Officer Daniel Auderer said the city of Seattle should just “write a check” to the family of killed 23-year-old.
A Seattle police officer has been caught on bodycam footage laughing at and making fun of the death of a young woman who was struck and killed by a cop responding to a call in his cruiser. In the two-minute-long video, reported on by The New York Post, we can hear Officer Daniel Auderer — who serves as the Seattle Police Guild’s Vice President — saying the dead 23-year-old grad student had “limited value” and the city should “just write a check.”
The footage takes place in Auderer’s police cruiser as he drives around city streets and discusses the wreck involving Jaahnavi Kandula over the phone with an unknown person whom we never hear. Kandula was struck and killed by his colleague, Officer Kevin Dave, in late January of this year.
There was some deeply downvoted comment on this in a post yesterday, and I initially was like “wtf no” but this time I decided to click and really listen to the conversation. And now I think that downvoted commenter was onto something.
To paraphrase the statement that got downvoted: “This dialog sounds like an officer who, in a grim and traumatizing line of work, turns to dark humor to laugh instead of wanting to give up. This is common for medical workers too - they see so much of the worst moments in human life that their humor would crush & nauseate the rest of us. But humor is a way to share trauma and camaraderie.”
His tone clearly changes in response to some joke the other caller made. These statements sound every part of some dark bit he’s playing out with the caller.
If you believe it’s vile and unprofessional to make light of this situation (I do), that’s very valid.
But there are a lot of comments here acting like this person truly believes in the limited value of the victim or something. On some level, yea, police are problematically numb to the value of human lives. But I wouldn’t pretend this guy is celebrating the tragedy in this conversation.
I’m a fan of gallows humor, enjoy cracking the joke that makes other people aghast, but my jokes (all modesty aside) would have some twisted element of humor, and the cop’s cracks do not.
What’s most striking to me is that no time had lapsed — his unfunny jokes weren’t the next day or the next week, they came quite quickly after the wreck, where a young woman had been killed.
Can’t find any benefit of the doubt. Officer Daniel Auderer’s remarks reveal who Officer Daniel Auderer is. So does this earlier, better coverage.
It was the same night??? :( Nevermind.