What the Heck?! Thread (Closed)

[plawolf]

It doesn't matter what Mr. Dao's race is, no one gets mistreated on a commercial airline flight, in the US because of their race, religion, or nationality.

When did I say anything about race?

Yes United should have chartered an aircraft for their flight crew,,, they made a bad call, but once Mr. Dao had broken the law, it was entirely appropriate to call law enforcement and have him removed from the aircraft.

There are plenty of unfair, unreasonable or downright ridiculous laws, and the clause that an airline could force people off for whatever reason they want is clearly an example that ticks all the boxes.

What this incident has done more than anything else is to shine a giant spotlight on the enormous legal bias there exists in the US that favours corporations' rights over that of ordinary people and their customers.

If anything, the fact that the airline was within its legal rights to do this has done just as much, if not more so, to fuel the publics disgust and anger about this issue than just their natural empathy for the doctor.

I'm disgusted with Mr. Munoz for saying they will no longer call law enforcement to remove passengers, that's being a total priss, man up, tell the truth, and don't be afraid to deal with unruly passengers in a legal, ethical manner.

That was his initial strategy, and that hasn't worked out well for UA has it?

Rather than take the silly view that just because it's legal we can and should do it, the far more reasonable, responsible and intelligent thing to do is to see if the law in question is just or fair or reasonable.

By sticking to the letter of the law in instances where the law itself is highly dubious, UA is in effect making itself the poster child for said bad law. And become a lightening rod for the public's shock and anger at the unfair law as much as about the initial incident. Because everyone is deeply appalled and scared by the prospect the very same thing could happen to them for doing nothing wrong.

Objectively speaking, UA did very little wrong. It was the Chicago PD whose officers caused all this by using such excessive force.

What did UA in was Munoz's initial victim-blaming, arse-covering, issue-avoiding, heartless response. Especially when contrasted against the swift and smart decision by the CPD to suspend the officer in question and issue a, frankly, very cookie cutter statement, which nevertheless succeeded in mollifying the public by assuring them that what they saw was not how things should go down.

Dr. Dao should probably have his M.D. pulled again, he used very questionable judgement!

That's just stupid and vinditive. He stood up for his rights. Nothing more, nothing less. Speaking up when someone, even if they are in uniform, tries to infringe on your rights is not questionable judgement. It is one of the things Americans like to tell foreigners they believe in, and love the most, so I am surprised you are so hostile to the idea in practice.

It is actually not that surprising for police officers to not know or understand some of the very many laws that are on the books in the US. They are not lawyers after all, and few lawyers could claim to know every single US law by heart.

It is for this precisely reason that US law demands the airline provide the customer with a written letter detailing their rights in instances like this. So the person can see exactly what his rights to see if the demands made upon him are reasonable and legal.

Had the cabine crew provided him with such a letter and pointed to the specific parts that stated he needed to follow the instruction of the captain and crew, the doctor may well have decided to leave voluntarily.

The police officer should have probably tazzed Mr. Dao at some point, that would have minimized his injuries and the danger to the other innocent passengers!

It's actually pretty telling you think that is reasonable, when in the overwhelming majority of the world, that is seen as gross excessive force.

The US has a systematic and chronic problem of atrocious policing. With poor and often awfully training that overemphasis the overwhelming application of force, with little or no training on non-violent confrontation resolution and basic reasoning and negotiation techniques.

Where officer's in pretty much every other civilised part of the world would calmly and patiently explain what it is someone has done wrong before giving them an option to make the situation right without needing to arrest them for non-violent offenders, and where the offence clearly does not warrant arrest, case in point the doctor refusing to leave his seat. However, in the US, it seems the police officers will take it as a personal insult if you do not do what they demand the instant they speaks, and use excessive force to 'teach you a lesson'. And US courts typically turn a blind eye to such crimes, yes crimes! Committed by the police.

Let me break it to you, what you have come to see as normal policing, the rest of the world would only expect from a hostile occupational force.

 

[Air Force Brat]

Oh, I did my research, Brat. Take a look:

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And even if it were not true; even if UA was legally protected, their actions were still immoral and unreasonable as evident by the backlash and stock decline they experienced afterwards as well as the moral support the majority of the people have given Dr. Dao. The people use their money to judge who's right; that's about the only democracy left in the US.

What further devalues your view that Dr. Dao will be arrested for being in the wrong is that the UA CEO has apologized, promised it will never happen again, asked Dr. Dao to accept his outreach for settlement, ALL the passengers on the flight were refunded, and the security agent involved was suspended. These are things that happened in the real world, not in the biases of your mind, which heavily and unreasonably favors the side of the profession you chose.

I have no idea why you would (continue to) bring up Dr. Dao's past convictions as they have no impact on his current case. The only straw man argument here is yours, that because Dr. Dao had previously made mistakes, that that would diminish or in any way affect the rights he had on that flight.

Those who have been convicted of a Felony as in a drug crime do indeed lose many of their rights such as voting or owning a firearm just for starters, and as the sign says at Walmart, you have a "criminal record" which will stay with you for life!

as for China, how many of your friends own private aircraft, firearms??? lots of them right??? didn't think so, so lets just stick with the facts. no need to get personal, but we do have laws, as does every other country, and airlines here are NOT STATE OWNED! They are private corporations in which people invest their own money to build wealth, and to provide a public service, but the wealth part has to come first or you're out of business!

 

[solarz]

It's actually pretty telling you think that is reasonable, when in the overwhelming majority of the world, that is seen as gross excessive force.

The US has a systematic and chronic problem of atrocious policing. With poor and often awfully training that overemphasis the overwhelming application of force, with little or no training on non-violent confrontation resolution and basic reasoning and negotiation techniques.

Where officer's in pretty much every other civilised part of the world would calmly and patiently explain what it is someone has done wrong before giving them an option to make the situation right without needing to arrest them for non-violent offenders, and where the offence clearly does not warrant arrest, case in point the doctor refusing to leave his seat. However, in the US, it seems the police officers will take it as a personal insult if you do not do what they demand the instant they speaks, and use excessive force to 'teach you a lesson'. And US courts typically turn a blind eye to such crimes, yes crimes! Committed by the police.

Let me break it to you, what you have come to see as normal policing, the rest of the world would only expect from a hostile occupational force.

Well said. Here's an article on this very subject:

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CHICAGO — Airport police officers called to remove a passenger who refused to leave a United Express flight essentially walked into what law enforcement experts say was a no-win situation: enforcing a business decision by a private company.

But if the passenger posed no threat and was not being disruptive, officers almost certainly could have tried an approach other than dragging him out of his seat and down the aisle, including simply telling the airline to resolve the situation itself, experts said.

Cellphone video of the bloodied passenger, 69-year-old David Dao of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, has become a public-relations nightmare for United and led to the suspension of three police officers who worked for the Chicago Department of Aviation.

The video also underscores a growing dilemma: From airlines to schools, police are called to deal with situations that in the past might have been handled without them, sometimes leading officers to respond with force far beyond the provocation.

"Police have an innate bias for action, but there are times that it's not in their best interest or that of their agency to get involved in an issue that requires you to use a high level of force," said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based research group, and former police chief in Redlands, California. "You have to ask whether ... you really needed to use force when doing the airline's bidding."

In an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" aired Wednesday, the chief executive of United Airlines said the carrier will no longer ask police to remove passengers from full flights.

After passengers were already seated on the full flight, United announced that four people needed to get off to make room for employees of a partner airline. When nobody accepted the airline's offer of $800 to relinquish a seat, the airline chose four passengers at random. All but Dao agreed to leave.

It's unclear what police were told by the airline about the situation. Screaming can be heard on the videos as Dao is dragged from his window seat and across the armrest, but he is not seen fighting with the officers. He appears relatively passive while being dragged. Later he's seen standing in the aisle saying quietly, "I want to go home, I want to go home."

But once police were aboard the plane, it would have been difficult to walk away, especially if they did not know why the passenger was asked to leave, said Kevin Murphy, executive director of the Airport Law Enforcement Agencies Network.

"Once you're there, it becomes tough to disengage. You have an obligation," Murphy said. "If someone is saying they're staying no matter what the property owner says, you have to wonder why they want to try so hard," to stay ... "Is there something else going on?"

But police officers should try to find out what they are going into and to defuse the situation, if possible, experts said.

Officers with the Los Angeles Airport Police do not get involved in civil matters such as business disputes between airlines and passengers. They have sometimes refused airlines' requests to board planes, said spokesman and police officer Rob Pedregon.

"We don't just fly into action when someone calls us," he said. Officers will "basically find out the whole situation, why we're here, get the background and then decide if it's within our legal authority. We wouldn't get (someone) off just because the airline wants them off. If a law is broken, then we will take action."

The Chicago Department of Aviation swiftly put the officer who removed Dao on leave, saying he had violated standard procedures and that the agency would not "tolerate that kind of action." Two more officers were suspended Wednesday. Officials have refused to say what procedures should have been followed.

The agency also said that its officers, who are not part of the Chicago Police Department, have "limited authority to make an arrest."

Officers could have asked themselves whether the airline had an option to reconsider its actions, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a group that has called for greater restraint from police officers. But the bottom line, he said, is that the airline put the police officers in a difficult situation by expecting them "to solve an issue that they had created."

"It was within their decision-making power to try someone else," Wexler said. "The real question is, at what point did the airline think this is no longer their problem and turns this over to the police? He could not solve this issue the way the airline could."

At the same time, police frequently overreact when someone defies an order, Bueermann said.

"They take the bait ... and you dig yourself in a deeper hole," Bueermann said, comparing the United situation to that of a South Carolina police officer seen on cellphone video in 2015 flipping a high school student backward in her desk-chair then dragging her across the classroom after she refused to leave.

"Everybody reaches a limit ... but police officers are paid in part to use their common sense to resolve a situation."

The article uses sugar-coated language, but even then, they cannot disguise the fact that the police in the US are out of control. From slamming teenaged girls to the ground, to shooting unarmed black men, to beating up innocent airline passengers, it is amazing that people who so vociferously proclaim their freedom would accept such behavior from their law enforcement agents.

Even North Koreans are not brainwashed to this degree...

 

[manqiangrexue]

My 2-cent on the matter.

Firstly, Dao's past doesn't matter. The security personnel didn't know his past at the time and still beat him. Even if they knew, they shouldn't treat him like that. Not even prisoners should be treated as such.

Also, the medical board has given back his license. That suggests that he is a law-abiding citizen and has been a law-abiding citizen for quite some time. Medical boards in the US are typically extremely strict. Any transgression would cause them to take away your license. I've had a colleague who was involved in a bar fight and had his license taken away by the Texas medical board. He had never been involved in anything illegal before or after the incident. Almost 6 years after his license was taken away, he wanted to see if he could get it back. He is well liked by all his colleagues. So the Chief of surgery and Dean of our med school went to Austin with him to plead his case. It still took them 3 trips to get the medical board to agree to consider his case. He waited another year and half to finally get his license back. You can see how tough these medical boards are. So the fact that Dao got his license back suggests that he has been extremely well behaved for quite some time, enough good behavior to convince the tough-as-nail medical board to grant him license.

Secondly, I don't have any problem with AF Brat's point that Dao needed to be removed. No matter how unreasonable it may be, the FAA law does grant airlines authority to remove passengers as they please. I don't like the law and would like it to be changed as soon as possible. Even the POTUS himself said that removing seated passengers by force from a plane is absurd. However, as it is now, the law still stands. Thus, the UA flight did nothing legally wrong when they decided to remove Dao from the plane.

HOWEVER, the way they removed Dao was extremely troubling. The extreme brutality is what is troubling most people, including me.

As such, I think the Chicago Airport security should bear most of the blame as it was their agents who did all the beating and dragging. UA unfortunately took the shot.

UA should be blamed for the way they handled the situation before the law enforcement was called. It should have never come to the point that they needed to called the police. Note that Dao was not an unruly drunk or someone with mental illness, where the only way to handle the situation was by force. According to many passengers on the plane, Dao was a reasonable and calm person. He was simply unwilling to take the offer. Flight attendants had plenty other ways to deal with the situation. Yet, they decided to use the most convenient method to them, which happens to be the most brutal way. They could up the incentive. they stopped the incentive at $800, while their upper limit is $1350. Other passengers might be willing to take the offer if it was sweetened a little more. This just shows how cold and unsympathetic the UA flight attendants were, which implies a corporate culture that simply does not care about customers. This is what infuriates most people.

Yes, Dao was acting kind of weird after being beaten and dragged off the plane. I don't know how anyone would behave when beaten to a pulp... Especially Dao is 69 years old. He might have simply lost control when experiencing such traumatic event.

What I think is the most absurd thing about American law is that no matter who's wrong in the first place, if you disobey the police, you're now wrong and responsible for everything that happens downstream from there. This puts a massive burden on ordinary untrained citizens to have to eat the injustice right before them and submit themselves to the wrong only to have the chance to go through an extremely time-consuming and expensive process to try to legally correct it. This just means that if you want justice, you'll need to invest an even bigger chunk of your life. They completely don't see that if a massive injustice is being committed upon you, it is human nature to lose your cool and correct it immediately with all your power and you shouldn't be punished for it. The person who caused the original injustice should pay for all events downstream.

For example, if the police tackle the wrong person and that person, out of shock and outrage, defends himself, he is now in the wrong for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer and if he's shot and killed, it's his own fault. This places a massive burden on the untrained civilian to have to accept that he was just attacked for no fault of his own and to resist his natural instinct to fight back, which is unreasonable. Reason says that it is the police's fault for attacking the wrong person so he should face all consequences after that including if that person fought back forcefully against the injustice being done unto him right then and there. This change would make the police think about their actions before they commit atrocities against civilians and shrug it off later as "mistakes."

The original injustice was committed unto Dr. Dao, as we all see. But somehow, it's on him to resist fighting back? If the laws weren't crooked, they'd put him squarely within his rights to fight back when attacked.

 

[manqiangrexue]

Those who have been convicted of a Felony as in a drug crime do indeed lose many of their rights such as voting or owning a firearm just for starters, and as the sign says at Walmart, you have a "criminal record" which will stay with you for life!

as for China, how many of your friends own private aircraft, firearms??? lots of them right??? didn't think so, so lets just stick with the facts. no need to get personal, but we do have laws, as does every other country, and airlines here are NOT STATE OWNED! They are private corporations in which people invest their own money to build wealth, and to provide a public service, but the wealth part has to come first or you're out of business!

What does that mean, Brat? Which of these (voting, carrying a gun) was violated by him and how does it pertain to THIS CASE?? Notice, I said that being a felon does not diminish his rights ON THAT FLIGHT. Were people voting on the flight? No. Are ordinary civilians allowed to carry firearms on that flight? No. So once again, the fact that he had a criminal record in no way affected his rights on that flight as it pertains to this case. We both know you have no point bringing up his past but you're just still talking.

Rest of your post is gibberish (too). Private owners of airlines need to know that they are paid by the public to serve the public and their attitude needs to reflect that. If they think they're doing everybody a huge favor and their clients need to shut up, get in line and follow totalitarian orders, then as Oscar just found out, there's gonna be a problem with the income.

 

[solarz]

as for China, how many of your friends own private aircraft, firearms??? lots of them right??? didn't think so, so lets just stick with the facts. no need to get personal, but we do have laws, as does every other country, and airlines here are NOT STATE OWNED! They are private corporations in which people invest their own money to build wealth, and to provide a public service, but the wealth part has to come first or you're out of business!

Interesting... you think beating up your customers is good business practice?

 

[AssassinsMace]

This has been an interesting litmus test. So much contradictory information. It's interesting how people point to the law when that's convoluted as well. Some charge Dao broke the law yet United didn't follow FAA regulations on what they had to do when denying a paying passenger his flight. United offered "United Dollars" as incentive when they were suppose to offer cash.

CNN interviewed the former head of the US Department of Transportation and she totally blamed United because the definitions and rules they're using as an excuse, she said don't apply in this case. United totally mishandled procedural guidelines to which they are the instigators of this incident. That's like saying if a rapist wants to rape a woman that happens to be in his home and she resists, she's being irate and belligerent and deserves what's coming to her.

Dao's not going to jail because that would just add to United's bad PR and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars more in stock value. About the time when someone should or shouldn't protest... I thought protesting was the pinnacle of a democracy. I remember reading an article on trying to blame Asians for not supporting the black lives matter movement. First of all that's wrong if they have to write an article suggesting all Asians are doing nothing. I've read that kind of stuff and seen Asian organizations of some sort or another active on it. So if they're demanding all Asians hand over all their money and be slave to the cause... yeah then guilty as charged. I posted a comment to the article pointing out specific cases of Asians being attacked by police and hate groups and even racism from other minorities and asked when is that addressed? Someone posted that this wasn't the time to bring up problems Asians face. I responded that it was the perfect time because they want something from Asians now when they totally ignore the issue every other time and everywhere else. Meaning they want it continued to be ignored. Just like some believe Dao shouldn't have protested and instead obeyed when being wronged. Normally when there are irate and belligerent passengers, the other passengers on board are totally against them. You haven't seen it in this case and by the recordings and interviews of the passengers, most of them supported Dao and I haven't seen one blame him for the entire mess.

 

[Air Force Brat]

Mr. Dao had already been removed from the aircraft once, he snuck back on in defiance of the flight crews instructions, and airport security,,,,,its obvious that there are lots of people here with opinions, but airlines typically overbook because there is a high percentage of no-shows...

Empty airplanes mean you will soon be out of business, and flying other flight crews is not at the discretion of crew members, its dictated by corporate dispatch.

 

[manqiangrexue]

They overbook because they are selling seats twice, trying to squeeze out money they shouldn't have but can usually get away with it because of the no-shows. They technically can't sell that seat again cus it's not theirs to sell anymore after they already sold it to someone. Those seats are already paid-for so they can fly empty just fine. That's why it's called overbooking, not full-booking. If they do choose to overbook, they should know that they are taking a risk and if more people with valid tickets show up than they have seats, then they will lose money buying some seats back. I'm sure they know that this is a gamble and most of the time, they come out on top, easily off-setting the few times they lose money from needing to buy seats back. The problem comes down to realizing that you win some and you lose some and when you lose, you gotta pay. Here, they lost the gamble, but didn't wanna pay (enough).

They gotta move crew? NO problem! But you made a mistake and didn't account for it so now you gotta pay. If $800 in flight credit isn't enough, then $1000, $2000, $3000! Cash! It's their mistake, so they need to pay for it. I find it hard to believe that they can't find 4 people willing to drive 4.5 hours to earn $3K. They might not make as much money if they bought 4 seats back at $12K, but as a business, they should know that mistakes cost money. Instead, they thought, "Screw the customer. Throw them off and we keep the money. What can they do about it? We're the judge and the jury around here." And that attitude is why everything happened the way it did. It wasn't because they can't ever overbook. It's not because they got caught in a bad situation where they needed to move crew. It's not because Dr. Dao's knows how to stand his ground. It's because they were greedy pieces of s-it and wanted to strong-arm their customers out of a situation that they created and thus should be handling by paying money.

 

[B.I.B.]

My father blames 'Electronic Tickets' In short, in the days when regular tickets were issued there is a clause written in the documentation, giving the airline the right to withdraw the ticket.That appears to be missing with E Tickets. Had written proof t been shown to Mr Dao, he may not have been quite as stubborn.Anyway I would have asked younger passengers to give up their place.
Secondly assuming the other passengers that gave up their seats were not Asian, how can Mr Dao claim Asians were being picked on.