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She steps in to stop YouTubing of mother/daughter spat at BPL
By adamg on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 10:57am
TKOG reports that when she saw a bunch of smirky teens videoing what appeared to be a struggle between a mother and her mentally ill daughter at the BPL main library in Copley Square, she took action:
... I wanted to swipe the phone from his hand and smash it to the ground. I wanted to click through his contacts and call his mother, tell him what her son was out doing. I wanted to smack his smug face until he learned the difference between suffering and entertainment. But of course I couldn't do any of those things - not with the cops already on their way. So, I did the only thing I could do.
I danced.
Ducked into the path of his iPhone video until I was obscuring the entire frame, then danced my spastic ass off. Where swiveled, I followed instantly; where he tried to evade, I only took up more space; where he ran, I followed. I blocked out every trace of the two women's struggle until, finally, he gave up. ...
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Comments
Nice Work
Interesting and creative solution. Now you can sue them for wire tapping, too ...
riiiiiight
You don't call an ambulance to get your kid to the mental hospital. You call the police so they're put in protective custody. She'd know that if she was having a long struggle with this kid's mental problems, right?
And you sure as hell don't assume that someone who is assaulting a crying teenager is their parent just because they say they are.
If this had been a guy restraining the girl, people would have come out of the woodwork, maybe even beaten him up AND called the police.
If you see someone restraining another person, you CALL THE POLICE. IMMEDIATELY. So next time, instead of dancing around like a monkey (and probably getting posted on Facebook and Youtube ANYWAY)...pick up your phone and call 911!
Did you not read....
..."the cops were already on the way"?
Dear Anon
Please explain the personal, legal or medical reasoning or experience that leads you to this statement:
Even if that is the party line, if you have had a bad experience with cops you wouldn't call them.
Actually
All the times I've hospitalized people, the ambulance has come and taken them to the emergency room. The cops don't generally show up if the caller has made it clear that it's a psych emergency.
Not necessarily a good thing.
Not necessarily a good thing. A teenage girl is being assaulted by an older woman, and NTKOG assumes that the older woman is telling the truth. So, she tells the other witnesses to leave and stops the scene from being videotaped. What, praytell, if NTKOG was wrong and the girl was telling the truth that she "never seen this woman before in my life!"?
Even if they were related, there may not have been cause for the older woman to hit or forcibly restrain her teenaged daughter, in which case it's still assault.
And of course, even if everything was kosher and this isn't a matter for the courts, NTKOG was still wrong to drive away witnesses. Cops need witnesses. It allows them to get a sense as to what happened without solely relying on the accounts those involved in the altercation.
Congratulations, NTKOG, for convincing witnesses to leave before the cops arrive and ensuring the assault wasn't recorded. Nice of you to make the criminal justice system's job harder.
Read the whole entry
Go to her blog and read the whole entry. There are a lot of details that weren't posted here that clear your concerns up. (For example, the BPL security staff was involved)
You were there
So you, of course, know everything about the incident and the motives of those involved? Or are you relying on your extensive expertise with mental health issues and advocacy? Do tell.
In your mind, the ambiguity of the situation makes a bunch of Douchbag Junior Edition youtubers aok for filming a touchy situation because they think it is funny, not because it was sketchy? Right. I might have filmed it because of the issues you raise (an accurate record of the events). But ask yourself this: why would somebody ask for an ambulance and police if they were trying to abduct someone???
And what is your "expertise"?
Wow, Anon listed same valid concerns, and all you could provide was a snide response?
I do have an "extensive expertise with mental health issues and advocacy", as a patient, child of a patient, parent of a patient, parent consultant/advocate, certified peer specialist, and client ombudsman in an in-patient mental health setting. And it is my personal and professional experiences that tell me something is not right within the situation described by NTKOG.
Humor me while I share a fond memory of growing up. My mom, a schizophrenic, would frequently cause a ruckus while off her medication - which seemed to happen like clockwork early every summer. Neighbors/bystanders/family/sometimes my mom herself would call 911, and police/fire/ambulance would arrive. And every single time, without fail, she would tell them that it was someone else causing the trouble - me, my sister, my aunt, my grandmother, we were the crazy one, take us away. And in the confusion, it sometimes almost worked.
Chances are, this is not what was occurring in this situation. I even believe that the older woman is telling the "truth," that she is the mother and that the girl is just out of the hospital. But truth is subjective, restraints are almost never appropriate (and never ever by the untrained), and clinical judgments should only be made by qualified clinicians, not parents. Everyone has rights, even teenage mental health patients.
None of us were there
It seems like NTKOG was trying to do what she thought was right, but as it's been mentioned, none of us were there and we (along with NTKOG) have no idea what the reality of the relationship between this woman and the girl was. The girl could have had emotional issues, the woman could have had been the one with the problem or they could both be clinically bat-shit. And it is indeed good to have witnesses around, but it seems more likely that the youth filming the incident were not motivated by civic responsibility.
So was NTKOG motivated to do her "nothing-to-see-here-move-along" dance out of concern for the two women or out of annoyance with the leering rubberneckers? I think the tone of the article (and the fact that she couldn't really know for sure what the deal was between these two people) implies that she was more interested in voicing her indignation at the idiots than anything else. But I wasn't there, and in the end who really cares what any of our judgments are on this anyways? Sometimes the Internet feels like a gigantic People's Court episode, only all the plaintiffs, defendants and spectators are wearing the robes (and have the irritable prostates).
Incredible...
I was at the library when this incident occurred, and not one single bit of TKOG's account is even remotely true. I should know - I am the security guard who "paced back to the security desk in quick, measured steps, and — finally — called the proper autorities" (sic). It disgusts me that this person would completely fabricate a story to make herself seem important or honorable. Shame on you, TKOG. Next time, post what had ACTUALLY happened, not how it played out in your mind when you finally sat in front of your computer to boast your "good deed."
Shocked
I am shocked to hear that the author of a blog about oneself would describe an event in a way that made him or her sound better, cooler, or more efficient than he or she actually was when the event took place. I am even more shocked to hear that such a blogger would describe someone else as worse, less cool, or less efficient than that person actually was during the same event. If you tell me next that this blogger is totally impressed with herself and her zany lifestyle then my head is going to explode from the shock-shock-shock of it all.
I hope, if you are who you say you are,
that they don't fire you for blogging about the event. Too often they are able to do stuff like that- freedom of speech, as it pertains to the workplace, is not very well protected, IMHO.
I think this is a troll
TKOG didn't claim to have anything to do with the interaction itself, only with blocking the would-be youtubers.
No, but she DID comment on
No, but she DID comment on the actions of the people who WERE involved. And she DID make it sound as if what she did was noble and heroic.
You didn't read her piece very thoroughly
She presented herself as playing only a marginal role (nothing to do with the main occurrence). Her primary interaction was with the would-be youtube-videomakers -- and she wondered whether she had done the right thing or just made a fool of herself.
Why such hostility towards a lively and imaginative young woman?
I applaud thwarting
I applaud thwarting cameraphone punks. But I would like to see other accounts of the situation.
Reason for my skepticism is that I once knew a dramatically-predisposed woman who totally would've done the same thing as this writer, and written about it the same way, but in the case of the person I knew, much of her perceptions would have been imagined. That's what too much unemployable Ivy League lit education mixed with too much drugs earlier in life can do to you.
The writer could have been 100% dead-on in her assessment and retelling, but she has to know that the oddness of emphasizing how she defeated the evil through dance, and the making herself the center of the story in a special mary sue way, is going to make some people a little skeptical.
A little context on her writing style
The whole point of her blog is to chronicle her efforts to do stuff she's never done before - so, yes, all her posts are about her, the main difference being between things for which she is The Kind of Girl (who would do X) and the ones for which she is Not the Kind of Girl (who would do X).
I've linked to several of her posts now, and so realize she really drives some people up the wall, but I like the basic idea of her blog and I like her writing (yeah, I know, sue me).