GateHouse: Football incident highlights problem of workplace violence

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

November 22, 2019

More than a week ago, 67,000 people witnessed, in person, a growing problem in this country - workplace violence.

In this case it was a member of the Cleveland Browns professional football club intentionally striking a co-worker, a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers football club, on the head with an object capable of causing serious bodily injury.

The object was a football helmet weighing between 4 and 6 pounds, swung with considerable force by a man standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 272 pounds.

In Ohio the legislature has defined assault as an act that "recklessly (or) knowingly cause(s) or attempt(s) to cause physical harm to another."

As of this writing, Myles Garrett, the Cleveland Brown who assaulted Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Mason Rudolph, has not been charged.

Garrett and Rudolph are professional athletes. Playing football is their job. They get paychecks, fringe benefits and time off. They go to lunch, they take breaks and they go home to their families every night - just like working men and women do every day nationwide.

They also, at times, face violence from co-workers in the workplace. In 2017, workplace assaults resulted in 18,400 injuries and 458 fatalities. Assaults include obvious violence like shootings, stabbings and bludgeoning as well as hitting, kicking, shoving and beating.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), "The best protection employers can offer is to establish a zero-tolerance policy toward workplace violence against or by their employees." To that end, the NFL did suspend Garrett indefinitely. However, the Cleveland police and the Cuyahoga County prosecutor have done nothing.

Workplace violence, co-worker assault, is commonly prosecuted - even when there are few witnesses and conflicting versions of the event. Recently, on a single day in suburban Philadelphia a 22-year-old man was arrested for hitting a co-worker in the head with a 12-inch metal bar at a construction site. After speaking with all the parties involved, police determined that a verbal altercation turned into a physical altercation.

The same day, Philadelphia police were told that employees of a lawn care business were cutting grass at a home when one of the employees stopped working. The employee was fired. Police said the fired employee hit his supervisor in the back of the head and then four more times in the face. He then kicked him in the face and fled.

This past week, an employee at a Domino's Pizza in Friendswood, Texas assaulted a co-worker who revealed the plot of a recently released movie. The employee was charged with assault after police were called to the shop and interviewed the victim and other employees.

Yet, in this case where a stadium full of people, and millions more witnessed the assault in real-time with many millions more having watched a video of the assault, law enforcement officials have shrugged shoulders.

Prosecutor Michael O'Malley told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that his office was not involved in the incident. Apparently, O'Malley doesn't have a television, computer, iPad or cellphone. He added that he would conduct a review for potential felony charges if the city police or prosecutors ask him to do so.

"If there were to be an investigation, it would be initiated at the city level," O'Malley said in a statement.

Football is a violent game. Every game, enormous men run into one another with great speed and force. Players assume the risk of serious injury every time they step on the field.

However, a quarterback, or any other person at work for that matter, does not assume the risk of being intentionally hit on the head with a dangerous object and ignoring such conduct sends the wrong message.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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NFL 'Players Coalition' pushes for criminal justice reform

The NFL season came to a close on Super Bowl Sunday, with the New England Patriots beating the Los Angeles Rams 13-3.

For the league itself, 2018 was a success. Television ratings were up five percent, with a per game average of 15.8 million viewers.

Several players did continue to protest police brutality and racial inequality during the National Anthem, but on-field activism didn’t define the season. At the same time, activism did continue on in the NFL, reported The Takeaway.

A group known as the Players Coalition, founded by Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins and former Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Anquan Boldin, has pushed the league to donate money towards issues including criminal justice reform and education equity. In 2017, the NFL made a deal with the coalition to donate $89 million to social justice causes over the course of seven years.

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Waldron: A presidential take down on the national anthem

President Donald Trump wants the world to believe his decision to cancel a White House visit from the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles was about the team’s ― and the NFL’s ― supposed refusal to stand for the national anthem. Trump abruptly canceled the visit, via a White House statement on Monday evening, before returning to his favorite medium to drive home his point, wrote Travis Waldron of the Huffington Post.

“Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling. Sorry!” Trump tweeted Monday night, a reference to the NFL’s new policy requiring teams and their players to stand for the national anthem or stay in the locker room while it is played before games. If the new policy was driven by the cowardice of NFL owners who wanted to appease the president, this was the latest sign they had predictably and miserably failed.

But while the Trump tweet was more red meat for his base, it was also a useful reminder that his fight with NFL players ― from the Eagles, or any other team ― has never been about the national anthem or the kneeling itself, no matter his insistence to the contrary.

Only one Eagles player kneeled during the anthem in 2017, before a preseason game in August. That player was cut before the season began, and not a single Philadelphia Eagle kneeled during the anthem through the entirety of the regular season. The Eagles players who protested at all during the anthem stopped once the Players Coalition, of which Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins was a vocal leader, reached an agreement with the NFL in November. No member of the Eagles or any other team protested during the anthem throughout the NFL playoffs this winter. Before the NFL revived the issue with its new policy in May, in fact, it seemed likely that the protests that had taken place over the past two seasons would not have occurred this fall.

So the fact that fewer than 10 of Philadelphia’s 53 players planned to make the trip to Washington was rooted in substantive opposition to the president’s policies, words and actions. As much as Trump would like the dispute to be a culture war skirmish about the anthem and the ungrateful athletes who won’t stand for it, the Eagles players’ renunciation was about his presidency ― and their lack of belief that anything positive could come from a glorified “photo op.” 

Aside from one weekend of symbolic but ultimately toothless protests driven by those same scared NFL owners ― some of whom appeared next to players in a cynical show of “solidarity” against the president’s targeting of their business ― little of the sports world’s opposition to Trump, in fact, has been centered on the anthem. And hardly any of his own actions have actually concerned the song, either. Trump’s fight with the sports figures who have criticized him ― the majority of whom are black ― is not about what takes place during 100 seconds of music, but about power and fealty, and his belief that NFL players and other black athletes are displaying too much of one and not enough of the other.

This should have been clear from Trump’s “cancellation” of a White House visit the Golden State Warriors never planned to make last year, after superstar Stephen Curry criticized the president. It should have been clear from the White House’s fight with ESPN anchor Jemele Hill shortly thereafter, or from Trump’s blasting of LaVar Ball. No one on the Warriors had protested during the anthem; neither had Hill or Ball.

Instead, they had challenged the president over the views he had espoused and the policies he had sought to enact; they had pointed out (correctly) that many of those policies were based in racism and white supremacy; they had refused, in Ball’s case, to show deference to a president who hadn’t actually done anything to help Ball free his son from potential incarceration in China.

That hasn’t stopped Trump’s supporters and even some in the media ― especially, but not only, his friends at Fox News ― from adopting Trump’s frame that the problem with the Eagles, and with the NFL, is that this is a legitimate dispute over proper anthem protocol. But the anthem is not the issue here. Not for the majority of the NFL’s protesters, who like Jenkins want to talk about racial inequality, a racist criminal justice system, or the nearly 400 black Americans who have been killed by police since Colin Kaepernick first began his demonstration nearly two years ago. And not for Trump, who along with Vice President Mike Pence has bastardized the anthem for his own political ends, blatantly committing the same perceived crime the players stand accused of.

For the president, who may or may not even know the words to the song, the anthem is only a useful weapon in his broader campaign of silencing black athletes, black sports figures and black people who would dare challenge him. At bottom, it has nothing to do with who is and isn’t kneeling for the anthem. It’s about who is and isn’t kneeling to him.

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What's up with Eagles fans assaulting horses?

For the second week in a row, someone was charged with punching a police officer and his horse at Lincoln Financial Field on the day of a Philadelphia Eagles playoff game, reported the Los Angeles Times.

On Sunday, the incident took place while fans were tailgating outside the Linc about three hours before the Eagles hosted the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC championship game, according to WTXF-Fox 29 in Philadelphia.

A mounted Pennsylvania State Police corporal attempted to disperse a crowd in Parking Lot M, but a man identified as Andrew Tornetta became verbally combative and refused to leave, police said. According to police, the officer grabbed Tornetta by the clothing in an attempt to maintain control, and the man punched the horse twice in the right front shoulder and then hit the officer just below his eye.

Tornetta then slipped out of his sweatshirt and attempted to flee into the crowd but was caught, according to police. His charges include aggravated assault, simple assault and recklessly endangering another person.

Last week, Eagles fan Taylor Hendricks was ejected from the Eagles' divisional round game against the Atlanta Falcons for being intoxicated and not having a ticket, according to WTXF. On his way out of the Linc, Hendricks reportedly approached a mounted officer and repeatedly punched the horse in the face and neck before hitting the officer in the legs.

Neither the officer nor the horse was injured, according to Philadelphia magazine.

Hendricks is charged with aggravated assault, taunting a police animal, simple assault and trespassing, according to court records.

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Dr. Omalu of 'Concussion' resigns medical examiner's job under protest

Dr. Bennet Omalu of NFL concussion fame, announced his resignation as San Joaquin County’s chief medical examiner. Omalu’s colleague Susan Parson also resigned. In California the sheriff also serves as the coroner. Under Sheriff Steve Moore, they said, the county has failed to adequately investigate deaths in the county.

Hands chopped off bodies; corpses left to deteriorate; doctors pressured to classify officer-involved deaths as accidents rather than homicides: The two pathologists have been documenting events inside the Sheriff-Coroner’s operation for months. The pair publicly released more than 100 pages of memos this week detailing their allegations, in addition to sending them to the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors and the county district attorney in a push for a broader investigation.

 “The sheriff does whatever he feels like doing as the coroner, in total disregard of bioethics, standards of practice of medicine and the generally accepted principles of medicine,” Omalu wrote in a memo dated Aug. 22.

Omalu is a nationally recognized forensic pathologist best known for his work on concussion-related brain injuries sustained by many football players. He is also a volunteer associate clinical professor at the University of California, Davis. His work was turned into the 2015 film “Concussion,” starring Will Smith as Omalu.

“The sheriff is interfering with the doctors’ ability to do their job and he is trying to influence their decisions,” said Patricia Hernandez, the union representative for both Omalu and Parson, who declined to be interviewed. “I would call it rogue mismanagement.”

San Joaquin County Sheriff’s office public information officer Dave Konecny did not return a call for comment. Moore posted a statement on Facebook on Nov. 28 that said he takes “my job extremely seriously.”

“As Coroner, the law requires me to make the final determination in the manner of death of each case processed here at the Office,” Moore wrote. “I want to make it clear that at no time did I attempt to control or influence (Parson’s) professional judgment and conclusions.”

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