I work in psychiatric services where we regularly have erratic/violent/scared individuals - often who can't be reasoned with and it's so rare that we would have to restrain. By virtue of being arrested a person is in a heightened state of arousal - someone in cuffs who kicks out a little after being thrown in a chair violently is not a threat and the risk of throwing the the floor are significant - it's not that hard to kill someone by sitting on their chest.

I know several bar bouncers (not trained police officers) who have told me that any 5 trained men can restrain any one man, no matter what.

They should have just cuffed him and thrown him into a squad car.

End of story.

It's like a restraining bolt, for cats.

Looks fairly restrained and carefully performed, actually.

The damage was secondary to getting the obstructions moved out of the way. No punitive damage, in that the excavator could have squashed them flat and piled them up if the operator had wanted to.

Secretly? If I had the Money, I'd do that all the time and live on TV. If I wasn't able to restrain myself so well, I'd leave messages with my key on every car parked like that. I had to enter my car through the passenger door one time too much.

Wow surprisingly restrained and pro for funny or die.
IS funny or die ...getting older?

Open or closed hand, there is no excuse for that...

1. Proportionate and appropriate use of force. She is barely a threat out of cuffs. In cuffs, she's effectively helpless. Restrain her and add attempted assault to her charges.

2. Didn't report the incident, a sure sign that someone knows what they did was wrong... If everything was kosher and he was reacting appropriately, he would have reported the incident, right?

It was definitely a punch and kick to the ribs of an inebriated woman who was restrained in handcuffs. She did attempt to kick him, but the return force used was wildly inappropriate. This officer also beat up an older man half his size on a traffic stop, causing multiple lacerations to his scalp. If you watch the related cnn video, you can see he is basically a juiced up thug who gets his jollies on beating people and taking buddy photos with them.

It's just becoming apparent, to me at least, that for every good officer we have it seems like we have 9 bad ones. A horrible ratio, to be sure.

Does american police training consist of 3 months of reading judge dredd comics? It's been a while since i've seen police academy, so i've forgotten what their training is really like.

You need to stop people in your custody from trying to hurt you or others, but you have a duty of care to the person you have restrained whether you like that person or not. This isn't judge dredd, and the first person to apprehend someone doesn't get to decide who deserves what punishment.

And not one *uck was given about the horse.. it could have just as easily run off and they'd have a run-away horse case on their hands. Not one deputy even attempted to restrain the horse or move it away from the fight.

Oh.. and as im typing this near the end they say one deputy was KICKED by the horse... they all should have been.

No attempt to secure the stolen property in a stolen property crime.. just straight to the beating.

Turning the camera off made it seem like they knew the amount of force being used was excessive. With that said, if you read the news story from the link posted above, it did say the suspect had a loaded gun on his person. Considering that this vehicle matched the description of the one they were looking for AND this person resisted getting out of the vehicle (at least it seemed that way) AND the person had a gun, it's easy to see why the cops were being aggressive. I'm not saying it's right to kick an obviously restrained suspect in the head and body or turn off a camera that is there for the officers' protection as much as the public's. That's behavior is definitely questionable.

"teaches right behavior"....
Do you mean like owning slaves, murdering infidels and heretics, raping women, crusading, inquisitioning, conquesting, etc.... Yeah, great book of morality, and wonderful moral behavior exhibited by it's believers...not.

It's only because people fail to follow the religious ideas wholly that religion is tolerated at all. If people acted like the fanatical Muslims, taking every word as law and acting on it, Christianity would have been outlawed in the US at the inception of the country (indeed, many of the founding fathers seemed to want this, at least in part). The 3 major western religions all require 'holy war' to spread the belief system if read honestly.

What he said is that only psychotics need religion to restrain them from immorality. If you aren't psychotic, religion harms you more than helps you.

Any catholic hospital would qualify as one opened by psychotics, since one of their 10 important rules is "no statues of anything", yet they do nothing but worship statues and icons. They institutionally ignore any 'rule' that's inconvenient, and insist on absolute adherence to any that further their current goals, which may change 180 deg tomorrow. Sure sounds psychotic to me.

Awful lot of hospitals named after saints, as well as a large number of schools. Religion teaches empathy for other people, it teaches right behavior, it teaches the ten commandments, it teaches the golden rule.

Just because people fail to follow those ideas wholly you condemn everyone who believes in any of it.

To replace it you bring in some philosophical sophistry that has nothing to back it up unless it is to say that there is a spark of Godliness behind it all.

It is good that we can agree that people have an innate sense toward empathy but it's an empty box.

All you have to say is that psychotics are restrained by religion, ipso facto, anyone who believes in God is a psychotic.

I don't know too many psychotics who open hospitals, care for the sick/infirm/dying, educate the masses.

I'd wager the amount of harm that comes from religion outweighs the amount of harm prevented in such rare people who are only restrained by religion. Almost everybody knows the difference between right and wrong and much prefers to do right for its own sake.

This is a very interesting question that I've thought quite a lot about during my life (to myself, not in any sort of professional capacity).

The conclusions that I have come to (so far) are:
I think that, yes, religion in general terms IS a significant (but it is a stretch to say the ONLY) restraint on a pretty large number of people. Which is a prospect that I personally have a negative and pessimistic reaction to, similar to what it sounds like you do.

However, I think that there are lots of mitigating circumstances. First, many different religions currently provide that restraint to people. And in the past, many many more religions provided it to even more people. Many of those different religions have been very very different. Some have been near polar opposites. That proves that if your goal is restraining people from being utterly evil, and someone suggests that religion has made or is making a noble effort towards that (like your uncle), the positive aspects they are cheering for are not unique to any single religion, or dogma, or whatever.

If one accepts that many many diverse and completely different religions can potentially have the positive effects that we're looking for, then the actual source of those effects can not be something specific to any one religion. Instead, it has to be something that is held in common by all such religions.

Religions are so diverse and different, it might be hard to imagine something that they have in common. No specific god is held in common, even though all the Abrahamic religions might arguably share that aspect. Not even the simple idea of a god or gods or creator is far from universal; Buddhists revere no god.

Yet I believe that there is one easily overlooked thing that all religions DO have in common. Humanity. They all come from flawed but usually well-meaning people.

However, atheists hold that humanity in common with religions as well. And that makes me believe that if we understand humanity better, either through psychology, or empathy, or whatever, we can achieve the positive effects of religions without the religions themselves. Certainly without the stone-age dogmatic nonsense -- which tends to have arguably as many if not more BAD effects as good. This actually gives me great hope for humanity; rather the opposite to the conclusion that I came to originally when pondering the question.

There may always be people who have no empathy, and for whom nothing would serve to restrain them from what humanity at large would easily identify as great evil. No religion will handle such individuals any better than no religion ... so I guess I don't lose any sleep over that.