U/A and Dr. Dao (2017)

That was a PR disaster for UA. I am quite reluctant to fly an airline where their management systems are so bad that the local people thought it was necessary to use that level of violence over that type of dispute.
 
dmspilot said:
Because they were airline employees needed to deadhead to work another flight without which many hundreds of people would have been inconvenienced.
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Right they needed to do something, but definitely should have chosen one of the many less violent alternatives. UA paid for it, big time, both in $ and derision, which they richly deserved.
 
Palmpilot said:
Did UA have reason to believe that the people who removed Dr. Dao were going to beat him? No.
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Well, when you call in LEOs the chances of violence increase dramatically.
 
Palmpilot said:
Excessive force on the part of LEOs can happen, but it's not the norm.
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Agreed not the norm, but it is happening with increased frequency in recent years. But this discussion diverges rather seriously from aviation now.
 
Have there been other airlines so lacking in sense as to call the police to remove a passenger over a seating dispute? I suppose it is possible, but the only reason this type of altercation was unprecedented may be that no other airline had ever been that foolish.

But there are plenty of examples off of planes which suggest to reasonable people that calling the police often escalates the level of violence. That is not surprising since basically the police are in the use of force business -- that is what they do for a living.
 
Thinking about this more. Whoever made the decision to call the police and treat this as a criminal trespass was really the person responsible for the problem. Even without having more money to offer, they could have made a lot of other choices. Ask some other passenger to leave -- this would be a violation of their internal policies for prioritization, but that is all. Tell one of the dead heading people they weren't going to be able to make it on this flight - again a violation of UA policy, but that is all. I wonder if there was a sort of wills contest going on and the person making the decision to call the police felt that they had to show that passenger who is boss and that the company owns the plane.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
UA didn’t choose violence. The doctor did.
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Let me see if I follow this line of thought. How did the doctor choose violence?

Did he do anything violent toward the flight staff, other passengers, or the police? I actually don’t recall the details of his behavior.

Or is the argument here that anyone who commits a misdemeanor trespass (which his refusal to give up his seat at the request of appropriate airline personnel arguably was) and refuses to obey LEOs deserves a physical removal and beating of the type he received?

I say “arguably” regarding the trespass because as noted by others here, the issues of the contract breach, either by Dr. Dao in refusing to follow instructions, versus by UA for taking him out of a seat he was already sitting in, are subtle and were never actually adjudicated because of the settlement.
 
Larry in TN said:
Calling the police to deal with a variety of passenger issues on board is not, and was not, unusual. Check YouTube for an endless supplies of videos of exactly that. The additional authority that the police bring almost always lead to a peaceful, if not voluntarily, removal of the passenger.
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If true, then I suppose part of the issue was the former Daley security force police given a special job at the airport so they could continue their careers. Weren't those the police involved? They may not be the best at de-escalating situations.

The discussion regarding the use of violence by the police then becomes a subset of the broader societal discussion about the level of police violence in society. In that regard, I will stand by my original post above. If you call the police to enter into a dispute, you should expect an increased likelihood of a violent response. Not necessarily a violent response, since as noted by Larry in TN, the additional authority often peacefully resolves the dispute. But it is more likely to end in violence if you do call them than not.

In this case, the airline personnel had other choices which were more peaceful. The person in charge amongst them chose the alternative of calling the police, which will more likely result in violence than the alternatives they had available. The fact that UA had policies and procedures in place which encouraged that choice is what makes me very reluctant to fly with them.
 
I believe they were told to take "police" off their uniforms _after_ the incident under discussion here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/us/united-chicago-airport-security.html . Several of them were fired.

And just to be clear, I believe the airport security people were former members of Daley's private security detail which were police then.

I don't know the state of mind of the person making the call for UA that day. Did they think they were calling the police, as Larry in TN's post above would suggest, or did they think they were calling a non-police security force, such as suggested by dmspilot? And what did UA policies call for ? Calling the police or only other security?
 
Interesting history, thanks. So does anyone know whether UA policies called for calling security vs the police at that time? (I imagine they did not make such a subtle distinction). BTW, that link is broken, from this end anyway.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
He refused a lawful instruction from law enforcement to get off the airplane. His choices at that point are on him. He went all in when he should have folded.
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Per dmspilot's post above, they apparently were not actually supposed to be wearing uniforms saying they were police. Were they law enforcement then? And were their orders lawful?

But back to my other question, do you think a person deserves to be physically treated as Dr. Dao was for refusing to obey a lawful order? Or should more de-escalatory approaches have been used? The police are the professionals at dealing with this type of situation, which I imagine was quite foreign to Dr. Dao. This response appears to convey a position of 'you deserve whatever beating and level of force the police administer if you refuse to unquestioningly obey them". Is that your position? Or perhaps that is not what was meant?

Also, what about the case where people are giving an unlawful command? That may have been the case here if these people were not actually police. In such a situation, does the person deserve whatever beating is administered to them by people falsely claiming to be police because that person failed to immediately obey?

Given what dmspilot has pointed out, this was a complex situation.
 
Palmpilot said:
The use of excessive force was no more foreseeable than if you called the police to remove a trespasser from your home.
If someone refused to get off your personal airplane, what would you do? If you called the police, would you be to blame if the police used excessive force?
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Agreed Dr. Dao did become a trespasser. I think the analogy to the home is not quite right. A home is a rather protected space in legal terms. Similarly for a personal plane vs a commercial one. On a commercial airplane where seats are offered to the public for a fee, people have a different set of expectations.

My point is, as noted above, people should expect that when they call the police violence may ensue. A lot of people (perhaps including these UA personnel) do not factor that into their decision making. But the police are in the use of force business and that should be borne in mind. If someone is invading your home, it is probably a good decision to defend it with force if need be. If someone is otherwise peacefully trespassing on your publicly accessible commercial property, other alternatives may be better choices.

UA had other alternatives (ask some other passenger to leave or deny boarding to the employees) which a reasonable person would expect to be less likely to result in a violent confrontation than calling the police. And UA has changed their policy subsequently, I believe, to not be calling the police for this type of dispute. I applaud them for realizing that. Too bad they didn't realize it earlier. They paid for their mistake.
 
Larry in TN said:
Hence the recommendations against taking the law into your own hands.
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Good advice if dealing with an already violent situation for sure. In other circumstances I guess technically this is some sort of Bayesian calculation of the prior probability of violence and the likelihood of violence after the police are called.

The book "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" goes into some of this in terms of how the police are becoming more violent over time. So our subjective impressions formed when young might not be accurate anymore.
 
Since you acknowledge that Dr. Dao became a trespasser, the logical consequence of what you're saying is that it's OK to ask for enforcement of the law against trespassing in a home or personal airplane, but not in a commercial setting.
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I don’t know that I would go that far. I would just say one should try other alternatives, if available, before bringing in the violence associated with LEOs when dealing with an otherwise peaceful contract dispute in a public setting.

UA had alternatives and has actually changed their policies to prefer those now.

Was UA within it’s legal rights to call the police - certainly. Was it wise? I would submit no. Was it a good way to treat customers - I think not.

It would have been interesting to see the legal parsing if the case had gone to trial, but it was settled.
 
Palmpilot said:
These conclusions may seem obvious after the Dao incident, for public relations reasons if nothing else. They weren't obvious before it.
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I would agree they weren’t obvious to UA before the incident and probably not to many others. That is one of the points I was trying to emphasize:

If you call in LE you are asking for them to come and use violence to enforce their interpretation of the law, if cooperation isn’t forthcoming. Just be sure that is what you really want and that you are willing to have the attendant risks of them using excessive force - which are on the rise. Sometimes that is necessary - just be sure that is what you want. Don’t assume there is negligible risk of the use of excessive force because you may get excessive firepower applied.
 
MauleSkinner said:
The airlines have a strong history of treating customers like **** in general, so no big deal there.
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Highly regulated markets often end up like that. The players in the industry being regulated are able to control the regulators and manipulate the situation to their advantage and to the detriment of the consumer. Classic regulatory capture.
 
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