Don’t go to jail and then you can avoid jailhouse medical care

@4 you seriously think there's no difference between the set of presumptions brought by a jailhouse worker and a hospital triager?

Sure it's possible that an ER could have given him the junkie brushoff too. But if you don't think the probabilities are different, you need to get out more.

The Trolls on here make me hate people even more than I do already.

Jesus! What did they have to LOSE by taking him to the damn hospital in the first place. Even if the guy had escaped-which they knew he was in no condition to do-even if he had, SO FREAKING WHAT? He was a drug user, not Ted Bundy. He should never have been in jail in the first place. At most, he should have been taken to a drug treatment center-but no, the Right cut all the funds for drug treatment centers decades ago in the name of "law and order".

Almost the exact same article in Crosscut, published March 7th.

https://crosscut.com/2019/03/he-died-king-county-inmate-pled-help-he-didnt-get-it

@10

my god, you can fuck right off.

As a society we've made a decision that addiction and poverty are best dealt with through criminalization rather than healthcare. This is an entirely predictable outcome of placing the sick and vulnerable in the care of prosecutors, police and screws who have dedicated their careers to dehumanizing and treating as vermin the members of our society unfortunate enough to pass through this system.
As someone who has spent my life in healthcare, I can tell you mistakes like this do occacially happen within healthcare, but when they do we feel terrible about it on more than just a bad PR level, implement policies to prevent the tragedy from reoccurring and pay the price of facing the family of those affected.
Within our jail and prison system this type of tragedy is a chronic problem this is never addressed because we consider anyone arrested and not worthy of basic human dignity and we elect public officials that reflect that sadistic view of human life.
Do you really think the Dow Constantine's, Mitzi Johanknecht or Dan Satterberg's in charge of our their mass incarceration system who see those arrested as sub-human vermin lose any sleep over preventable tragedies like this? Doctor's and nurses often lose licenses and face face a lifetime of terrible guilt over preventible mistakes this this. Do you think our elected officials who make a living criminalizing poverty and addiction see this tragedy as anything other than a public relations problem to be managed?
Laws don't lock people in cages, other men do. Until we stop giving the least evolved members of our society power to terrorize and lock up the most vulnerable among up, terrible tragedies like this will be ignored and treated as little more the public relations problem rather than the entirely preventable tragedy that it is. This man is dead because he was locked in a cage for committing a crime that created no victim other than himself. As long as society allows the least empathetic among us to manage situations like this, the body count of harmless, but vulnerable members of society will only rise.

@13: Thank you

@13: Yes, Thank you. We need reminders that humane and more effective approaches than the status quo still exist.