Other than that, I want to put a word in for the police. Apparently, she was on her way to a center, fr treatment of alcohosilsm and had gone ballistic, puching, kicking and screaming, because whe was late. Some people are not easy to deal with, and being left to sit by herself does not,,on the face of it, seem like cruel and unusual punishement.
If every police man/woman was required to be highly trained in mental conditions, we would not be able to afford hiring any policemen at all.

Sometimes bizarre events occur, with tragic results, without having a sinister cause.

Her family’s lawyers will think otherwise, I’m sure,
and that’s the other half of the tragedy.

The tragedy here is the loss of life, and I suspect that Jill Dybka is correct above when she says that Police do not know how to deal with someone who is mentally ill or who is temporarily mentally ill due to the stress of being arrested.

It doesn’t help any of us, or our desire to have a society we can be proud of to assume that she was claiming some sort of privileged status and the rest of us would have cheered her tasering. We sure do not cheer her death.

I assume the police are shocked and I wish we would all remember that this is it: this thing is our life and when it is gone, it is sad to so many people.

She was only a woman from a well-connected family, but one more is gone, and I weep for her and the ones who should have saved her life.

It would be. I bet that the autopsy will disagree with the third-hand speculation from the spokesperson. Even money on a blood-vessel blowout of some kind.

NAMI is working with police departments to train them better — Crisis Intervention Team Training Programs.

If she did manage to strangle herself with her own handcuffs, that’d be amazing. I’m curious how. If she didn’t…well…that story is easy.

I think Superdestroyer calls this right. No one would be giving a rat’s ass about this story if she was not an attractive, white woman from the upper classes.

Yes, more clearly needs to be learned about this incident, as her death is pretty bizarre.

But to blame this on the national security state and the GOP is a stretch. Seriously!

I travel a lot, and in the congestion and tension of airports, one of the annoying features are those passengers with a sense of “entitlement” – invariably, upper class and white.

Last Xmas I witnessed a near-lynching of a snooty upper class couple who felt their demands entitled them to delay a plane’s takeoff for hours. Security was called. I swear…people would have clapped and cheered if the couple were tased multiple times by security.

Thus, while more needs to be reported clearly, I believe the race, class and image subtexts define this story. Is this any different than America’s bizarre obsession with that young girl who was murdered in Aruba?