www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-the-utah-good-nurse-bad-cop-video-says-about-medical-privacy
The second officer, Tracy, who browbeat Wubbels while she sat in the car, was apparently the one who urged Payne to arrest her. Then he arrived to preside over the sorry spectacle.
...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.”...
...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.