“You’re hurting me,” Alex Wubbels, a nurse in the burn unit at the University of Utah Hospital, called out, as Jeff Payne, a Salt Lake City police officer, forced her wrists into handcuffs and dragged and shoved her out the hospital door, toward his car. “Then walk,” Payne said. Wubbels had just declined to violate the rights of an unconscious patient (who was not a suspect in a crime), by not allowing the officer to draw his blood. Payne knew that he was not in the right, because Wubbels had shown him a document containing the policy that the hospital had previously worked out with the authorities—no blood without the patient’s consent, a warrant, or an arrest—and had put her supervisor on speakerphone to reiterate it. In a video of the incident, shot from a police body camera, and released by Wubbels’s lawyer late last week, someone protests that Wubbels is just doing her job. “I’m doing my job. She does hers,” Payne replies. He was, essentially, punishing Wubbels for refusing to break the rules as a favor to the police. Is that what he thought each job entailed? Wubbels knew otherwise. She was, like many nurses, tough. (Indeed, she is a former Alpine skier, who competed for the United States in the 1998 and 2002 Olympics.) But, beyond the drama of a confrontation between a good nurse and a bad cop, the incident raises questions about matters ranging from the character of policing to medical privacy and how and when you stand up for a colleague.
The story began on July 26th. That day, the police had engaged in a high-speed chase on a highway that ended with a deadly multi-vehicle crash. But this was not a cinematic case of, say, fugitive armed robbers. It began around 2 P.M., when the police received reports of a Chevrolet Silverado driving erratically. As the officers began their pursuit, the Silverado, now on US-89/91, swerved into a semi truck that happened to be on the road, causing an explosion. The driver of the Silverado, Marco Torres, who was twenty-six, was killed instantly. The truck driver, William Gray—who, in one of this story’s many byways, was a reserve police officer in Rigby, Idaho—staggered out of his semi, his clothes and body on fire. He was airlifted to the burn unit. One might wonder why the police wanted his blood, when he was, essentially, a bystander. The Utah police have said that it was meant for Gray’s protection, but Payne, in his report on the incident, obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune, said that the officers who were dealing with the crash wanted to know whether Gray had any “chemical substances” in his system. Another, troubling possibility could be that they were looking for something that might place some of the responsibility for the crash on Gray, in case he complained that the police had been reckless in their pursuit.
One way or the other, Payne wanted Gray’s blood. (He had been trained as a police phlebotomist.) “I either go away with blood in vials or body in tow,” Payne told Wubbels. Blood does not only indicate whether someone has had a few drinks, smoked marijuana, or used some other drug; it contains an extraordinary amount of information about a person, from genetics to medical conditions that have no effect on driving. The potential level of exposure in a blood test will only increase with future technological developments. That is why the hospital has its rules; that is why patient-privacy laws reflect those restrictions; that is why the Constitution, as the Supreme Court ruled as recently as last year, also forbids what Payne was insisting that Wubbels do. When she asked him, not for the first time, if he had a warrant, he said, “Nope,” in a tone suggesting that it was an irrelevant question. And yet the principles that underlie warrants—freedom from search and seizure, privacy—are the heart of this matter. “She’s the one that has told me no,” Payne said, when a supervisor on speakerphone asked why he was threatening to arrest Wubbels. Payne was not alone with Wubbels, as she shouted, “Help! Help! Somebody help me! Stop! Stop! I did nothing wrong!” Other police officers were at the hospital—three or four of them come and go in the video—and so were members of the University of Utah police, who stand there looking more or less dazed. Some seem to urge Payne to be more gentle, but no one stops him from hurting Wubbels. Paramedics make far more of an effort—one puts a hand on Wubbels’s shoulder until police wave him off, and they ask for the officer’s name and badge number as they call hospital officials for help.
When Wubbels’s lawyer released the video, the response was professions of shock from municipal officials; an apology from the mayor, who called the incident “not a just arrest”; statements that multiple internal investigations were under way; and the announcement that Payne and another member of the department would be placed on administrative leave. The Rigby, Idaho, police thanked Wubbels for protecting Gray’s rights. The hospital called her a “rock star” for defending her patient, and apologized for the failure of its own security officers. But the police had the video all that time—it was shot on the department’s own body cam, after all—and, until the wave of publicity, had allowed Payne to remain on active duty, while taking him off blood-drawing duty. The chief of police acknowledged that he had not even watched the video until Wubbels’s lawyer brought it to light, providing another reminder of the difference a video, and civilian pressure, can make. “This cop bullied me,” Wubbels told the A.P. “And nobody stood in his way.”
It may have been worse than that. Payne’s defense is that his lieutenant, James Tracy, whom he spoke to by phone, had urged him to arrest her. Tracy eventually arrives at the scene in the extended video, and appears to confirm that Payne acted on his instructions. Tracy also further berates Wubbels as she sits, handcuffed, in the police car. He tells her that, while she may be citing hospital rules, he has “the law” on his side, a formulation he repeats to one of the paramedics who approaches the car, saying, “There’s a very bad habit here of your policy interfering with my law.” When Wubbels says that she has an obligation “to my patient,” Tracy says that, if it turns out that the request from the police is in violation of the law, there are “civil remedies” that could come into play later: “If we took his blood illegally, it all goes away.” The implication is that it’s acceptable to violate a person’s rights and then wait and see if someone sues. Wubbels was released only after Tracy determined that the hospital had a sample that could be obtained by warrant later; he then tried to blame Wubbels and her colleagues for not making this clear earlier, although she had patiently reviewed the options. The backup Payne got makes the whole story worse, suggesting, as it does, that this is not a matter of one rogue cop but a structural problem. Indeed, it suggests a need to examine, on many levels, the intersection of the health and criminal-justice systems.
In another segment of video, Payne, who held a second job, with an ambulance service, can be heard talking about how he sometimes brings patients to the university hospital. One of his colleagues remarks that the staff there will not be “very happy” with him. (Indeed, the hospital has now changed its policies to prevent police officers from dealing directly with nurses.) Payne replies that, in that case, “I’ll bring them all the transients and take good patients elsewhere.” Transients are less likely to have health insurance, and thus might cost the hospital money. This might have been just talk—and the ambulance company has now placed Payne on leave—but the idea that such assessments, rather than medical need, might determine which direction an ambulance drives is revealing, and another reminder of the distortions of American medicine. Otherwise, it’s not clear what makes someone a “good patient,” in Payne’s judgment. His treatment of Wubbels, who can be seen in the background as he talks about his ambulance work, still confined to the police car, suggests that, in other circumstances, too, he may not be a good judge of character.
