This story from the Chicago Sun-Times about a police officer being sued for handcuffing an ER nurse who refused to draw blood from a DWI suspect against hospital protocol and holding her in the back of his cruiser for 45 minutes is disturbing for a couple of reasons. Let’s run down the bullet points:

• Asking an emergency room nurse to violate hospital protocol in order to better ensure that the concentration of alcohol in the suspect’s blood will be higher disrupts the flow of events in a situation in which there are real, actual stakes. It’s essentially saying that the gathering of evidence is more important than treating people in an emergency situation.
• It’s the exact sort of “attitude adjustment” for daring to argue with a police officer that makes so many Americans distrustful of the police. It reaffirms something that a lot of us feel – that the police expect to be treated deferentially in all situations, which fuels a particular kind of resentment: What you want me to do isn’t always, in every situation, more important than what I’m already doing.
• It removes a friggin’ emergency room nurse from the emergency room for forty-five minutes for no good reason. The reason we respect the police is that they devote their lives to increasing safety and protecting us. When they instead decide to remove someone whose job is to provide medical care for people in an emergency situation from their role because they’re upset that they weren’t being treated like the boss of the room, they’re putting innocent people’s lives at risk. Not even the lives of people who are innocent because, like, they haven’t been convicted of anything yet, but they’re suspects so let’s give ‘em some leeway (As with, say, tasing people). No, yanking a nurse out of the emergency room – especially a head nurse who’s responsible for triage – means there’s one less qualified person available to stabilize grandma after the heart attack. So for those who would dismiss the suit because, boo-hoo, she had to sit in the back of a car for less than an hour with handcuffs on – you’re missing the point. The cop didn’t just violate the nurse’s rights, he threatened the health and safety of everyone in the emergency room. Because he was mad that she wouldn’t break the rules and do what he said.

Again, this sort of abuse of power is why it’s hard to justify the demonization of DWI suspects. Not because DWI isn’t incredibly dangerous and incredibly serious. But because when you insist that anyone accused of doing it is a terrible criminal, you justify things like putting an entire emergency room at risk just to teach a nurse who insists on following the rules (and on treating sick people as a more important part of her job than gathering evidence) a lesson for having the temerity to say no to a police officer who’s absolutely convinced of his own righteousness.

EDIT: More on this here and here and here and here.

(Linda Cardellini from ER image via NBC.com, because typing “nurse & police” into Flickr brings up a bunch of inappropriate Halloween costume pictures but not much else.)

Labels: abuse of power, blood draws, dwi, the attitude test

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments