harm was caused anyway and marcus would be here if the people responding to the situation hadn’t treated him like a wild dangerous animal instead of someone in need of aid.
We'll just have to agree to disagree, then. Marcus is responsible for his death, because Marcus took the cocaine. Being put into handcuffs, by itself, doesn't cause cardiac arrest. And a person who is out of their mind on drugs IS a wild and dangerous individual, as demonstrated by Marcus' injuring himself while in the police vehicle.
marcus, (“drugged out of his mind”, as you put it) would’ve been in no position to take full responsibility for his actions regardless given that he wasn’t lucid.
Using your logic then, we shouldn't charge people with DUIs, because they're not in control of their faculties because they're drunk, so it's not their fault that they drove while drunk and broke the law... Do you see how stupid that sounds? If a person can't be responsible for their own actions because of substances THEY ELECT TO TAKE, then when can they held responsible for their actions? How on earth is it the police's fault that a person with a heart problem took a stimulant that is well known to cause heart attacks in HEALTHY people??
all i’m saying is that the way you’re presenting this makes it seem as if Marcus dying was an inevitability and a simple mistake rather than evidence that the way the cops handle people is overly-aggressive, lacking empathy and dangerously fatal.
I'm saying that the police did what ANY REASONABLE person would do when dealing with a potentially violent, dangerous person. It's not like they did all of this without calling an ambulance. They didn't handcuff him at first, they just put him in the squad car so that he wouldn't run around or run into traffic. They can't know what he will or won't do, because he is high on cocaine and ecstasy and clearly experiencing some issues. The police were trying to keep him safe. While in the squad car, MARCUS began hurting himself and damaging the squad car. Destruction of property is a crime, and he was a danger to himself, so they restrained/handcuffed him. Again, they were doing their job and trying to keep Marcus safe from himself. It's not overly-aggressive, it wasn't lacking empathy, and it's not demonstrably fatal. Hand cuffs do not cause cardiac arrest, show me another case of someone dying from a heart attack because they were put into handcuffs. But taking cocaine ABSOLUTELY can.
All that being said, the city shouldn't be paying a settlement because the police did nothing inappropriate that they wouldn't have done to any other person who was acting the way Marcus was, and it's not the police's fault that Marcus decided to take cocaine. Was his death an inevitability? Maybe, we can't know that. For all we know, he would've gone into cardiac arrest whether they had handcuffed him or not. I can't blame the police for restraining him when he was incapable of restraining himself and had become a potentially violent threat to the people who were there, trying to help him.