In Too Deep

In Lincolnshire, England, police officers, firefighters and paramedics refused to go to the aid of a man who had been struck by a car, knocked into a ditch and was lying in 18 inches of water. They deemed climbing down a 15-foot bank to the victim was too dangerous and called for a water rescue team more than 50 miles away. An autopsy determined that Karl Malton drowned while lying face down in the water.

Comments

[alice]

a man died becuase some cop didnt want to get his new shoes wet

[Darwin]

If you read carefully, you'll see it was that a man died (probably) because some cop didn't want his men to get their shoes wet. The firemen were getting ladders and ropes to go down but the boss put a stop to it.

[skr]

that's some fucked up shit right there

[skr]

ok wait let me get this straight, running into burning buildings is not too dangerous but using a rope and some ladders to get to the bottom of a levee is too dangerous? Are you fucking kidding me?

[BarryJV]

He died because he was hit by a car, landed in a ditch full of water and wasn't found until he'd been lying there for more than ten minutes.

[Dello]

Perhaps the best, as in worst, part of this is that if I had been on the scene and tried to rescue the man myself, I'd have been arrested. The cops would have figure that I shouldn't go down there lest they have to rescue me ALONG WITH the guy the they're already not rescuing.

[Alert Bystander]

Too bad I wasn't there. Tax-suckers are useless when people need help.

[BarryJV]

1: It's the Daily Fail, nothing they write can be relied on.

2: There's no picture of the ditch the body was lying in. There's a picture of another ditch, but it doesn't match the description given in the article.

3: The body was recovered by boat. If the water is deep enough for a boat to travel through and the only access is via a high, steep, unstable bank there's a very real chance that a rescuer could find themselves in serious trouble very quickly.

4: The victim was hit by a car and died before the emergency services reached the scene. It might be worth the risk to save a drowning man, it's not worth the risk just to retrieve a body.

5: It's the Daily Fail, nothing they write can be relied on.

Could the staff at Reason please stop using Daily Mail articles as reference material. Their poor journalism reflects badly on this site when it's quoted uncritically.

[skr]

the times says the water was only 18" deep.

[BarryJV]

At what point? If a boat can travel along the water it has to be deeper than 18 inches in at least part of the channel.

[Some Farker]

HURRRR HURRR.

DAILY FAIL!!!

HURRRRRRR.

[BarryJV]

I call it as I see it. The Mail's breathless outrage is responsible for most of Fark's Nanny State threads and some of the worst panic driven legislation this country has seen. Not an awful lot of facts involved in most of the stories though.

[Mike]

Here's a Times version of the story. It confirms all the facts of the MMail story, and while Malton may well have been dead before the first emergency responders got there, they did not know that at the time.

[BarryJV]

The only fact is confirms is that the body was in water 18 inches deep. If it was that deep across the whole width of the ditch, how did a boat manage to navigate it? Also, a police representative gave evidence that police recruits are not required to be able to swim if they work for inland police forces. Swimming in eighteen inches of water? Does that sound plausible? The fact that that question was raised at the inquest should tell you something about the situation. At the very least it shows that the police believed the water to be much deeper than eighteen inches.

Arguing over the facts as presented in the article in the Mail is pointless as the problem is not contained in the substantive facts in the body of the article, but rather the facts omitted and the claims made about them.

e.g. the first paragraph:
"Police, firemen and paramedics refused to go to the aid of an accident victim who was drowning in just 18 inches of water... because they believed it was too dangerous."

The police didn't refuse to go the aid of the victim, they tried and failed to reach him and then a senior officer called off the attempt because it was obvious they didn't have the right equipment. Also, the victim wasn't drowning, he was drowned. Important difference.

Now look at the Brickbats description:
"In Lincolshire, England, police officers, firefighters and paramedics refused to go to the aid of a man who had been struck by a car, knocked into a ditch and was lying in 18 inches of water. They deemed climbing down a 15-foot bank to the victim was too dangerous and called for a water rescue team more than 50 miles away. An autopsy determined that Karl Malton drowned while lying face down in the water."

Again, the word "refused" and the implication that the man could have lived if only the emergency services could have been bothered to try to help him. That's what you get when you read the first paragraph of a Mail article and don't bother checking the body of the article and researching the full story.

[Mike]

Here's the Times story
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....735669.ece

[William Walsh]

Okay, let's say the story was a complete fabrication by the Daily Mail. Okay?

Government rules and regulations and healthcare system in GB are horrific.

Are we agreed on that, at least?

[BarryJV]

Not a complete fabrication, but an unfair distortion that accuses police, who made a genuine attempt to recover a body, of refusing to help a drowning man.

The NHS funding system is a mess that spends more on bureaucrats than on healthcare, but I wouldn't call it horrific.

All government rules and regulations are horrific, that's kind of the point of Reason in the first place. The British don't suffer particularly from government at the moment, though there are some horrific ones on the horizon if the Labour party win the next election. (They won't). We mostly suffer from the same problem as the US, everyone is so scared of being sued that they are hyper cautious about any possible risk.

It seems to me that the US has it worse than us when it comes to being overlawyered. (Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.)

[Mike]

I don't know what type of boat was used there, but all the rescue squads here use jon boats. I've personally floated a jon boat, loaded with another person and a coller of beer, is less than a foot of water.

[BarryJV]

That's not impossible, but the one's I've seen the police using on the Avon are more like the one's pictured on this web page:

http://www.rescue3.co.uk/srbo.htm

I think they're the type used across the whole of the UK, but Lincolnshire police could plausibly have something like the jon boat.

I think this might be getting too into specifics though. My point was just that the representation of the story was quite different from the reality and with the Daily Mail it is always so. Even if the water was eighteen inches deep at its deepest point, the police believed it was deeper, they had made several attempts to recover the body and they weren't just blindly following bureaucratic health and safety rules with no care about a drowning man.

This is typical of the Daily Mail and it's not the first time Brickbats has linked to a story from the Mail that is a total misrepresentation of the facts and I believe that it harms the reputation of Reason.com to uncritically accept Daily Mail stories.