Life or Death, They Still Want Your Money… NOW UPDATED

Dr. Michael Kutryk, a hospital cardiologist, was stopped for speeding on his way to perform an emergency surgery in Toronto on Saturday. According to reports, Jeffrey Halstrom, a forty-seven year old kindergarten teacher was in the emergency room waiting for emergency angioplasty surgery to repair three clogged arteries while Kutryk was held up by the police.

Reports state that Kutryk told the arresting officer that he was in a rush to perform surgery on a man in cardiac arrest and that every minute counted. The officer chose to write him a ticket anyway. Luckily, Halstrom is now recovering at the hospital. But the outcome could have been much worse.

If the officer was so intent on writing the ticket, then why couldn’t he have escorted the surgeon to the hospital and written his precious citation when a life wasn't at stake? Why was the officer so intent on writing the ticket in the first place? He should have explained to Kutryk that he needed to slow down to prevent an accident that would hold him up even longer. Then he should have sent him on his way, wishing him well.

If this would have been the officer's off-duty co-worker, would the ticket have been so necessary?  Cops stick together, and the boys in blue have lined up solidly behind their cohort who wrote the citation.  According to this article, both 53rd Division Unit Commander Staff Insp. Larry Sinclair and Police Spokeswoman Const. Wendy Drummond stood by their fellow cop.  Some might say that this has made all three look like complete and total asswipes.  If speeding is so dangerous, why do the police violate the speed limit every time they apprehend a speeder?

UPDATE 1/13/2010 - It is now official: the Toronto Police are so desperate to avoid looking like complete and total horses' asses that they could not resist the urge to shoot off their big mouths again.  According to this update, Toronto Police spokesman Mark Pugash stated "This is an issue of public safety."  OK, wait a minute - does he mean the effort to ticket the doctor or the effort to get to a hospital and save a life? 

He followed this up by stating "If in the middle of winter you have someone driving at twice the speed limit, they present a risk to themselves and others."  It's hard to argue with that, but of course Pugash was attacking a straw man.  The doctor wasn't going twice the speed limit.  Pugash simply took the liberty of inflating the alleged speeding offense to make it sound more dire.  Further, he uses the intellectually dishonest technique of mentioning winter as if there was ice everywhere.  I just looked at some Toronto traffic cams and it appears that all roads are clear and traffic is flowing well.  So again, Pugash sacrifices credibility for sensationalism, making the Toronto PD once again appear to be nothing more than clowns.

Continuing this theme, Pugash "noted there are hundreds of doctors on call at any time in the city of Toronto who manage to obey the speed limits."  Huh?  He's somehow monitoring every doctor on call?  And what does that have to do with anything anyway?  We aren't talking about doctors on call, we're talking about doctors racing to the hospital in a life or death scenario where every second counts.  Again, this is intellectually dishonest.

Pugash saved his most preposterous claim for last.  He claimed to have "spoken to a number of doctors who believe that issuing Dr. Kutryk a ticket was the right thing."  WHAT?  Who?  Are we really supposed to believe that a bunch of doctors were consulted by the Toronto PD and they said "Yeah, when we are racing to save a life, you should pull us over, cite us, and let the patient's life hang in the balance."  Are they serious?  How much of a douche would you have to be to make this claim or to believe it?  Let me point out that prosecutors have Juris Doctor degrees from law school - I can only assume that these are the doctors he's talking about. 
 
At the risk of overstating the obvious, when you are right about something, you don't need *three* spokespeople to hide behind.  If you use one, your point could go either way.  Two spokespeople means you are taking a position that nobody agrees with.  Three is the equivalent of hoisting a 50 foot billboard that says "we're wrong and we know it, but in a desperate attempt to save face we are claiming that the Emporer does in fact have clothes and they are quite handsome." 
 
My challenge to Pugash and the other jackasses making statements in favor of this misguided cop: produce one (medical) doctor who thinks doctors should be ticketed on the way to life or death emergencies and have them post a comment saying so on this blog.  With so many to chose from as you have claimed, it shouldn't be hard.  If you concede that your entire department hasn't the first shred of common sense between you, do not respond to this blog.  Time will tell...