This is possible, as doctors are generally held in more respect than nurses by the uninitiated, even though it's not warranted. But what if a doctor had shown up and they had been female, or black? Would the cop have shown more respect then? We don't know, obviously, but that hospital policy in many US states gives nurses the right and responsibility to intervene doesn't change a thing: this cop overstepped his authority and abused his power. This is a common problem in the US, and blaming hospital policy for what happened seems a bit specious to me.
Cops can be wrong. We have laws in this country (and I'm sure they do in Canada as well) that limit their powers and that dictate how they behave when obtaining evidence. This cop clearly violated those. I don't know why someone always feels compelled to explain their behavior away or to victim blame when cops become abusive, stressing how the victims should have/could have behaved to prevent the cop from running amok when the police officer, and possibly the hierarchy within their own department,
are solely to blame. I'm not saying this is your intent, but this is how it reads.
This is undoubtedly true, since they are the ones who spend the most time with patients and the public in general, but abuse (and arrest) at the hands of police for doing one's job correctly is a very special case. The blame rests solely with the police. Changing hospital policies, or changing the laws about which rights and responsibilities nurses have, won't change the fact that many cops are on power trips and think they are above the law.
It's police culture that needs to change, not hospital culture.
Possibly, and if I were a betting woman, I'd wager that there are meetings being held in this hospital, and in hospitals around the country, where management is discussing how their staff should deal with incidents like this in the future. This story is newsworthy, in an era where
police brutality is nearly an everyday thing, because it's pretty unprecedented. I can't think of an incident where a cop has arrested a nurse for doing their job before.
It sounds like you're focused on what might have been wrong at the hospital, in terms of dealing with an unprecedented situation that no one likely anticipated. Out of control patients or patients' loved ones are one thing, but who expects abusive cops in an ER?
Maybe things would have played out differently in your workplace, had an situation arisen. But in a world where it's possible for different people to read the same news story and to miss different essential details (like the truck driver
not being the person who caused the accident), we can all miss or focus on different details within a story. And none of us were there. Things can happen very quickly, and in an after-hours situation in a very chaotic setting (an ER), there may not have been time to get the hospital supervisor (or whoever) involved.
And in the US, cops can and do beat, or even shoot, people who interfere with them in any way. They tend
to not be charged,
or to be acquitted, for/of homicide when they do so, because (as has been explained to me over and over, including within these forums) cops have to make split second decisions where lives are at stake, and in a society where anyone can be armed, they never know for sure who might be a threat. So even if someone was later determined to be unarmed, the cops are generally
considered to have been acting reasonably in a court of law.
Most Americans know this, and we're scared to death of cops. Some of us are pissing-down-our-own-leg scared when cops start tossing their "authority" around. What if someone
had been civilly disobedient and stepped in to stop the cop when he was dragging her of? What if the cop had shot someone? Would people then be blaming the person who stepped in for not allowing the poor nurse to be dragged off to the police department where things could be sorted out legally?