Hypo behind the wheel, the sequel

Today, the Star-Ledger published a follow-up article to the one I discussed in Monday’s post. For those of you paying close attention, the new article is published online here.

State officials are calling for an investigation of the training procedures.  Not of the incident, but of the existing training procedures.  This sounds like more bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo to me.  Why investigate the training they currently have?  Just adopt a training program that has already been accepted and applauded in a different jurisdiction. They’re out there. The rules of misbehaving pancreaii don’t change when we drive across the state-line.

The victim in the original case already has a training-plan that he created for the city of Philadelphia.  I’m sure he’d be quite happy to see it implemented throughout the region — and throughout the country for that matter.

Instead of wasting time trying to figure out what was wrong, let’s just make it right.  Our lives are at stake. Our dignity, too.  It’s not that hard.

One particular line in the follow-up article got my attention.  In it, a former Jersey City police officer recalls encountering a hypoglycemic motorist about twenty years earlier.  He hadn’t been trained on this, and misconstrued the driver’s behavior for drunken defiance:

“I was about to issue tickets, not giving him the attention he needed,” said Mainor, chairman of the Assembly Law and Public Safety Committee. “But my partner understood. For the grace of God, we saved a life that day.”

“My Partner Understood.” “For the Grace of God.”

In other words, it was completely by chance that this officer’s partner happened to know how to recognize the symptoms and knew what to do.  Had two different officers been on the scene, the story could have ended differently. Instead of a life saved, it might have been one of  a life sacrificed.

Forget the politics and the finger-pointing.  Forget trying to reinvent the wheel.  Just do what’s right.

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In case you missed it…

• Scott K. Johnson responded to Monday’s blog post with a blog entry of his own.  Read it here.
• I misidentified the online name of a person who commented to Sunday’s newspaper article in my Monday post.  I’ve corrected the error.

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This post was recognized as a Best of the ‘Betes Blog for “Best Advocacy” in October 2012.
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