I changed the photo to prevent this misconception. I fear that I may have received more sympathy and readership because of the false notion that I'm the attractive female in the photo. You can see me in the photo where I'm being loaded into the van. I'm a Soviet born Jew who immigrated to the US in the late 80s. At the time, I also had a beard. Here is a more flattering photo of me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgoralnick/6128547691/in/photos...
I (the author) understand the comments above and the reasonable skepticism about my self interest in portraying only one side of the story. I'm not an angel. This was avoidable. I can even understand the police perspective and sympathize with the difficulty of their job. For full transparency, I'm preparing a followup post with all of the assembled documentation, including the police report. And yet, this still should not have happened.
But at the time, it was all very sudden. I was being yelled at while my friend (and co-founder of a yc company) was being manhandled. The fact that I was "obstructing with the emergency response" didn't enter the realm of possibility, as I was on the periphery of the scene and far away from the medics. The fact that I was at risk of being arrested didn't cross my mind until the moment I was tackled from behind.
I tried to resolve my issue directly with the police. Mediation would have quelled my anger. Only when I felt that I wasn't being heard, I published. I didn't expect 365k views (and counting).
I think that these situations are common, but rarely do the victims take the time to write the story in full detail. I've seen it happen to others, and felt powerless to interject. And now that it happened to me, I felt an obligation to do my best to write it as accurately as possible. In the least, it's an anthropological case study, and I hope you felt it was an informative story that was worth your reading time.
SFist contacted the SFPD for comment. Spokesman Albie Esparza explains that Partensky was arrested for interfering, resisting arrest, and public intoxication. According to police, he was both drunk and disruptive as police and fire department medical personnel arrived, he was told several times by officers to back up and remove himself. "If someone calls 911," Esparza says, "They are expected only to be a good witness, and to obey anything they're told to do by arriving officers." During Partensky's ensuing detention, one officer sustained an injury when Partensky swung his elbow and struck the officer in the eye. That there probably led to his subsequent poor treatment, though Esparza says he can not comment on what happened while Partensky was in the custody of the Sheriff's Department overnight.
I too understand the scepticism. But I cannot condone the insult. Sure, what happened to you was avoidable. But not just by you. From the look of it, you bear very little responsibility there. Your biggest mistake was in your model of the cops: you assumed they were trustworthy, and could be reasoned with. Some were not.
I would have made the same mistake. So, thanks for the tip. Your story was definitely worth reading.
Likewise. Bet you didn't have to bribe the Russian secret police in kaz, though! Much tougher crowd. Surprised you got pulled up over an expired visa - have seen people get in and out with no visa, just a wad of cash.
I sincerely hope you sue and get paid an exorbitant amount of money for your trouble. You were kidnapped and held without charge, abused and lord knows what else.
Trying out a new platform. I had some support from the editors. It looks nice. I wanted to get it off my chest and it was a path of least resistance. Some other outlets wanted me to do much more rewriting.
@trevore - great to see you on the thread! There are a lot of questions raised here that are hard to answer, but I can share a troubling observation. Of all the US personnel I have met in Afghanistan, fewer than a handful were engineers, makers, creators rather than enforcers, money dispensers, or supervisors. Sure, the military has its own engineers, but very few are outside the wire interacting with people. Where are the civil communication, construction, mechanical, etc. engineers? I think there is a larger role in global peer to peer diplomacy for such a cadre. I've got more stories to tell, so does @trevore, some of them are posted jalalagood.com/ --> more will come out guided by the questions you ask.
