The Bear Minimum

When police are in the ’sites’ it’s nice to know that justice still won’t waver.

It’s an interesting case, and one that I’m quite pleased to see play out like this. In 2008, Pc Jason Hanvey was investigating an assault which Amy Keigher, who was 19 years of age at the time, was the lead suspect. During an interrogation with Keigher, Hanvey became overly aggressive to the point of bullying her. He was shown in CCTV footage to have pushed her head onto the table and held it there, told her he would “rip her scull off”, held her hair, and cuffed her only to then hold her arms up over her head for over a minute, whilst telling her to say “pretty please” to have her arms let down.

This was all witnessed by Sgt Andrew Kennedy, who was the other officer charged, and whom the judge in the case, Judge Anthony Gee QC, was also quite scathing of. He called them bullies, and stated that Kennedy’s culpability was no less than that of Hanvey’s in spite of his not physically being the aggressor in this case. Both officers haven’t had spotless careers before this, with Hanvey being convicted of punching a suspect in the face during an interrogation 12 years ago, and Kennedy facing disciplinary hearings in both 1999 and 2000 for neglect of duty.

The lass who was assaulted by Hanvey was tried and convicted of the assault for which she was a suspect, which is partly why I’m mildly surprised to have seen this result. I believe the judge was entirely right when he sentenced the two to 18 months in jail each for their part in the incident, but nonetheless, it’s still nice to see that even when abuse of power is directed at criminals it’s taken as seriously as if it’s directed at the common person. Both officers have also lost their jobs, quite obviously, and their pensions.

The judge also commented that neither of the police officers had shown anything like remorse, and in fact they’d tried to justify their actions in what he saw as an arrogant fashion. You know they’ve irritated the judge somewhat to receive such words, which makes me wish I could have seen their faces whilst they stood in the witness box.

This all just makes me glad that those CCTV cameras are in interrogation rooms nowadays, and that certain standards are still expected of our police.

I find the NDE phenomena very interesting, so I though I would report on this recent small-scale study out of Slovenia.

I’ll give a brief run-down of what an Near-Death Experience (NDE) is before I go into the rest of my piece here today. An NDE occurs when a person has died for a short time and has returned by themselves or been resuscitated, and has had some sort of experience during this time. This can range from seeing some sort of tunnel with a bright light at the end, or a feeling of peace and happiness, or being free from one’s body and being able to move about the room and see things and hear things that they have no physical way of seeing or hearing, or going on an immense journey and meeting all sorts of figures from family to Angels, to Jesus and in some cases a God-like figure. Often these experiences will contain a ‘life-review’ where you look over the effects you’ve had on all the people you’ve come into contact with. No two NDEs are precisely the same, and some of them are amazing to read, and I heartily suggest everyone read a few of these: some are really quite profound.

Okay so now that you’ve an idea of what these are, I can talk about this study. To sum it up briefly, the University of Maribor in Slovenia has been researching into NDEs, and found that in the 52 cardiac-arrest patients they studied (a very small-scale study, indeed) the 11 who had reported having some form of an NDE had also had higher levels of carbon dioxide in their bodies than the other 41 patients.

On the one hand, that’s mildly interesting, and it would be great to understand the correlation. You can also see how those who don’t want to believe in NDEs for one reason or another may latch onto yet another ‘biological’ reason why people have these experiences.

On the other hand, the study is very limited, and it frustrates me somewhat that the content of the patient’s NDEs is left out entirely from the paper submitted by those doing the study. I find the content far more intriguing than the why of these phenomena, but I do see that it would still be beneficial to know why these events occur.

A study I’m more looking forward to seeing the results from is one conducted by Southampton University into whether or not cardiac arrest patients do have out-of-body experiences and to test this the researchers will be leaving images up on high shelves that can only be seen from above. When so many studies are looking to attribute the phenomena to a malfunctioning, dying brain, it’s nice when a study takes it a little further.

As far as re-enactments go, this one here, brought to me by a friend in Australia, is rather crass, in my opinion.

On Saturday afternoon in the small beach-side city of Geelong, Victoria, Australia, a group from a church decided to have a re-enactment. The paster of this church, Heaven on Earth, decided that they needed to get out and ’spread the word of God’ as the Bible told them to do, and they thought the best way to do this was to show people what Easter was all about.

So they dressed a fellow in a loin cloth, and two ladies in black as mourners, and had the fellow doused in fake blood and stand up on a crucifix, whilst he was mourned by the two women. They also played instrumental music through an amplifier. The paster, Sarah Kenneally, defended their decision and called the ‘demonstration’ a ’silent display’ and that they weren’t trying to ‘preach to people’.

First off, that’s just a lie. There was music coming through the amplifier, and the person acting as Jesus was moaning audibly and crying out ‘Why, why?’ which, of course, terrified children and many of them were crying leading parents to request police to put a stop to the display, which they did. Quite unceremoniously, too, from what I hear. Secondly, how is could this pastor thing she’s not preaching? You don’t have to be speaking to be preaching, and this was sending a very clear message.

I think it’s the carelessness that aggravates me about this. The group chose a busy shopping district on the day before Easter to put on this performance, knowing that many children would be in the area. I think that’s extremely inconsiderate of those children and of the parents who’ll now have to explain to their child that no, the man wasn’t really in pain, and he’s alright, and why these people would want to do this.

Apparently the pastor is looking to do this again next year, but probably without the fake blood. Well that’s something, at least.