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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   464 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 12, 2025

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Some weeks ago, I shared a court case regarding whether a firefighter's failure to resuscitate two dying babies with CPR counts as "abnormal working conditions" that give rise to a valid PTSD workers' compensation claim, rather than being merely part and parcel of working as a firefighter. This case presents a similar question: Does it count as "abnormal working conditions" for a police officer in a very peaceful municipality to shoot a suspect to death as part of an intense physical struggle?

  • The administrative pseudo-judge expresses deep skepticism toward the claimant's argument.

    On cross-examination, [Claimant's boss] acknowledged that the death of [the suspect] was the only occasion since he became Superintendent that a Township officer [in a municipality adjacent to Philadelphia] was forced to take someone's life. At that point in the cross-examination of [claimant's boss], [the trial judge] interrupted Claimant's counsel to make the following remark:

    [Counsel,] are you going to argue that, when a police officer discharges a firearm in pursuit of a suspect, that's an unusual and abnormal working condition? Is that where you're going with this? Because I'm Philadelphia born and raised, I've been living out here for quite a while, and to me, that does not seem, in this area, to be unusual and abnormal.

    Claimant's counsel responded that he was asking about the abnormality not of the need to discharge a firearm but of the need to kill a suspect.

    The pseudo-judge rejects the claim. On administrative appeal, the workers' compensation board affirms by a vote of four to two.

  • On judicial appeal, the appeals panel reverses by a vote of two to one.

    [The pseudo-judge]'s finding that the incident "was a normal-type condition for a police officer who works in the Township" is erroneous for two main reasons. The first is that [the pseudo-judge] focuses on one aspect or another of the incident rather than the full convergence of events. For example, [the pseudo-judge] characterizes the incident as one in which Claimant "discharged his firearm". It has never been Claimant's contention in this case that the incident was abnormal strictly because of the necessity of using his firearm, or even strictly because of the necessity of taking someone's life. To frame it as such is to engage in the flawed reasoning that our Supreme Court cautioned against in Payes II [1 2: breaking the entire incident into component parts, "where each part, standing on its own, might be safely determined to be a 'normal' working condition for a police officer"], because it casts the full incident in a deceptively "normal" light.

    The second reason that [the pseudo-judge]'s conclusion is erroneous is that it is not even supported by the testimony cited as its basis. [Claimant's boss]'s bare assertion that such incidents as [this one] can be normal for a Township police officer is belied by his acknowledgement that there has been no other fatal officer-involved shooting in the Township in the years since he became Superintendent, that Claimant has only discharged his service weapon on 3 or 4 occasions in the past, and that Superintendent has never discharged his own while on duty in his 27 years as a law enforcement officer. [In this incident], Claimant not only discharged his service weapon, but was forced into hand-to-hand combat with [the suspect], placed into a chokehold so aggressive that he was lifted off the ground, was nearly deprived of his duty belt when [the suspect] pulled it away with such force that Claimant's belt loops were torn, and nearly lost control of his service weapon, which placed him in reasonable fear that his own death was imminent. Once Claimant reasserted control of his service weapon, he had to shoot [the suspect] at such close range that he witnessed changes in [the suspect]'s facial expressions and movements in the fabric of his shirt; subsequently, Claimant tried (like the trooper in Payes II) to perform life-saving measures in an attempt to keep the bloodied [suspect] alive but did not succeed. Nowhere in [Claimant's boss]'s testimony is there support for the notion that this chain of events is of a kind that a Township police officer, or any police officer, may normally expect to encounter at the beginning of a workday; to the contrary, his testimony militates against such a conclusion.

    At the outset, we point out that even a strict construction of the Act militates in favor of reversing [the pseudo-judge]'s deeply flawed decision. Thus, while it is true that we have gravitated toward a liberal construction of the Act in order to favor the compensation of workers injured on the job, that principle has no bearing on our holding here. However, we take this opportunity to register our grave concern with [the pseudo-judge]'s cavalier treatment of the facts in this case. This is displayed not only in her written decision but in her interruption of Claimant's counsel at the hearing to editorialize that the discharge of an officer's weapon did not seem to her like an abnormal working condition, based on the utterly irrelevant fact that she is a native of Philadelphia.

    We find [the pseudo-judge]'s outburst to be of particular concern for two key reasons. The first is that the Act's regulations are crystal clear that a [pseudo-judge] is to "conduct fair and impartial hearings" and to "maintain order". [The pseudo-judge] failed to carry out these duties when she disrupted the examination of a witness on a highly sensitive matter in order to provide her own arguments on the Township's behalf. The second reason is that, by focusing on the narrow question of whether the discharge of an officer's weapon is abnormal, [the pseudo-judge] was, again, exhibiting exactly the kind of myopic and distorted view of the incident that our Supreme Court warned against in Payes II.

  • One appeals judge dissents from this conclusion.

    I cannot agree with the Majority that the incident here qualifies as an abnormal working condition sufficient to support benefits under the mental/mental theory of recovery for psychological injuries. I do not discount the facts here or seek to improperly break the event into component parts, "where each part, standing on its own, might be safely determined to be a 'normal' working condition for a police officer", an approach that our Supreme Court denounced in Payes II.

    Acknowledging that this inquiry is both fact-sensitive and a question of law, I believe that this incident, replete with terrible facts that cannot be minimized, remains within the type of event that law enforcement officers unfortunately encounter in the performance of his or her duties. Police officers face the possibility of life-and-death situations every day as a necessary part of their work. Indeed, it is the nature of the danger and trauma inherent in their work that engenders our deep respect for police and other first responders.

    Unlike in Payes II, where the accident [running over a mentally ill jaywalker on an Interstate highway wearing dark clothing at night, and unsuccessfully attempting to resuscitate her while simultaneously directing traffic around the crash site] could have happened to any driver on the highway at that moment, this incident would be highly unlikely in a work context had Claimant not been a law enforcement officer. The cases collected in Payes II bear out this approach. Law enforcement officers have been awarded compensation where "a street gang, in retaliation for the officer killing a gang member in a shootout, placed a bounty on the life or health of the officer and his family" and where an officer was "subjected to false accusations by the chief of police, public airing of those accusations, suspension, termination, and stripping of his duties and authority upon reinstatement and deliberate ostracism instigated by the chief". These were truly abnormal working conditions for a law enforcement officer, not events that were, as the Supreme Court stated in Payes II, "inherent in police work".

    By contrast, the more numerous cases collected in Payes II where benefits have been denied to law enforcement officers all entailed incidents occurring while the claimants were engaged in their law enforcement duties: responding to a call to assist officers who had been shot and seriously injured; involvement in a physical altercation arising from an attempt to serve a domestic violence arrest warrant; fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect followed by a grand jury investigation, indictment, trial and media attention; and involvement in an eighthour standoff involving the officer, other officers, and a barricaded gunman. The facts here fit more within the latter category rather than the former and convince me that this case does not present abnormal working conditions for a police officer in [this municipality].

In a footnote, the appeals-panel majority points out that the state legislature has "fortunately" recently passed a law making further court cases in this vein unnecessary: "A post-traumatic stress injury, when claimed by a first responder, 'shall not be required to be the result of an abnormal working condition to be a compensable injury under this Act'."

A very interesting exchange in the culture-war thread:

I haven't consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn't really serving any purpose for me.

If we don't want porn stars to make money, if we don't want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I'm not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee's graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

Typical-mind fallacy. Maybe you have a wealth of experience and a great imagination, but I have only about three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine well enough to fap to (available upon request), in comparison to the dozens of text, hundreds of video, and thousands of image situations that I have compiled on my computer.

How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?

The three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine are as follows.

(1) IRL, for a dancing unit in high-school gym class I was paired with a hot, somewhat acne-afflicted (Indian) girl. In the fantasy, she has obtained from a genie a wish to be super-hot, but as a tradeoff for the wish she has been cursed with overwhelming horniness, so after gym class she drags me somewhere private and begs me to fuck her.

(2) IRL, in high-school physics class (I don't remember which one—maybe honors, maybe AP, maybe both) a hot, skinny, cargo-pants-wearing (Chinese) girl was included in one of my laboratory groups, and for around a year during college she was a pseudo-friend of mine—not Pseudo-Friend One, whose list of questions is linked above, but Pseudo-Friend Six (1 2 3). In the fantasy, she comes to my house wearing a sundress and invites me to fuck her.

(3) IRL: In my civil-engineering office there was a hot (white) woman just a few years older than I was. At the end of one workday, just after sending a resignation email to upper management*, she pulled me into the office's plan room (filled primarily with dozens of stacked metal cabinets containing hundreds of decades-old as-built plans** and survey field books) to tell me privately that she was resigning.*** In the fantasy, she invites me to fuck her in the plan room before she leaves.

*She was extremely frustrated with upper management. As one example: She was a licensed engineer. Licensed engineers (and licensed surveyors) are as rare as hen's teeth in this particular government employer, because for obtaining a license this employer offers tuition reimbursements but not the salary or promotion incentives that can be found in some other states. A few years ago, instead of instituting a salary incentive, the employer set up a program allowing licensed-engineer employees to volunteer as mentors to help other employees gain licenses (fulfilling the license requirement of several years of experience under a licensed boss), and my coworker volunteered in that program. The program consisted mostly of designing solutions for work orders provided by the operations people. But she discovered that, whenever she told the operations people that a particular work order could not be fulfilled in a standards-compliant manner within the scope of a quick maintenance work order (rather than being put off until it could be included in whichever full-blown "capital program" construction project was scheduled to pass through the area several years in the future), they would just shop the same work order around to different mentors until they found one willing to condone the drawing up of a substandard design that would expose the employer to liability if discovered later. (If a motorist hits a piece of guide rail, is injured, and files a lawsuit, the installing authority has immunity only if the guide rail was designed in accordance with the authority's standards.) She raised this issue in emails with the bigwigs and even in a full meeting with them, but I guess she wasn't satisfied with their response.

**Now that I've retired (since depression made me incapable of tolerating work, even with the medication described in the linked comment), I guess there's no reason for my throwaway account @throwaway20230125 to exist separately from @ToaKraka. (Was there ever a reason? Maybe I'm just paranoid.) So now I can claim the prestige of membership in the AAQC-writers club. Look on my work (singular), ye mighty, and despair.

***I don't know why she felt it necessary to give me special notice in this manner. I don't think we were very close, though we were both acclaimed by others as highly effective employees. In response to her revelation, I just (very nervously, due to the dangerously-secluded situation) said something like: "Okay. If you find resignation necessary, then it's necessary. It's your decision."

Crosspost from >>>/diy/2959736:

>Be me, mid-Atlantic USA
>Hire a homebuilding contractor to build a small custom house (860 ft2; 220 k$ plus permit and utility fees) in a town of 10,000 people
>Project manager sends me a zoning permit application to be signed
>Whoever filled out the PDF didn't write in what zone the lot is in, and didn't include the second page of the permit application. I point this out
>Project manager responds: "It's a minor oversight. I'll finish filling out the form after you sign it. Just trust us! I've got ten years of experience doing this!"
>I again ask for the second page
>The permit application gets sent over again, now with the first page complete and the second page included
>But whoever filled out the second page didn't write in the lot's ID number. I point this out
>Project manager now says there's been a misunderstanding: the contractor helps me fill out permits as a courtesy, but in the end it's my responsibility to complete and file them
>Okay, whatever. I'm an early-retired civil engineer, so I can do it myself if I really need to
>Fill out the applications for zoning, driveway, and fence permits, use QCAD to draft a fully dimensioned copy of the homebuilder's site plan (with the driveway shown—it wasn't in the site plan that the contractor sent to me), and send all four files to the municipality

Am I about to get fucked up the ass by a shitty contractor? Or is it just normal procedure for clients to sign incomplete forms?

Responses from 4channers:

Everyone is a shitty contractor. It balances out because the city inspectors and permit departments are also shitty and don't care what you're doing as long as they get their beak wet.

bingo. its hilarious when you pull property maps and tax docs from them county and half the info is obviously wrong or completely missing yet the county engineer round stamped it

My folks applied for a permit to add a fourth room to our house. The permit got held up cause our houses 'already had 4 rooms'. After reviewing the details it seems the original builder submitted plans, got them approved, and then built a completely different house. After twenty years no one had noticed.

My girlfriends house was built back when no one gave a shit about anything. The septic tank leach lines were basically stubby little nothings because the lot didn't have much of a back yard. It was a wide lot but not deep. The house was a two bed/one bath and they wanted to double that. The county building code put limits on the number of bedrooms based on septic capacity. They said the limit was two based on the septic tank. The system would need a full replacement to bring it up to code. They found another county code that stated that a room was not a bedroom unless it had a closet. They built two 'dens' and a bathroom addition and the county updated their codes the next year to fix that loophole.

I live in a city. We wanted to add an office/bonus building to the back of our lot. The permit and inspection costs were a huge issue. Code said that anything 120 square feet or less was an outbuilding and exempt from permitting, inspections, and even building codes. Ended up building three 120 square foot 'sheds' in a U-shape around a central deck. Code says decks require a permit... if attached to a structure. If they are free standing they don't require one. Power required a permit but that was much less hassle.

Does it count as "abnormal working conditions" for a police officer in a very peaceful municipality to shoot a suspect to death as part of an intense physical struggle?

I'll be honest that's a tough one I don't really have a clear answer to. On one side, that's unlikely to be what they ever had in mind would happen that that day, even with decades of experience. Then, I think how silly it would sound for infantrymen to make the same claim, that having to shoot at people in a warzone is abnormal for a soldier, even if they're from a country that hasn't had a combat deployment in decades. I think on balance I would err on the side of the dissent, no matter how unlikely it is to happen, using deadly force is something police officers train and prepare for as it is a possible outcome of an intervention. If it was so unlikely and abnormal, then they wouldn't be armed at all times in the exercise of their functions, they'd have guns at the station or in their cars for "abnormal" emergencies.

That said it seems a quite a bit shitty to refuse compensation because it would not be "abnormal working conditions" and I'll echo the sigh of relief that that law has been amended, even if I can imagine situations where people abuse those claims or get into jobs they should be gently discouraged to be in due to being a poor emotional fit for it. Hopefully there's other criteria that would stop an EMT from claiming PTSD compensation from simply seeing blood.

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