A Stitch in Haste

For those who were righteously indignant after reading my recent post about an incident involving some California educrats and law enforcement officials maliciously tormenting students by falsely informing them that their classmates had been killed in DUI accidents ("we want them to be traumatized"), may I offer you a denouement?

An unsuspecting mother was accused by hospital staff taking part in a security exercise of stealing a baby from a ward as she left the building with her new daughter.

Clare Bowker, 37, was confronted by staff as she got into her car outside Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands [U.K.]. She was asked to accompany them to the maternity unit with Hannah, her seven-week-old baby, and her other daughter Holly, then four, where she was told a baby had been snatched. Mrs Bowker was questioned by police and her bag searched to verify her identity.
...
A distressed Mrs Bowker was allowed to leave the hospital after 40 minutes, still believing the situation was real.
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The Good Hope Hospital Trust has agreed to pay her undisclosed compensation, believed to be a five-figure sum, to cover her suffering and loss of earnings.

It would tempting to simply observe, without elaboration, that this was a British socialized medicine facility and be done with it. But correlation does not imply causation. It's also not clear why the December 2005 incident is only being reported now. One should also note that the hospital in question is now managed by a different NHS trust that insists it was simply a case of mistaken identity (i.e., they thought the mother was a willing participant in the exercise). As if the difference between "intentional" and "negligent" were equivalent to the difference between "reasonable" and "outrageous."

Meanwhile, and more akin to the DUI hoax: Is it fair to the staff (the target of the ruse) to stage such exercises, even when executed as planned (i.e., without cases of mistaken identity)? When my employer runs a fire drill, we're told it's a fire drill, not a fire. Why traumatize the staff by lying about a baby-snatching -- is the added panic-induced adrenaline (not to mention tears) somehow helpful?

(And does the expression "boy who cried wolf" mean anything to these bureaucrats?)

One tangential observation that I also take away from these incidents is the fallacy that local decision-making tends to be better. Utter nonsense. Local authorities are far more likely to make decisions in a vacuum and to be staffed with incompetents (because the less-incompetent have moved on to higher positions).

Moreover, the smaller the group, the easier it becomes for a potentially tyrannical majority to arise within the group (e.g., it is far easier for a theocrat to insist that "this is a Christian town" than "this is a Christian nation"). Better for the sheep to be a minority in the zoo generally than in the wolf den specifically.

In any case, let's hope that such incidents of idiocy remain isolated and newsworthy rather than business as usual.

(Via Socialized Medicine.)