[Corganist]

Originally posted by DeviousJ

'If it happened, it must have been necessary.' And from the bit I quoted last time, 'it's acceptable if it's necessary'. Obviously that contracts to 'it's acceptable if it happened' which is a pretty worrying attitude, and that's the only reason I called you up on it. If you were talking about two different things then I wouldn't mind, but you were responding to questions of 'was this amount of force extreme' in both cases

Except I wasn't. The decision to use the dog on her and the decision for the 3 guys to tackle her are seperate and independent. Your logic makes out like I'm saying "It was necessary for the cops to interact with this woman (via the dog ot otherwise), and therefore its acceptable that three cops could tackle her." That's not what I'm saying at all.

My premise is as follows:

1) Police dogs don't randomly attack. They go after who they're told. So I believe that for some reason the officers sent the dog after the girl. I find it unlikely that the police dog did anything other than what its handler wanted it to. I think common sense at least gives a presumption that the officer had good reason to use the dog, and wasn't just picking out random females to sic the dog on.

and

2) After it became necessary to use the dog, there were seperate reasons (namely, the girls apparent continued refusal to submit to the dog/cops) that indicated that it might have been necessary for the officers to restrain her physically. In which case, if 3 cops was what was needed to do it safely, then thats how many it should have taken (and no more). That's what I was talking about when I said "its acceptable if it was necessary." It was supposed to be a narrow point about the use of physical force, not about the encounter overall.

Yeah but you said, in that quote just above, that the girl was stupid for 'resisting arrest' by trying to fight the dog off and that this apparently justified their actions since only guilty people resist arrest

Resisting arrest is a crime no matter if you've done anything or not. If the cops show up at my door with a warrant for murder and I fight them when they try to arrest me, I'm still on the hook for resisting arrest even if I didn't kill anybody. In our situation here, the girl apparently did not submit to authority. Whether she was doing anything wrong or not, she should have done exactly what she was told.

as though suddenly being attacked by a dog is automatically going to make you think 'man I should just lay back and wait for this to stop'. If she had done something to warrant that amount of force then that's one thing, but you can't infer it from her struggling with an attacking dog

Again, I highly doubt that the "attacking" dog would have even been in the picture unless there was good reason. I'd be almost certainly willing to bet that he dog was sent for her after refusal to follow police instructions. Once it had her, she should have known to not continue to try to escape.