That’s barely more than a slap on the wrist. The system is rotten.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Dude. They have to maybe do community service. How can you say that!?
Thoughts and prayers for the officers family...
A cop is actually going to have to help people. That’s torture right there. This is clearly unconstitutional.
Cruel and unusual punishment.
Exactly.
He'll never do it. And a fundraiser will be in his name.
She. It was a female cop.
Same difference. The cop will never do all the community service. They'll get paid for the entire time. And any fines will be paid by tax payers. There's no justice here.
I hate that phrase "hit by a train". It's usually because it's fodder for NIMBYs. It implies the train did something, like it jumped the tracks or something, whereas the train was just traveling the path it always does. A woman drowns, she's not "asphyxiated by the river", a man burns himself on a stove, he's not "Burnt by the stove." In the train's case the conscious action was the "putting something in front of it". Yet somehow it's the train's fault? Suicide? It's the train's fault. Drunk idiot? It's the train's fault.
I mention this because this is yet another case in which transit is getting blamed for a human action, an action that human knew could leave to the death of someone else, but that the human did anyway. It detracts from the fact the blame is with the officer.
Anyway, I know you all don't care, but it's another way in which language serves an establishment, in this case two - the car centric, anti-transit establishment that it usually does, and the officer who all but murdered a suspect. It's another phrase like "Officer involved shooting", except maybe even that phrase doesn't place blame on an inanimate object.
You know, I agree with your point after reading it but sure don't read statements about trains hitting things that way.
A train is a huge and heavy thing that takes forever to slow down, so putting someone in front of a train or being hit by a train is read as the person who created the situation causing the harm, not the train. Almost like a force of nature, trains don't hit things by choice so it is the fault of whoever put the thing in front of it that always take the blame.
Obviously other people must read it the way you pointed out. Just noting that some people see it in a way that cannot possibly blame the train due to the properties of trains.
Read the above comment again, towards the end of the first paragraph..
"Yet somehow it's the train's fault?"
I do believe that is implied sarcasm, they're well aware it's not the train's fault.
You know on a conscious level that the train couldn't have done anything. But on a subconscious level the author is telling you the train, not the "person that caused something to be in the way of the train" was the cause of the accident. Had there been no pesky train just existing, there'd have been no accident regardless of how avoidable the accident was.
That's my problem with the language. Just as you know an officer-involved-shooting actually involved the officer shooting someone, but the language is so weak that on some level your subconscious assumes it can't be a big deal if that kind of vague, woolly, wording is appropriate.
And as I mentioned, it appears to be an intentional word choice. People don't talk about rivers (non-sentient object) asphyxiating people, they talk about people drowning in rivers. A threshing machine (non-sentient) doesn't thresh a minion (!), the minion falls into a threshing machine. But a train (non-sentient) hits people, rather than vice-versa. To be fair you occasionally see this language with cars, but cars are driven by people, it's usually the case the car driver is actually the decision maker that caused a death.
Does that make sense?
"Flooding kill X people" is a regular headline though, as the default is to be based on the person/thing that is acting. So flooding kills people, but people who fall into the river while boating put themselves into the situation and therefore drowned.
Things like trains that are controlled by people fall into the thing you are talking about, where there is a possibility that either person's actions could have led to the outcome. In that case they tend to default the action based on avoiding blame in headlines. An "officer involved shooting" tries to avoid blaming either person, but as you note tends to be read as excusing the officer by default which is more of a blame the victim thing. It also avoids the possibility that the officer was present but never shot their weapon as a CYA default.
For trains though, it is treated like someone who stepped in front if a car in a way that couldn't be avoided. They were struck by the car even though the impact was not caused by the car or the driver. That is because the car is the larger object that impacted a smaller object.
So I am agreeing with you that the language can imply something, but explaining that it is not always malicious intent that results in the wording we see every day. In fact, I would prefer if shootings involving police were worded as "police shot X" instead of officer involved shooting, and that vehicles/people were described as not getting out of the way of trains. But that just isn't how attempts at neutral language work.
An officer-adjacent multisystem traffic event and subsequent cessation of suspect vitality.
Soft, passive language where the events are technically communicated but the impact of them is lessened to the point of outright denial and absolutely no one is in any way responsible for their actions.
I see your point. It's the same sort of thing for various violence around the world. Headlines like "3 die in West Bank Violence" should actually be "Israeli Soldiers Kill 3 Palestinians."
I think this also speaks to an issue around suicide. I used to work in behavioral healthcare and “suicide” is a similar issue. There’s a lot of debate around “commit suicide,” since it sort of blames the person and not the illness.
It’s hard to frame these conversations around cause of death in certain situations.
This misuse of language has irritated me for years in both media and personal life. "It" didn't do a damn thing!
hit by train
hit by car
hit by a pitch
hit by stray bullet
struck by new knowledge
This is just the way our natural grammatical structure works.
This is just the way our natural grammatical structure works.
We're not having a discussion about grammar, we're having a discussion about how phrases can be misleading even if technically correct, and how those phrases can end up serving inhuman agendas.
While "Hit by car" the driver is usually at fault. Note news articles will generally go out of their way to avoid "hit by car" on the rare occasion someone jumps in front of one.
Hit by a pitch? Not sure what this means.
Hit by stray bullet is modified to describe an unusual set of circumstances so inappropriate here. That's the equivalent of "Man hit by derailed train". We're not talking about that kind of situation. The nearest equivalent of "Man hit by train" where the direct cause of death is an aimed bullet is "Man shot", or "Man shot by ", it's never "Man hit by bullet"
Struck by new knowledge doesn't really apply here too.
The underlying message of "Hit by train" is that transit was at fault (the train "hit"). Rather than the drunk driver. Rather than the reckless idiot who decided to go around the barrier. Rather than the suicidal cyclist who stepped in front of it. Rather than, in this case, the cop that parked on the tracks and locked a prisoner inside the car.
Words are about communication. And all phrases have subtexts and good writing recognizes those subtexts and avoids misleading ones and uses accurate ones that convey as much information as possible.
"Train hits " is an intentional choice by journalists to focus the blame on transit rather than the person whose actions lead to death. Whether it's technically correct ignores the fact that there are better phrases that could be used that also focus the blame on the person who caused the situation. "Colorado officer who trapped prisoner in path of train sentenced to " doesn't have the misleading nuances that the headline does. It's more accurate and more informative as a result.
We’re not having a discussion about grammar, we’re having a discussion about how phrases can be misleading even if technically correct, and how those phrases can end up serving inhuman agendas.
We're having a discussion about the way a person wrote a headline, and I explained that, rather than believe an elaborate conspiracy theory, you could acknowledge that this is just the way English grammatical structures work.
The alternative to "hit by a train" is going to be multiple sentences long to convey the same information. Your conspiracy theory about it being a deflection falls apart because the entire article is about how the officer is legally and ethically at fault, accepts that, and that the family understands that.
"Trapped prisoner in path of train" oddly enough, is slanted language with misleading nuances.
The wording is deliberate. "Hero cop was not assaulted by dangerous detainee"
I mean, the correct phrase here is "murdered by a cop" but you can see where the people that pay cops to murder us might object to that phrasing. They like soft language where of course everyone wishes that things had gone differently but it's also no one's fault and nothing is going to change.
Bravo. Well said!
Nurses who accidentally poison patients go to jail, but cops get nothing but community service?
Looks like you just dropped this vial of cocaine while asking this question. Do you want to step into this little room while we ask you more questions over and over again?
The suspect was resisting arrest. Several officers who arrived on the scene after the shooting testified that they saw the suspect reach for the officer's service weapon. Bodycam footage will be accidentally deleted shortly. Anyone who knows of security cameras in the area is encouraged to bring that footage and all backups to the local police department to aid in the investigation. Bring your dog, too. This is gonna be fun.
A light punishment would be termination and revoking their drivers license for not being able to see train tracks, or a train. Or able to hear.
A light punishment would be 10 years in prison for abusing their authority to put someone in harms way.
That's getting off pretty easy for a murder, I agree.
I assume a lawsuit will follow that will be severely punishing to the department and the officer ( hopefully the final figure has many zeros at the end)
You mean the taxpayers, right? Police departments generally don't pay out in lawsuits, that burden is shouldered largely by taxpayers.
Fuck lawsuits
Seems light
Is light.
You can tell by...the way that it is.
Murder a person by train... Believe it or not, straight to maybe doing community service.
Nothing but photons
So she out the suspect in the back of a different cop's car and then a train came? Did I read that correctly?
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Why was a cop so far away from the car that no one was able to move it?
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Who fucking parks on top of railroad tracks ever? I have a local spur that serves a lumber yard. I've literally never seen a railcar on the tracks and I would never think about parking anywhere near this tracks even though they cross the road into the yard where there is primarily street parking.
She claimed that she couldn't see the tracks and didn't know that they were there, despite walking across the rails something like 7-8 times in the dash video.
https://youtu.be/t6HRRSismpo?si=MLR2kQWyuCjMRn5p
Give it a look for yourself. I watch this channel a lot, and watched this one not knowing what would happen, but the whole time I was like screaming THE CAR IS ON THE TRACKS WTF. MOVE YOUR CAR!
The part where the train actually hits the car is not shown in this vid FYI, but it was extreme negligence on behalf of the officers on scene.
Absolutely disgusting "consequence"
Probation is how the justice system says "Do it again and someone might actually give a fuck".
Holy shit…….
As always. Please read the article. The headline was written to generate the responses I have read so far. And of coourse the actual article explains the situation. The sentence seems a bit light to me given what I read, but it doesn't say if the officer lost thier job or any other consequences that may have been additional factors. What it does say is the victim did not want the officer to go to jail. Thats pretty striking frankly. Tells me there is probably more going on than is written.
Rios’ attorney also told the court that Rios did not feel strongly about Steinke serving jail time and felt “very sorry” for her instead.
That’s not the same as what you said.
Nice, you read the article. My work here is done. Lol.
True though, but a heck of a lot closer then the people who referred to female cop as a guy, and the victim as dead.
Dude left a guy on the tracks… even if that was… somehow an innocent mistake, someone could have died (and almost did die)
totally agree. Jusr tired of reading comments about how HE killed the person... when it was neither a he, nor was the person killed. And really I am tired of deceptive headlines designed to make people angry.
Yeah, she probably doesn't want to be left on the tracks again by those cops.
it did seem odd. Totally more going on then is in the article one way or another.
Truth.