“I lean toward the willing-collaborators explanation. Emergency room docs — and this was almost certainly in the emergency room — are, by and large (yes, I’m generalizing here in a big way), cowboy adrenaline junkies with minimal empathy. They don’t intimidate easily, and they don’t spend loads of time agonizing over moral quandaries. They’re also likely to laugh at cops who get in their faces. ‘Were you counting on anesthesia the next time a uniform shows up in my ER?’ is a not-unlikely rejoinder to any police officer who tries to get emergency room staffers to do what they don’t want to do. But either way, medical personnel, like the rest of us, are responsible for their actions. In the absence of guns at their heads, doctors and nurses must answer for the things they do — even if those things are performed at the request of state officials. You don’t get a moral get-out-of-jail-free card because the cops said ‘pretty please’ before you agreed to participate in a horrible civil rights violation.” (05/13/08)