Minneapolis Oversight Board Says Police Department Should Ditch 'Excited Delirium' Training

from the GTFO dept

Excited delirium isn't a medical condition. It's just post-death rationalization that shifts the culpability for deaths at the hands of law enforcement to the corpses the cops created. This supposed medical diagnosis didn't reach critical mass until the introduction of one of the most infamous "less-lethal" weapons ever created: the Taser.

Taser is a cattle prod for humans. But it has never been extensively tested on humans for obvious reasons: it has the capacity to be lethal. Taser has since rebranded as Axon, but its legacy lives on. And some of that legacy is the mainstream law enforcement adoption of "excited delirium" as the x factor in officer-involved killings that involve multiple or prolonged deployments of Taser's modified stun gun.

Taser may have distanced itself from its only-slightly-less-lethal weapon, but there's no escaping the death toll. And there's no escaping Taser's culpability in these deaths -- a company that has lawyered itself up to the teeth and hired a shitload of medical experts to find any other reason than the most obvious for deaths in custody. Let's not forget what inspired Taser and (kind of) gave it its product name: Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, a young adult novel that featured a main character who carried a weapon that was anything but "less lethal."

Of foremost notice is Swift's invention of the electric rifle, a gun which fires bolts of electricity. The electric rifle can be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality; it can shoot through solid walls without leaving a hole, and is powerful enough to kill a rampaging whale, as in their steamer trek to Africa. With the electric rifle, Tom and friends bring down elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo, and save their lives several times in pitched battle with the red pygmies. It also can discharge a globe of light that was described as being able to maintain itself, like ball lightning, making hunting at night much safer in the dark of Africa.

"Pitched battles with red pygmies." "Making hunting ... safer in the dark of Africa." Hmm. Problematic, to say the least. From those beginnings flows a marketing wing that got this weapon in the hands of law enforcement all over the world -- one that had the capacity to kill but was sold as "less than lethal." This marketing led cops to believe it could be deployed as often or as long as possible without killing people. But it did kill people, and when it did, Taser sent lawyers, NDAs, and its own medical experts to combat lawsuits against law enforcement officers.

Its lawyers and medical experts arrived in court with the novel theory that "excited delirium" had actually caused these deaths. The experts pointed to problems officers encountered subduing people and made the most of any illegal substances found in the systems of victims of police violence.

Years after the damage has been done, things may be changing. There's enough criticism of the "excited delirium" medical theory -- one not accepted by most medical regulation and oversight boards -- that police oversight entities are starting to push back. In Minneapolis, Minnesota -- ground zero for the latest nationwide protests against police brutality -- a police oversight board has stated its unwillingness to allow officers to continue blaming police violence victims for their own deaths.

This is notable because Tasers weren't involved in the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd (suspected of nothing more than passing a counterfeit $20 bill) by police officer Derek Chauvin. The killing here was committed by Officer Chauvin, who placed his knee on the neck of the black man in perhaps the most unsubtle depiction of systemic police racism engaged in by a cop. He did this for more than nine minutes -- and for more than three minutes after another officer failed to detect a pulse.

The excited delirium theory was in play as Chauvin defended himself in court. His lawyer suggested this unrecognized "medical condition" contributed more to Floyd's death than the asphyxiation caused by the officer's knee to his neck. This faux medical condition has also been used by Minneapolis cops to suggest the use of ketamine by EMS responders -- a tactic that has led to even more in-custody deaths.

The Minneapolis Police Conduct Oversight Commission -- with input from the medical community -- is strongly suggesting the PD walk away from this oft-abused excuse for in-custody deaths, citing both its questionable history as a medical condition as well as its tendency to be deployed to excuse the killing of minorities.

A Minneapolis police oversight board has recommended the police department replace what the board calls “outdated training” about excited delirium, a controversial medical diagnosis that police say can give people “superhuman” strength.

The diagnosis has not been recognized by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association or World Health Organization, but has been widely used by police to justify force and explain deaths of people in custody.

[...]

Abigail Cerra, chair of the PCOC, wrote to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo recommending that MPD re-educate officers on the issue, especially given the city will be hiring more than 100 police officers in 2022.

Good. And this request should receive no pushback from the Minneapolis Police Department. I mean, it probably will but the PD and the medical professionals contributing to the PD's training have already disavowed use of this "diagnosis."

Dr. Nicholas Simpson, chief medical director at Hennepin EMS, told the Minneapolis Police Conduct Oversight Commission earlier this month that Hennepin EMS and the Minnesota Department of Human Services are no longer using “excited delirium” in their practice and education. Hennepin EMS physicians have been revising medical training materials for law enforcement officers, including the Minneapolis Police Department.

According to the mayor, the PD has removed "excited delirium" training from officer education courses. If true, then the PCOC's request will be adopted without argument. If untrue, the PD will start pushing back. Documents posted by the PCOC include "excited delirium" training presentations -- documents the Minneapolis PD has yet to confirm have been removed from its training programs.

Let's hope they have. The presentations argue that "excited delirium" sufferers -- ones most often diagnosed after being declared dead following interactions with police officers -- have both "superhuman strength" and the tendency to die at the drop of a Taser/knee. The sooner cops stop pretending "excited delirium" is nothing more than a convenient post-facto justification for unjustified deadly force, the sooner more people with start surviving their "interactions" with law enforcement.

Filed Under: excited delirium, minneapolis, police

Cops And Paramedics Are Still Killing Arrestees By Shooting Them Up With Ketamine

from the i-guess-it's-ok-if-it's-not-on-purpose? dept

Cops -- and the paramedics who listen to their "medical advice" -- are still killing people. A couple of years ago, an investigation by the Minneapolis PD's Office of Police Conduct Review found officers were telling EMS personnel to inject arrestees with ketamine to calm them down. This medical advice followed street-level diagnoses by untrained mental health unprofessionals who've decided the perfect cure for "excited delirium" is a drug with deadly side effects.

People have been "calmed" to death by ketamine injections -- ones pushed by police officers and carried out by complicit paramedics. The cases reviewed by the OPC included potentially dangerous criminals like jaywalkers and disrespecters of law enforcement ("obstruction of justice"). Multiple recordings showed arrestees shot up with ketamine shortly before their hearts stopped or they ceased breathing.

This incredibly dangerous practice of using ketamine to sedate arrestees hasn't slowed down. Instead, it has spread. What was a horrific discovery in Minneapolis is still day-to-day business elsewhere in the country. Cops and paramedics in Colorado are still putting peoples' lives at risk by using ketamine as their go-to sedative.

Police stopped Elijah McClain on the street in suburban Denver last year after deeming the young Black man suspicious. He was thrown into a chokehold, threatened with a dog and stun gun, then subjected to another law enforcement tool before he died: a drug called ketamine.

Paramedics inject it into people like McClain as a sedative, often at the behest of police who believe suspects are out of control. Officially, ketamine is used in emergencies when there’s a safety concern for medical staff or the patient. But it's increasingly found in arrests and has become another flashpoint in the debate over law enforcement policies and brutality against people of color.

An analysis by The Associated Press of policies on ketamine and cases where the drug was used during police encounters uncovered a lack of police training, conflicting medical standards and nonexistent protocols that have resulted in hospitalizations and even deaths.

McClain was killed because paramedics assumed he weighed nearly twice as much as he actually did. They gave him an inadvertent double dose that triggered cardiac arrest. Soon after that, McClain was declared brain dead and removed from life support. McClain was killed for the crime of being suspicious in public (cops were responding to a call about a "suspicious person wearing a ski mask and waving their arms.") And he was killed by the people who were supposed to ensure his health and safety.

After his death, Colorado's health department attempted to investigate law enforcement use of ketamine. That investigation appears to have fallen apart before it could really get started. As the AP report points out, there are no uniform reporting requirements for ketamine deployment -- not at any level of government. State requirements are different from federal requirements. Consequently, there's no cohesive collection of data on this drug's use.

Unfortunately, most government guidelines agree cops can use a particularly worthless term to justify the use of the sedative.

Most states and agencies say ketamine may be administered when someone exhibits “excited delirium” or agitation, which is typically associated with chronic drug abuse, mental illness or both.

Even if "excited delirium" was a mental health condition recognized by a large number of medical and mental health entities and governing bodies (spoiler alert: it isn't), police officers aren't qualified to make diagnoses and recommend sedatives after limited interactions with people they're trying to arrest. But government bodies have already issued this permission slip to cops and they use it as often as they can. It's a diagnosis that rarely comes from anyone but a law enforcement officer or official.

The drug is only safe when deployed in controlled settings by healthcare professionals. Even then, there may be complications due to preexisting conditions. Turning it into a tool of arrest tradecraft eliminates all the expertise and replaces it with expedience. It may not go wrong every time. But it goes wrong often enough -- and with deadly consequences -- that no one should feel comfortable allowing law enforcement and EMS crews to make off-the-cuff decisions about its use.

There were 902 reported instances of Colorado paramedics administering ketamine from 2018 to 2020, and almost 17% had complications, including cardiac arrest and oxygen deprivation, the state health department said.

If it increases the chances of death, everyone involved should steer clear of it. EMS personnel are supposed to be lifesavers, not deathbringers. The same goes for cops. Just because someone's uncooperative doesn't mean they need to be subjected to something that could kill them. That a 17% failure rate hasn't slowed this practice down shows how little cops and their first responder buddies care about the lives of people in handcuffs.

Filed Under: ems, excited delirium, ketamine, police

Law Enforcement Training: People Saying 'I Can't Breathe' Are Just Suffering From 'Excited Delirium'

from the dying-in-custody-is-just-a-tragic-side-effect-of-being-previously-alive dept

"I am worried about excited delirium or whatever."

- Officer Thomas Lane to Officer Derek Chauvin as Officer Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Police officers are not "worried" about "excited delirium." This supposed mental health condition -- which isn't recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, or the World Health association -- exists mainly to exonerate police officers who have subdued an arrestee to death. A majority of people who die from "excited delirium" do so in police custody.

Dr. Michael Freeman, a professor of forensic medicine at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has been researching this law enforcement-centered cause of death.

Freeman’s research team currently has a paper in the process of being published that reviews scientific studies comparing excited delirium with cases of agitated delirium syndrome — a medical diagnosis that gets applied more by doctors treating a person who lived, while excited delirium is primarily used by forensic pathologists examining a person who died.

While both syndromes present with roughly the same symptoms, Freeman’s team found that restraint was used in 90 percent of the cases that turned out to be fatal. Only 2 percent of fatal cases involved no restraints. (The rest were unknown.) Forceful restraints such as manhandling or hog-tying were also significantly more likely in fatal cases.

It's not the "excited delirium" that kills people. It's the force deployed by officers. And when those officers need to be cleared for their excessive force use, "excited delirium" is there to take the blame.

The officer mentioning it during the George Floyd killing shows how much "excited delirium" has become an exonerative mantra for law enforcement -- just like the chanting of "stop resisting" to excuse the continued assault of an unresisting arrestee.

Training materials obtained by Mitch Kotler from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department show how officers are being given a ready excuse to use for in-custody deaths. The PowerPoint presentation [PDF] stretches the definition of "excited delirium" to cover nearly any abnormal behavior officers might encounter, as well as excuse nearly any use of force deployed in response.

There are six slides listing "symptoms" of excited delirium, which includes everything from dilated pupils to "easily distracted" to "extreme agitation" to muscle rigidity. On the fifth slide, there's this supposed symptom:

Says "I can't breathe", "I'm dying", "You're killing me."

Well, that's super-handy, considering how many people who've told officers they can't breathe soon stop breathing. And of this expansive list of so-called "behaviors," George Floyd only exhibited this one: telling officers he couldn't breathe. This sign of distress was ignored by Officer Derek Chauvin until Floyd stopped breathing.

As if six pages of catch-all mental illness symptoms wasn't enough to create an aura of excited delirium around anyone not acting "normal," the presentation then throws in a handful of drugs and the suggestion that literally any genetic variation can make any non-cop a potential sufferer of excited delirium.

Cocaine
Methamphetamine
Alcohol
Mental Disease
Genetics (Polymorphism)

Once the presentation has finished delivering a list of ways to turn arrestees into excited delirium sufferers, it then tells officers how they can use this broadly-defined health condition to excuse excessive force deployment.

Excited Delirium deaths have historically been blamed on:

Taser
OC [oleoresin capsicum, a.k.a. pepper spray]
Positional Asphyxia
Pressure on thorax (back)

There's a reason Taser is listed first. Taser (now Axon) has pushed for coroners and law enforcement agencies to use this term for in-custody deaths rather than something more descriptive and accurate like, say, "electrocuted." Taser has sued coroners who have declared Taser use to be a contributor to someone's death. And when it wasn't suing coroners and medical examiners, it was trying to intimidate them into retracting or altering reports.

Several coroners have also reported being challenged by Taser, says Jentzen. Among them was a Cook County, Ill., medical examiner who ruled Taser shocks contributed to the death of a 54-year-old man in 2005. Taser dismissed the autopsy report as not credible and said the medical examiner was unqualified. The company demanded a judicial review.

Taser also has asked coroners to reverse opinions. An Anderson, S.C., deputy coroner said Taser representatives showed up in his office on the same day that he ruled Taser shocks contributed to a man's death in 2004.

Taser had its own theory about in-custody deaths linked to Taser use:

Taser advocates an alternative cause-of-death scenario called excited delirium. The condition, which is not recognized as a diagnosis in official medical manuals, is used to describe deaths of suspects who become so agitated by drugs, psychosis or poor health that their bodies shut down during struggles with police.

Years later, Taser's concerted effort to avoid wrongful death suits has paid off. Law enforcement agencies have bought into the "excited delirium" narrative and turned it into a key part of police culture. It's a built-in excuse that's backed by very little science -- a mental health condition that seems to be triggered most often by the presence of police officers.

This presentation treats excited delirium as two things it can't possibly be simultaneously: a serious mental health condition to be handled cautiously by officers and a go-to scapegoat for any deaths officers cause while deploying force against people they've decided are too deliriously excited to be handled with actual care or concern. Cops see it for what it is. And that's why cops in the process of killing someone they're just trying to arrest say things about being "worried" about "excited delirium." They've already been given the script and the motivation for their characters. All they have to do is deliver their lines.

Filed Under: excited delirium, i can't breathe, police, police brutality, police training, police violence
Companies: axon