up over the weekend due to uh a Patriots-losing-involved incident. Anyway this quote here sounds about right to me. This is about how it is.
Similarly I do not want to die at all I want nothing more in the world than to not be dead I just don’t particularly relish having to be alert and sharp for all of this living.
Speaking of pain and streaks I snapped my something like 800 days in a row of running streak the other week after inevitably fucking up my back again since the last time. Who cares and so on but I at long last managed to get in to see my doctor and they were not particularly interested in my whole thing as usual so I asked to go to physical therapy instead and now I am doing that and it’s been pretty good so far due to the guy actually seems to give half a shit about what’s going on with me. I went to acupuncture and a sports massage recently too to try to get the nerve pain down my leg to subside and I swear I’m not being a natural oils guy here but this is just to say that it’s so much nicer to have some gym teacher bro or hippie lady take your pain seriously than to feel like you’ve got 30 seconds to impress your doctor with your pain like you’re pitching a sitcom to NBC executives.
Both the PT guy and the doctor are being squeezed by insurance companies one way or another to be clear but man the feeling of someone listening and caring is immeasurable. A little kiss on the forehead from mommy when you’ve got a belly ache.
I was tweeting about this shit the other night and a reader emailed me to say this below and it all sounds right to me.
I just saw your tweet about your PT treating you better than your PCP and this is actually a thing that the insurance industry is aware of but won’t address and as someone who works in insurance it is maddening. Primary care doctors are assigned to insurance havers who don’t specify a doctor based on openings in that doctor’s panel, so they know that they will essentially have the same amount of patients no matter what so there is no incentive for them other than their basic human emotions to treat anybody with any decency. So you could end up with a great doctor who actually cares or some shithead who just wants to get to the golf course based on a coin flip but either way they know their panel is going to stay full. Ancillary providers (PT/Chiro/Acupuncture/etc) are either referred to by PCPs or sought out by the patient. This gives them the incentive to learn more about the patient and give them better care because they want them to keep coming back or keep getting referrals. Your PCP either knows you will keep coming back or doesn’t care if you do.
It is very difficult to maintain a practice as a bad physical therapist, but very easy to maintain one as a bad PCP, just because you are being fed patients based on insurance type and geography and you don’t have to worry about the quality of your care. Insurance companies really only become aware of this kind of doctor when they keep getting phone calls from dissatisfied patients but even then if that patient requests a new PCP a spot opens up in that doctor’s panel and somebody else gets assigned to them. This is why so many people rely on their ancillary providers to give them the care they actually need.
I’m not saying all PCPs are bad but I’d argue the percentage that will see you for five minutes and just tell you to lose some weight or stop drinking so much without actually bothering to really check on your whole deal is pretty high. A Physical Therapist needs to learn more about you not only because of the job they’re trying to do, but because of the job they need to keep. There is more skin in the game for them.
In short PT guys don’t have enough job security to tell you to go fuck yourself.
Somewhat relatedly I was reminded of this fairly fucking devastating interview while thinking about pain and suffering the other day.
And as it pertains to what I was just saying this section below in particular. (Obviously dying of Covid or cancer or whatever is infinitely worse than suffering with chronic injuries but the same idea applies I guess.)
As the palliative care nurse explained to me:
One of the interesting things that is born out in data, and one of the reasons palliative care is getting more accepted now, is that a lot of people live longer when they have palliative care on board. It’s a little hard to wrap your head around that if we’re doing less medical interventions people do better. But it is pretty consistent across a lot of serious illnesses that just having somebody to talk to, having someone ask how’s your pain, are you constipated, are you eating... Not only do people feel better and report a better quality of life, but there’s actually improved survival. So there’s something kind of borderline magical or mystical about not being so focused on medicine that people seem to do better.
Not much else to feel too great about in that one though.
What do people tend to say at the end of life? When they know they’re about to die? Are there any common themes?
It’s really unpredictable how somebody is going to react to the news. Largely people immediately have regrets. I hate to say that. It’s human nature to not expect yourself to die. As the protagonist of reality you don’t expect that you’re ever going to die or not be around. I think a lot of people, it’s trite, but they go through those stages of grief. There's gotta be something else you can do, or what did I do wrong or what can I change. There has to be something. I think grief and regret comes early on in the process of digesting the news.
What else… What else… Oh there’s this: Happy twentieth birthday today to our torturous prison on Guantanamo Bay!
Spencer Ackerman has a good one this week on this most quintessentially American of nightmares:
But it would be tendentious to deny that Guantanamo does indeed exist also on the level of symbolism. The unfortunate truth is that it is an appropriate symbol. It symbolizes an America that not only lacks moral authority but deserves none. A country with moral authority would never have constructed Guantanamo. It would not have armies of lawyers to defend each of its operations, in design as in sustainment, lawyers who agree to litigate keeping men in cages beyond the reach of the law instead of resigning from the task in disgust. A country with moral authority would not have legal precedent for indefinite detention to draw upon for Guantanamo. It would not have mass movements that fantasize about locking their political opponents inside Guantanamo. It would not have stolen Guantanamo Bay from Cuba in the first place.
Ok that’s all for today. I’ll leave you with this. I’m sure it’s fine.
