As we answered the nine to one one called, and we see the police
call, and we see the ambulance that has decided that it's going to roll
up. We get to the point. The Associated Press investigate over one thousand
cases of unintentionally fatal interventions by police between twenty twelve and twenty twenty one and
found that sedative administration took place prior to ninety four of those deaths, nearly
ten percent of non firearm police subdued deaths in that time period. AP's investigation
discovered a disproportionate impact on black individuals, with administering providers as well as medical
examiners citing excited delirium as the reason for administration and as the cause of death
after the fact, a diagnosis that is starting to come under contest by medical
experts. The article also points to the lack of scrutiny when sedatives are administered
prior to police involved civilian deaths, where focus remains on police actions rather than
on medical interventions. The story is from AP News by Ryan J. Foley,
Karla K. Johnson, and Shelby Lum on April twenty six, twenty
twenty four. It's yeah difficult. It was difficult leading. It was,
Yeah, and I took a special interest in this one because I worked in
EMS before I used to be in EMT, and it talked a lot about
police directing the administration of sative and especially ketamine or just controlled narcotics in general.
And I don't ever remember, you know, working with a law enforcement
officer that would ever have like dictated how a medic should you know, provide
care to a patient, or a medic that would have listened. So a
lot of this was really shocking for me to read and and and and learn
about. So if I can jump in for six, so if I read
this just to get to the heart of the article. Basically, when police
are arresting an individual and the individual is not complying, what I understand here
is that the police are using drugs to sedate the person to make it easier
to control them. Is that center it right? That's how I understood it.
But it was it was the narcotics administered by the e M s,
the you know, the paramedics to show up on scene. Is how at
least how it because at least in areas where I've worked, there was no
police agencies that have been trained in narcotic administration and all. That's purely a
paramedic thing. E mts don't do that. That's paramedics. So whether there's
advanced cmts, but by and large, you know, so to speak,
So that's sort of where where it's coming from. So it was the paramedic
aspect of it that I really sort of took a special interest in. But
I have so much I could say about this, Phoebe, But what do
you want to It reminds me not police, you know, administering these drugs
and stuff, But it reminds me of a case that came out of Utah
where a woman was a where a nurse refused police access to a patient who
had been involved in the current acident. Police officer walked in and said,
I have to take a blood sample. He said, I must take a
blood sample. I must take a blood sample. Nope, you have to
get a warrant. And he went, no, I must take a blood
sample, and it escalated and nestigated. She refused, and she got arrested
by him because the police officer believed he was above the law, believed what
he said went And that seems very much the case here. The police officer
feels I'm above the law. The law doesn't apply to me. And that's
why there are so many things wrong with the police situation in the United States.
First one, as a legally trained person is qualified immunity. Qualified immunity
means that police officers think they have an unmitigated, unfettered right to make up
the law and behave like bullies. Second one, I suppose a sense of
pregmatism. Would it be phoebe Well, yeah, it's a sense of superiority.
Almost. I have qualified immunity because I'm a police officer. I couldn't
do as I please because I'm a police officer. They need taking down a
peg or two. And the bottom is and I wouldn't normally say this is
that they trade union is the problem for turn order of police is the problem
because they stop accountability of the police, They threaten lawsuit, and they reduce
the training that goes on, and it just leads the situations where things of
this nature go on and on and on, and everyone gets angry when it
happens, but nothing ever changes. Rodney King happened, George Floyd happened.
I mean, Scott, you have lived through these things in America. Not
you personally, but you've literally these events occur. Is this a shock to
you to read this? You know, it's in one respect it is a
shock. It's a shocking story. It's a it's a it's a it's shocking
in that it's painful and frightening and angering and sad that this kind of thing
is happening. It's not shot, it's not surprising, it's not unexpected.
In fact, as the math guy here, I felt like obligated to look
up some stats here. So in I looked up police killings, okay,
and so I found Prison Policy Initiative. They gathered data from ten wealthy countries
Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway and the US, and in twenty nineteen, US police killed
one thousand and ninety nine civilians. In second place was Canada with thirty six.
Okay, So clearly there's something happening here in the United States that's different
than the rest of the world. In addition to that, the same in
a different study, I saw that the rate is increasing. Between twenty thirteen
and twenty twenty three, the number of police killings in a year went from
one thy seventy nine and twenty thirteen to one thousand, three hundred and fifty
two and twenty twenty three. That's a twenty five percent an increase in ten
years. So I think what we can learn here is that there's something fundamentally
different in the way that the police in the United States interact with the public
when we're comparing to other wealthy countries and so on one hand, we could
say that there's some bad apples out there, and I'm sure that's the case,
but I think the data shows that the problem is systemic, and in
order to solve the systemic problem, we're going to need a systemic solution.
Now what that solution is, you know, I think that's that's up for
debate. But it's clearly something is different in the United States than elsewhere in
the world. You're on mute phoebe. In Britain, we have non lethal
ways of dealing with this. So when somebody is, you know, acting
violently, they are restrained with certain things, so they'll have you know,
their legs will be bound together, it'll be handcuffed. If they're spitting them
have a spit hood. You're one reach in Britain for the nearest bottle of
ketamine to go. What what our doctor and police officers and medics doing here
injecting people with random medication, randomly injecting medication into people that you don't know
what reaction is going to happen, and you could be killing somebody with an
allergic reaction to that. I mean, I can't speak for America, I
definitely can't speak for Australia, but that does seem like something that you shouldn't
be doing. Hmm yeah, yeahe Some police in some jurisdiction seem very punitive
to willing to sedate people who are in reality posing no threat, especially when
they're aurea restrained. And I think the George Floyd footage is a good is
a good example of that. And just listen to this. Relating back to
the Australian experience and in particular the state of Victoria back in the eighties and
nineties, in the State of Victoria, the Armed Robbery Squad, the Armed
Robbery Squad of the Victoria Police were very much shoot first, to ask questions
later, and that's if the guy survived. And basically what then happened was
that the the crooks basically ambushed police and started killing police back in revenge,
and so became this like tit for tat where you know, there were dead
bodies, you know, dead bodies, broken families, all all this kind
of stuff in the name of justice, in the name of catching the crooks.
And I think there has to be a line where you know, you
shouldn't have to break the law to enforce the law. I mean, do
you process in America exactly? And a lot of And the problem is is
that if you if you're killing or injuring the person you're trying to arrest,
you know, especially especially if they die, then you know you've removed their
chance of natural justice. If you're you know, negligent actions in either administering
ketamene or you know, resting on someone's neck or whatever has caused them to
not be able to defend themselves in front of the law, then you know
you've removed the dignity of the person but also denied the chance of natural justice.
And which is thanks guys. The thing to remember here is what if
the tables were turned. What if the police officer that administered this drug one
day was having it administered to them in life. Yes, so there definitely
is a lot of questions around consent and when it comes to this. Obviously
all medical treatments require consent, and there's you know, different aspects that come
into play when when you have like an unconscious person or a person who isn't
capable alert and oriented to make their own decisions and things like that. But
I remember, I remember watching the video and thinking, so Demitrio Jackson was
the name of one of the individuals that they really focused on in the article,
and they had a video about him, and I remember watching the moment
where they administered the kademine to him, and Ketymine, by the way,
isn't isn't classified as a sedative drug. It's a dissociative anesthetic. And what
are is said really does is stops responsive nerves essentially from reacting to stimuli.
So things like when your body doesn't realize that it has too much carbon dioxide
inside it, it doesn't engage that breathing mechanism to breathe off that carbon dioxide,
which is what it seems like happy with the Mutro Jackson, unless I'm
misunderstanding it, which is a possibility. But when these things are happening,
and in the moment that he got that shot, it did not seem like
he was being combative. He did not need to be, you know,
sedated. They use these narcotics or these drugs as what they call chemical restraints,
and it just didn't seem like he needed to be restrained any further.
He and the other medical experts in the video that they interviewed seemed to have
the same opinion. So there really is a huge question about, like the
consent issue. He was alert and oriented to make his own decisions and did
not consent, nor did he need that drug for his or anybody else's safety.
So that that probably came largely into play during the court case for those
those ems professions, because we talk here about medical consent here. But the
other thing that we have to take into consideration here is that, particularly and
focus on this panel, is that some individuals being injected with this is actually
a violation of their religious rights. To say, for example, if you
were to have a Mormon that was injected with these drugs, that could very
easily be a violation of their religious rights and other things that could happen,
so you could have a Jehovah's witness that is injected with this. Are they
abstain from all these drugs, abstain from medical treatment, and you just decide
you're going to inject mean you're violating their religious rights, aren't you, Scott
in one respect? Yes, you know, religious rates don't trump the law
and public safety. I mean they're they're at the film which I've taught,
we talked about First Amendment though, pardon, but the freedom of religion and
the exercise their role of your religion is guaranteed by the First Amendment. So
if you've got no consent here to have these chemicals put into your body,
right, But but the First Amendment doesn't, like I said, it doesn't.
I mean, if you are are if you have a firmly held religious
belief that you're allowed to take whatever you want from anybody you, that doesn't
mean you can and the police can stop you. The police are allowed to
do things that that the general population are not. They're allowed to put you
in handcuffs against your consent. They're allowed to put you in a a in
a car and take you away and lock you in a room. And if
if I did that to somebody, I'd be arrested for kidnapping, and so
so I think consent is certainly part of the part of the equation here.
However, we need to I mean, it needs to be reasonable what the
police are doing. I think that there are cases where administering a sedative or
eli what was the phrase that you use for kiddamine, it was not a
senative, asthetic, dissociative anesthetic, I mean basically a drug that will calm
you down or stop you from from reacting violently. There an argument can be
made that there would be cases where that is in the in the best interest
of the individual and in the best interest of of the public. And the
problem that that really stuck out to me in this particular article was that the
medical professionals were not being uh listened to. The police were pressuring uh the
e mts to administer the drug. They were uh, you know, against
their best medical judgment. And so so that I think is part of the
issue. It's yes, I agree that, uh, you know that a
person's religious rights need to be weighed, a person's individual consent needs to be
weighed. Part of that, though, is the safety of the of the
individual. Part of that is the safety of of the the public at large.
I think the police, of the police that are untrained shouldn't be making
this decision. I have to stop you there, to stop you, Okay.
The thing here, though, is why is it so prevalent? Why
is it that the first thing that the police officer is doing is grabbing that
vile and going thump. Why is that happening so frequently when I cannot see
analogous things happen in any European country, in any Oceana country, in Canada?
Why is America reaching for the drugs before it goes through every other step.
Britain has violent individuals, It doesn't have police officers reaching for glass vials
and hypodermic needles, and police officers aren't getting killed by violent individuals. So
why are America reaching for that glass vial first? Well, because our police
aren't trained about that, about proper use of restraint and proper use of control,
and it's the easy way out take for examp sample. Now that this
example is definitely on a different plane when it comes to seriousness here, but
I think there's a kernel of similarity between uh, the situation we're talking about
here and young parents with children that are just you know, you know,
infants that are just crying and they and they won't calm down. I've I
have, I have two kids myself. I've been in that situation. And
you feel, especially with your first child, you feel a sense of panic,
You feel a sense of wanting to do something. You feel a sense
of what can I do to fix this problem now? And so there can
be there can be a strong temptation to maybe give your your child Benadeaux for
example. Okay, it has a side effect of making the person who takes
it sleepy, right, and so if we compare h uh, Now,
my wife and I we tried not to do that, but I have to
admit that there were some cases where we were a little bit generous with the
directions, a little bit generous with the with the symptoms that are good.
Are you sure that's not a cold? Are you sure that I think that's
that looks like an reaction to me, maybe we should give you know,
And and so I can I can understand the temptation there to want to want
to do something, want to take what we could argue our very extreme response.
Now compare that to when my second child and I was much more experienced
I had. I knew what you know, the normal behavior of an infant
was. I knew things that were effective. I knew I had a new
sense of patience. I had a new sense of confidence as a parent.
And and I think that underlines what I was talking about before about the training
of the police officers. It's it's it's a it's a it's a naive,
lazy response, okay. And and when I was when I was first a
parent, I was a naive and lazy parent. I became better at it
as I got as I got more experience, and as I learned more.
And I think that same kind of thing can be applied here. We need
to you know, we need to train UH police to respond appropriately and to
listen to medical pfer nationals when necessary. And so you know, and the
lie I think has to step in and nail it down in order for those
kind of decisions to be made. I mean, Damien, you brought up
Victoria Police in Australia. Were the police held to a higher standard because they
were the police when they were engaged in what is effectively shoot first? Yeah,
well, look, eventually the reason why Victoria, what the death threat
for Victoria police came about was because to junior constables were ambushed by criminals.
And in the inquest that happened after that, it was discovered that the Victoria
police had a shoot first mentality, and so when they revisited, like how
can we do this better, they realized that, you know, basically the
Victoria Police were essentially criminals in blue uniforms trying to like crooks in blue uniforms
trying to catch other crooks was essentially how it was. So then they underwent
a cultural shift where it was about training. It was about you know,
learning how to effectively restrain perfectly restrained people and you know, ensuring that that
they're alive as far as could be after a police interaction, to the point
where a few a few years ago, there was a bank robber who was
on the run and so he was holed up in a particular house and he
was shot by bean bag bullets. And the story goes was that when he
was arrested, he asked if he could keep the bean bag round that knocked
him out, and the police said no. Unfortunately. You know, it
was so we have we've kind of undergone a shift where like shooting is like
the last thing. You know, we use tasers, we use capsicum spray,
we use you know, other other things. This isn't to say that
we where we are, we've got it right. But you know, I
would much rather be arrested by a Victoria police then let's say Michigan or Utah
police. And if you have comments on which police force you'd prefer to be
arrested by,