> Paramedics were called and injected McClain with ketamine, but they incorrectly estimated his weight, giving him more than 1.5 times the dose he should have received. He got 500 milligrams because they thought he weighed 220 pounds, but he was only 140 pounds and should have received 315 milligrams.
That’s 7.9mg/kg, not nearly enough ketamine to cause cardiac arrest in someone that size. LD50 in humans is at least 5-10x that.
Those officers that had him in a chokehold killed him, and are trying to scapegoat the EMS.
There is a name for this behavior: a lynching.
Erica Marrero, Kyle Dittrich, Jason Rosenblatt, and Jaron Jones, white cops, murdered an unarmed black man.
The entirety of the consequences they suffered? They lost their jobs. The police who declined to enforce the law against them are complicit.
I hope I'm not not regurgitating false information (I'm finding it difficult to find a reputable primary source, since there's a lot of clearly pro-ketamine sites), but I was under the impression that one of the reasons that ketamine has been used both in people and in applications like as a horse tranquilizer is that it's safe dosage range is considerably wide, presenting some margin of error over similar drugs.
Obviously it's more than he should have been given (and tbh am pretty uncomfortable with it being given here at all), but my decidedly non-expert opinion (and the official autopsy statement that the "ketamine in McClain's blood was at 'tolerable levels' ") is that there's all sorts of red flags about this situation.
3-4mg/kg is more than sufficient for subduing an adult human. 7-10mg/kg will cause unconsciousness, and is dangerous without CLOSE airway monitoring.
Injecting a suspect with a drug without medical necessity or consent is a major human rights issue, and you wouldn’t be far off if you called it rape.
The whole thing is quite obviously pig lies; they had dogs and tasers on this 140lb black man who they had already had multiple cops choking out. Nothing about their dodge adds up.
7-10mg/kg will cause unconsciousness, and is dangerous without CLOSE airway monitoring.
Just barely dangerous. You might see a bit of transient respiratory depression, but the risk of respiratory arrest or clinically significant hypoxia is very low even in an out-of-hospital setting. We have case reports of paediatric patients receiving as much as 50mg/kg without significant ill effect.
I think perhaps you assume empty stomach, such as in a normal setting. Those doses are puke probability 1.0 range, which is lifethreatening if the person is unconscious and unmonitored.
Ketamine doesn’t really depress respiration that much. If the airway is physically obstructed, however, because nobody had their eye on him...
For those who didn't know, the police culture becomes quite a bit more sickening when you find out that one of the arresting officers, along with 2 other colleagues, posed grinning in a photo mocking their brutality against McClain just days after he died! Across the street from a memorial to him, no less.
Sounds cool. I have had some bad experiences with cops.
Suppose someone breaks into your house because of your skin color or political leanings and there are no police. What course of action do you recommend? Spoiler alert. You are also heavily armed.
If someone breaks into your home what do you think police response time will be? 20 minutes? 40 minutes? An attacker can do a lot of damage and run away in that allotted time. The police will just be there to fill out the paper work after the fact.
Whatever course of action you take, do something in addition to or besides call the police.
So it’s not about abolishing the police. “Defund the police”, which I agree is a bad term, is about focusing some of those funds on social programs and only calling the police for true criminal causes.
I am definitely not a conservative on most issues, but I am a strong believer in the right to have a gun in your own home and the various “Castle” laws. If you break into my house or try to take my car while I am in it, I am going to assume you mean me harm. Shoot first then call the cops.
Yes I know the statistics about a gun in the home is more likely to be used accidentally or on purpose (suicide/homicide/accidental shooting) against someone in the home.
> I am a strong believer in the right to have a gun in your own home and the various “Castle” laws. If you break into my house or try to take my car while I am in it, I am going to assume you mean me harm. Shoot first then call the cops.
Do you know how absurd this sounds to people in actual civilized countries? Kind of amazing how many of you Americans are living in some Wild West fantasy.
Othering and belittling pours gas on an already polarized topic. If you can't talk about the issue without going there, then you aren't equipped to change minds. If the [keyboard] is mightier than the [gun], then one must show even more restraint in its employ.
I would much rather live in a world with fewer guns. But, with the proliferation of guns in the US, what is the left suppose to do when confronted by an armed assailant in their own home? We are not going to get rid of guns in America. What other protection do you have?
4 in 10 Americans live in a gun owning household. That number is probably greater in the south.
It’s probably even greater for someone willing to break into your house.
Guns in the US is a “gravity problem” no matter how much you complain about them, they aren’t going anywhere.
We live in a country where the far right is arming up and when the left wants to “peacefully protest” and exercise their first amendment (not saying it always ends up being peaceful), the far right is “exercising their 2nd amendment”.
Which side do you think is going to come out ahead?
Do the police in your country have guns? (Trick question. The police in every country, even Japan, have guns.)
If an armed attacker breaks into your home, would not the first thing you do be to call someone to bring a gun over quickly to protect you and bring an end to the risk?
This is no different than keeping a fire extinguisher in your home versus relying 100% on the fire brigade to protect you.
Firearms are safety equipment, nothing more. The fact that you equate a common tool, used in every civilization in the world, to “some wild west fantasy”, says more about the baggage you attach to it than that which exists in reality.
In the case of the US, if the criminals have guns and the law abiding people don’t, where does that leave the law abiding people?
It’s just like what happened when Reagan was the Governor of California. As soon as Black people started peacefully “exercising their second amendment rights”, both Reagan and the NRA were all for gun control.
I mean there is quite a number of countries where regular police are prohibited from carrying firearms, or at least don't carry them anywhere so casually.
I bet those same countries don’t have the love affair with gun ownership and easy access as the US.
That still comes back to the same question - if the criminals have guns and neither law abiding citizens or the police have guns, where does that leave the law abiding citizens?
Feel free to propose a method, and we'll all object to that.
Stopping an uncooperative person is guaranteed to be upsetting to somebody. That is fundamental to the problem.
Every method tried so far has been objected to by squeamish people who refuse to understand. If we let criminals run amok, then we get a failed state, and then armed gangs form to impose their own idea of a justice system. I assure you, those armed gangs will be far more brutal than our fancy westernized police system.
So we medicalized the problem. That appeases more people than the cheap standardized billy club. We'll just ignore the needle-stick biohazard problem, because at least it won't look like a replay of Rodney King.
I agree that all restraint methods are upsetting, but "inject with dissociative drugs" should really be a lot further down the list than "hit with stick".
Personally, I favor hitting people with billy clubs, because it leaves evidence of what happened and it requires the police to actually take physical action against another human. Giving cops needles full of magic compliance juice seems less responsible to me.
The reason people were upset about Rodney King was because it was brutal and easy to understand. Injecting ketamine is also brutal but it's less visible. I cannot imagine anyone ever getting over the fact that they were restrained by authorities and injected into a k-hole.
They won't be visibly harmed in any way, but that will absolutely mess someone up for life.
If I was being restrained, I would far rather be given a hit of ketamine than a hit of a bat.
(From people that seem to know a bit about restraint techniques Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink discussed the use of choke holds on Joe's podacst. They both agreed that it was far better than a smack with a baton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=iUhdc1GAddk&...).
I guess the argument against this is how many people in the US have died from being struck by a police club vs from a police chokehold. I cant recall a single instance of death by police bat.
From the article, it sounds like it is on a completely different list altogether.
"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."
In that scenario, the police would be beating the culprit into compliance and we would all be looking at videos on youtube shaking our heads. I'm not saying cops should be carrying hypodermics in their utility belt, but how many non-lethal options do you remove before you have to accept more lethal outcomes?
This is yet another scenario where the US can't seem to avoid violent actions when arresting people and other countries don't seem to have this problem. So what's going on here? I can only see it as another case where violent actions are significantly increased by police behavior.
Personally, I favor hitting people with billy clubs,
because it leaves evidence of what happened and it
requires the police to actually take physical action
against another human
Like you say, there's not really a "good" choice, and I am not defending officers' actions during incidents like the killing (murder, IMO) of Elijah McCain.
But those police batons break bones. Also, there's evidence of ketamine sedation: they need to summon paramedics to perform the injection, etc.
So, I don't know. I'm sure we at least agree that the answer is to avoid letting things escalate to that point so frequently.
"Not injecting people with a drug without their consent" is not the equivalent of "let criminals run amok."
I have trouble reconciling the notion that after someone has been restrained to the point where it is considered safe to inject them with a drug, they find it necessary to inject a drug for the purpose of restraint.
It's a bit like placing your knee on the back of someone's neck who is already handcuffed and crying for his mother. Unnecessary, cruel, and dangerous.
So there are only 2 options, violence by armed gangs and violence by state-sponsored armed gangs?
What is there to understand when it comes to police brutality? Not that western European police is without faults, but this feels just wrong on many different levels
De-escalation skills can be learned. First class psychological training and counselling could be the norm.
One gains a lot of respect by showing wisdom and courage.
Most scenarios are essentially communication problems to be solved. Not defaulting to the most violent means of "cooperation" is and should be an option for any police force in a 21st century democracy.
Look to the best in the past and in other countries.
Successful policing actually needs skin in the game.
What's really sobering is that, in my personal experiences as a middle-class American white man in his 40s, police have always been really good at de-escalating things.
I haven't always agreed with them, but they have always cooled things down nicely without resorting to violence or even arrests.
Training varies widely by locale, but I believe de-escalation is indeed a nearly universal part of their training. It must also be noted that de-escalation certainly is much easier for the police officers themselves: less hassle, less danger, less paperwork, less repercussions. These people generally just want to get through their shift and get home.
They are certainly capable of de-escalation and, in most instances, are trained and motivated to de-escalate.
So, it's very telling when (nearly always white) officers leap to unnecessarily violent tactics on (nearly always Black) victims.
All of that is seen through the filter of the media. They have a story that they want to sell. They need to grab eyeballs. They are also political, and so they want to push what helps advance their own political goals, even if it tears the country apart.
Specifically, every one of these is subject to selection bias:
You won't see a news report when the tactics are peaceful, when a black cop is involved, or when the supposed victim is non-black. Nobody is going to riot over that, so why report it? It goes unseen by you, so you get the wrong impression about reality.
A different sort of bias comes into play with word choice, using "victims" to refer to people who typically are violent criminals being apprehended. The word ought to be "perpetrators", "suspects", or simply "criminals".
Of course "the media" focuses on incidents where cops abuse their power.
"The media" also exalts policemen and soldiers as heroes, with countless reminders to thank our "heroes" and millions of hours of Hollywood entertainment devoted to showcasing heroic soldiers and cops. Much of the media denounces the protests as well.
A different sort of bias comes into play with
word choice, using "victims" to refer to people
who typically are violent criminals being
apprehended. The word ought to be "perpetrators",
"suspects", or simply "criminals".
Surely you see the irony in using an equally loaded set of terms yourself?
In all of the incidents that sparked outcry, police were shown on video using vastly asymmetrical force against victims who were nonviolent or who had already been subdued. One, Breona Taylor, was in bed when police knocked down the wrong door when serving a no-knock warrant. Elijah, the teen injected with ketamine, was nonviolent and had no history of violence or crime.
There are a lot of incidents of police violence in which the suspect is behaving violently and, in these cases, I have not seen public outcry.
Do you think there are no black cops abusing their power, or that there are no white victims? It's hidden from you by the media because it doesn't fit the narrative of racist white cops abusing innocent black victims.
Statistics paint a different picture. Given that there is a police response to crime, a white criminal is more likely to be shot by the police.
I have seen plenty of public outcry over police violence when the suspect was behaving violently. The riots in Ferguson are the obvious example. Evidence of powder burns and of DNA in the car show that the BLM story was clearly false. The evidence is consistent with the story given by the cop. It's been like that for every case that I've researched, so at this point I'm done with research. It's always the same, more or less.
Not exactly, but pretty close: "it's very telling when (nearly always white) officers leap to unnecessarily violent tactics on (nearly always Black) victims"
You got that distorted perspective from the media bias.
It's just not that way. Some statistics even point the other way.
So, it's very telling when (nearly always white)
officers leap to unnecessarily violent tactics
on (nearly always Black) victims.
I could have been clearer about the context of my statement: I was referring to the police shootings that have made national headlines. My bad.
Nonetheless, while the overall reality of police killings in America is less dramatic than "nearly always", but it worrisomely lopsided. Black Americans are killed by police at a per-capita rate of roughly 2:1 compared to white Americans.
Crime rate is different. There are at least 3 ways to do the statistic:
1. What race has the biggest number being killed by cops? (answer: white)
2. What race has the most per-capita being killed by cops? (answer: black)
3. What race is most likely to be killed by cops if they get in a police confrontation? (answer: white)
The obvious solution for non-equality with #2 is to fix the culture so that conflict with the cops is less likely. Don't do crime. If you are stopped by cops, be fully compliant and don't look like a threat. When stopped by the cops, don't even think of reaching for something they can't see. You just wait, and then you'll be able to sort things out in court.
Eh, we also should fix the non-equality with #3. It shouldn't be more excusable to shoot white people.
c) injecting them with hilarious overdoses of drugs and crossing our fingers
then why would we pay for police?
If that's ok, we might as well go back to old west times and just have everyone carry revolvers, possibly calling the town apothecary with his bottle of ether if we think we need it. It'll be way cheaper than maintaining a standing police department.
The whole point is that police are supposed to be trained and equipped to handle disturbances without harming the person being detained. There are options for this, including that so rarely used tactic, defusal.
Like, we pay police overtime. Cordon the person off, give them space but don't let them leave, wait until they get hungry even if it takes 12 hours, and then bribe them with pizza to come quietly. Build rapport with them over the entire incident. How often do we see that strategy deployed before we fall back to injecting ketamine?
Almost every police encounter event ends without incident. There really seems to be an issue right now with selection bias of these events.
I agree there is always room to consider other ways of handling outlying incidents. Injecting drugs into people violates so many principles of freedom it seems hard to justify it.
The pizza idea could work in some cases but I think we also have to realize that some people being taken into custody are irrational either from mental illness, and/or drug use, could be armed and/or violent, and cordoning them off may work or it may not. And then a potentially armed, violent, and irrational person is a threat to innocent people. The police have many objectives and one of those is to take suspects into custody safely so they can have just administrated. However, the safety of the public might be of higher priority and if asked to make a choice between hurting a suspect that appears irrational and violent so as to not risk the liberties of the public or respecting their liberties but putting the liberties of the public at risk, they’ll choose to optimize for the former.
Policing will never be perfect and there is a reasonable amount of error we should tolerate. And there should be accountability. I do agree that it would appear, at least from the stories that tend to make the news, that diffusion could be employed more.
I live in a country where we don't inject people with ketamine on the street, nor do "criminals run amok". We also don't have armed gangs imposing "their own idea of a justice system", and we have fewer police killings in 25 years than the US has in 25 days.
I imagine your comment is probably symptomatic of the major societal issues within the US; it certainly worsens the image of the US to those fortunate enough to live in a Western nation which isn't actively regressing.
I live in a country where we don't inject people with
ketamine on the street, nor do "criminals run amok".
We also don't have armed gangs imposing "their own idea
of a justice system", and we have fewer police killings
in 25 years than the US has in 25 days.
As an American, the parent poster is an unfortunate and common example of the sort of attitude that is common here. It is at least partially the result of America's geographic isolation: most Americans have never been to a place where there is low crime and low police brutality and thus literally cannot even imagine it.
I would like to point out the America, one's treatment by police varies greatly.
I'm a white man in my 40s have never witnessed police brutality firsthand. In all my interactions with police, they have acted properly and de-escalated things nicely, even when perhaps I didn't agree with them.
This is the experience shared by many (most?) Americans who, once again, have trouble imagining experiences other than their own. They imagine that nearly all police are just, and therefore victims of police brutality must have done something to deserve the violence.
Essentially, it is the "just world" fallacy writ large. People like to think that the world is just, and therefore like to think that those who experience misfortune have done something to deserve it. It is more pleasant than realizing we live in a country where the police sometimes act in shockingly violent and inappropriate ways.
I do know many people who have experienced awful treatment by police. And of course in recent years much light has been shone upon this misconduct.
> most Americans have never been to a place where there is low crime and low police brutality and thus literally cannot even imagine it.
nit: They haven't been to a place where there is low crime, low police brutality, and high population density. To most observers, most of the US is low crime and low police brutality. From this perspective, violent police are a city problem where things are so out of control that the police have no choice but to act that way.
(I don't why this is getting downvoted. I'm certainly not condoning the state of affairs, just trying to elaborate on the perspective that keeps supporting the uniformed criminals)
> And, you realize that the US has 300m people, correct? You will have to compare per-capita stats, not total numbers.
The UK has a population of almost 70MM. The factor of ~5 needed to account for population pales in comparison to the two orders of magnitude difference between 25 days and 25 years.
There are some good uses cases . You arrive on scene and the patient is injured and agitated and lashing out. EMT is having a hard time as well. You need to give them something. Basically Benzos or Ketamine, and Ketamine is much safer and can relieve pain
Full time EMTs aren’t trained enough to make good decisions about when it’s appropriate to administer ketamine and how much to give. A cop who did some EMT training but doesn’t use the skills full time is going to be even worse.
Paramedics were the ones who killed Elijah McClain with ketamine.
Putting aside that police shouldn’t be utilizing drugs period, there is zero justification for administering drugs to someone who isn’t a danger to themselves or others, as was the case for McClain. It makes more sense when you realize that the Aurora PD is eighth in the nation for police killings per capita.
My fiancée has to deal with kids in the ER who got injected with too much ketamine by overzealous EMTs all the time. I don’t think limiting it to EMTs will solve the problem.
I always had the impression that emergency departments used haloperidol or chlorpromazine because they don't cause increased intracranial pressure like ketamine nor respiratory depression like benzodiazepines. I'm sure it varies for individual experience.
If a suspect is restrained enough to be injected with a needle, then the police have already overpowered them. If an EMT has not judged that a sedative will medically help their patient, the right answer for the police is hand and ankle cuffs. Ordering administration of a sedative is purely for the officers' own desires - to make their jobs easier in the future and to extra-judicially punish.
If you are resisting arrest, you may still be presumed innocent of the original crime. However you're almost certainly guilty of resisting lawful arrest, which is usually a misdemeanor.
There's no exemption that allows innocent people to resist lawful arrest.
This is not to say that injection sounds like a great solution for everyday arrests.
Of course, the definition of "lawful arrest" is pretty flexible these days and can seemingly include arrests that are blatantly unlawful, like some cops deciding to assault a random passerby on the street because they don't like the look of them or are unhappy about legal conduct like photography. Is it okay to resist under those circumstances? According to a judge or a police officer, probably not, but at the end of the day you'd probably win the case. If you survive.
> According to a judge or a police officer, probably not
I'd naively hope that a judge wouldn't side with a police officer here, but I think the fact that resisting arrest is inherently criminal is a pretty big flaw in the US legal system.
I live in a jurisdiction [1] where resisting arrest is not criminalised in the same sense as the US, and the idea that a police officer could unlawfully arrest you and then immediately have lawful grounds if you resisted is very alien to me.
Since the '70s it feels like law enforcement (and juries to some extent) are informed by two movies much more than the Constitution and case law: Dirty Harry and Death Wish.
I saw a interesting clip on TV a while back where they played several clips of various popular police dramas in which the main characters use wildly illegal or unconstitutional tricks to get confessions from criminals. Things like physically assaulting them while contained and. turning off cameras in interrogation rooms to do so. The point it was trying to make was that this "desensitized" people to police violence. Of course, the criminals in the clips were things like child predators, serial killers, etc. so it was all justified.
Thankfully we don't use "almost certainly guilty" as the criminal standard in the US. So, you're still injecting an innocent person with drugs to detain them.
In america if the police are killing you, resisting that death is a crime. If someone had attempted to stop the police from killing George Floyd, they would have been arrested and charged.
You can imagine the confusion that arises when plain clothes police seize people.
In my country (Canada), using firearms for self-defence is almost universally regarded as illegal. However, when police officers exerted a no-knock warrant on the wrong person, and they defended themselves using firearms, they were found illegal, because it was judged that armed intruders violently barging through and threatening you in your home is one of the rare cases where the situation is so outrageous that it is justified. In the US, despite owning guns for self-defence being legal, you will be found guilty of murder for this, and certainly be found guilty of resisting arrest.
Generally this is the case, very often because either dead men tell no tales or the victim was a minority (see Breonna Taylor) . A while back though in TX there was a case where cops executed a no knock raid beginning with a flash bang and the homeowner shot 3 of them. The homeowner was not the target of the raid. He was found not guilty of attempted murder. I am sure the court fees and lost job destroyed his life though. Mug shot also appears to show he was very much roughed up in the process.
There are many instances of people using weapons in self defense and then police arrive and kill the gun owner. For instance; Jemel_Roberson' a black armed security guard that subdued a shooter in a bar. Cop showed up and immediately killed the security guard then lied that he was given multiple commands to drop the weapon. Witnesses said the cop arrived and shot the guard within 5 seconds. Later police changed their story and said it was just a case of friendly fire, very sad nothing can be done. And nothing was done.
> I can’t breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That’s my house. I was just going home. I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t eat meat! But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity, I’ll do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you. Try to forgive me. I’m a mood Gemini. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ow, that really hurt. You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t trying to do that. I just can’t breathe correctly.
The source you're citing doesn't even address the assertion you're making, so that's a bit misleading to post. Looking for a source for your claim I found this, which adds some detail: https://youtu.be/lfzJzAm-OV0?t=63
> There's no exemption that allows innocent people to resist lawful arrest.
It's a bit murkier than that in the US. In some states you can't even resist unlawful arrest, but in all states you're allowed to defend yourself against _excessive_ force.
In practice that's probably a bad idea, but if you survive the retaliation from somebody who's armed and who has already proven themselves prone to excessive use of force then you might win the ensuing court case.
It says that on the books that you’re allowed to defend against excessive force, but they’ll still charge you for assault for bleeding on their uniform. (And then only retract this when the media outcry becomes too difficult to ignore.)
Being charged is enough to hold you for 3 days, as well as to put you on probation for a couple months afterwards, even if the charges are dropped. This happened to a friend of mine when he was frustrated with an inland border control roadblock and didn't want to answer the questioning officer. He did not resist, was not violent in any way. He simply politely declined to answer.
In the end it cost him over a grand to get his car back and to pay for drug tests required by the probation. Again, he was never actually charged with anything.
Policing in this nation is fundamentally broken. The bad cops know how to use the system to brutalize people without consequences, and the rest of the police close ranks and protect them while they do it.
In addition, for most people, if you miss work for 3 days without an explanation, you'll be fired. If you miss work for 3 days and tell your boss it was because you were arrested, you'll also likely be fired. You'll now also have to answer "YES" on job applications where they ask you whether you've been arrested for anything (even if eventually charges were dropped or you were found not guilty). As an innocent person, the mere brush with law enforcement can have long-standing negative effects on your life.
If it's just your word against theirs, they might as well be. Everybody is against you except for your low-paid advocate (the public defender) who's working on 100 cases at the same time as they're working on yours. It's different for the wealthy.
Cops are not lawyers or judges, but cops can make your life hell totally legally. There are people who are forced to sign away their right to protest in order to be let out of jail for a charge that is totally dropped.
Alas, when someone is or is not "resisting arrest" is not something that is particularly well-defined. It's usually "when the officer says you are resisting," regardless of the actual facts at hand.
My point, basically, is that if a cop grabs you unexpectedly, and you push them away (a reasonable, normal reaction): the next thing you hear is "stop resisting!"
I have no clue, the first time I read about ketamine was in a article [1] about upcoming partydrugs in The Netherlands. In that article they mention that ketamine is generally used as a anesthetic for horses. But having things done to your body while you cannot decide about that is just horrible and should be banned.
In an ideal world, sedation is more humane than beating or shocking a suspect into submission, when there is no other way to get them under control.
If I and other HN commenters are not mistaken, ketamine is commonly used for this purpose in hospitals around the world.
However, leaving the theoretical behind... Elijah McClain was murdered by police for the "crime" of acting oddly. There was no reason for them to use force against him whatsoever. He was unarmed and committed no crime.
His death hurts me because he was, broadly speaking, "one of us" - an eccentric and intelligent person.
Based on all I have read about his life, I think many HN readers would recognize aspects of themselves in Elijah.
The common scenario is someone being arrested who is also is a state of excited/agitated delirium. Someone in that state will likely be combative but won't be able to comply with directions. Your only options would be to physically restrain the individual (which might be very difficult to virtually impossible depending on what you have on hand and how agitated the person is) or sedate them. The article implies that police are coercing paramedics into giving ketamine. I'm pretty skeptical of this. Any delirious person being treated by paramedics would be on the way to the ER for evaluation. The cops and the paramedics would be working together to ensure that the patient is safely restrained/sedated. But the paramedic would in essence be taking over control of the patient (likely with a police escort to the ER).
Police forcing people to do drugs. People that can't refuse it. Is revolting and insane, and distroys any possibility of fair defense of course. What would be next, escopolamine by default in any declaration?
I'm confused. The police aren't administering the drug, EMS is. Can't you just solve this by telling EMS not to administer it unless they feel it's needed?
It's not a life-saving drug, it's literally never needed. Guy was 140 lbs. There's not a 140 lb man I couldn't subdue myself, probably. And I'm just an out of shape programmer.
Why do six cops feel they can't do the same?
Because when the feedback loops on his 140lb musculature are blocked and he will keep going to the point of permanent damage... and when his ability to feel pain is decreased... and there's a very real concern for hyperthermia, rhabdomyolysis with an extended struggle, dysrhythmia, then maybe ketamine becomes the better option.
That being said, ketamine should be an EMS decision to minimize risk to patient and others, not "at LE direction".
So cops are doctors now? Or EMS even? Neither have any real medical training, at all. No offense meant, EMS grind for little money, but they're not medical doctors.
Narcan I was already uneasy about, but it saved real lives in obvious situations. This is absolute lunacy.
Do you have any idea how many medical procedures cops are trained on? It’s a lot. They aren’t doctors but they are required to assist medically and stabilize until EMT arrives.
Specifically no, but I do know they are trained. That said, training is just that. If you see X, do Y. And sure, net, it's a positive thing. But again, they aren't medical doctors. It's not always IF THEN. Oftentimes it's IF AND NOT THEN.
Either way, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole of arguing life saving procedures. My entire point is that we should not be injecting people with non emergency drugs like Ketamine.
Actually, we should be giving patients. Ketamine is an extremely safe drug for paramedics to give for the safety of the patient and those around them. Especially in cases of excited delerium where the person may actually die because of it. In these cases ketamine is absolutely an emergency drug.
> My entire point is that we should not be injecting people with non emergency drugs like Ketamine.
Instead your argument seems to be that we should be subjecting people to significant risk from rhabdo, hyperthermia, which to be clear can be entirely significant.
It’s not about the training of police, it’s about the track record of police misconduct and coverups. Any additional tool in the tool belt of police to commit aggression is worrisome.
Excited delirium is a really, really sketchy diagnosis. There's certainly no good clinical evidence to suggest that ketamine is an effective treatment.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. There are 140lb men and women that could calmly choke you to death. Somewhere in that alltercation you will progress from trying to subdue them to fighting for your life, at which point you will throw all rules out the window and willfully violate any and all lawful progression in the use of force continuum.
Hopefully your demise will be captured on video to use in training material for future generations of law-enforcement, as has been the case for many before you.
You're also making assumptions here. Lots of out-of-shape programmers have been in fights. Lots of out-of-shape programmers weigh more than twice what this victim weighed, and still move well. Also, get out of here with that "women" bullshit: that proves all your implied expertise comes from watching TV.
The attitude here is typical of bootlickers, however. Never mind that there were a dozen cops present. Never mind that they were not responding to an actual crime. Never mind that very few people in the general public are highly-trained choke-out ninjas. Some cops might get scared, so let's burn the world down. Pathetic.
It's a perfectly cromulent word. If you'd like to try writing that comment again, this time with less psychological projection and no distracting nonsense about deadly pre-teen ninja girls, we'll all read it again and revise our opinions about the licking of boots. "Maybe next time" it won't be downvoted to oblivion...
Any time you think you have a simple solution to a problem and your explanation to fix things starts with “just”, stop and think for a moment that perhaps someone else has already thought up your simple solution.
They don't administer it unless it meets all criteria in their protocols. Something like administering Ketamine would be under a standing order meaning that the paramedics would not need to consult with medical control prior to administration. There would need to be a post-call consultation with medical control to document it and explain why it was given in addition to everything being documented in the patient care report given to hospital staff at the time of transfer of patient care.
Setting aside the fact that this kind of thing happens at all: How is ketamine the drug of choice?! Although it has a very high active dose:fatal dose (alluded to in other comments), accepted practice for "chemical restraint" is Thorazine+Valium (or equivalent); ketamine is basically never used for behavioral "sedation" by any medical professional.
Our Ed takedown drug is midazolam. I can’t see benzos being safe being given by non-medics. The safety profile of ketamine is excellent (as I’m sure you know)
Having said that it blows my mind that it is considered necessary or appropriate to give someone ketamine to restrain them.
The use of chemical restraint in a law enforcement setting is an appalling breach of human rights, but ketamine is by far the safest option in an out-of-hospital setting, especially when you don't have any sort of patient history. I'm sure that someone has been killed by a single clinical dose of ketamine, but I'm not sure how. Ketamine isn't a very good chemical cosh, but at least it's a safe one.
Anyone administering chlorpromazine and a benzodiazepine in this setting is criminally negligent - if the "patient" (and I very much hesitate to use that word in this context) has taken another CNS depressant, they're in deep trouble.
It’s a candidate for safest only if it’s being used where required by a trained administrator. And those two factors probably outweigh the choice of drug in their effect on lethality.
No, it's not guaranteed, it would depend on how intoxicated you were.
For the purposes of this discussion, I thought it was safe to assume we were talking about doses that could actually alter your behaviour; high doses of opioids do not make exactly for agresssive behaviour, while lower doses are unlikely to have an impact either way.
AFAIK, the toxicology report showed tiny amounts of methamphetamine and THC - I don't recall opioids being mentioned at all.
A quick Google shows that only in the past few days, the cops are now trying to say he does from a fentanyl overdose, rather than the knee on his neck. TBH, this seems purely like an attempt at scapegoating, making him out to be the "stereotypical black man, crazed on drugs".
But we're veering off topic now. I'd rather not discuss the rights and wrongs of the police in this case, because I will disagree hard with any attempts to justify the actions of the police, so there is no interesting discourse to be had there, and HN is not the right platform regardless.
Ketamine is also a CNS depressant and would have the same compounding effect when mixed with alcohol, it's a wholly inappropriate drug to administer to someone who was in a state of "alcohol-induced excited delirium"
The amount of opioids on the streets of the US (and elsewhere) is staggering. Many people are on a cocktail of different street drugs (meth + heroine where I live). You don't want to be adding a benzo like valium to someone who has opioids in their system due to respiratory depression.
I dislocated my ankle rock climbing a few years ago and had to be taken to the hospital. After a few doses of morphine had zero noticeable impact on my pain, they gave me ketamine so I couldn't feel the pain of the reduction (aka pulling my foot out and moving it back into place).
The ketamine experience was far worse than my fall and any subsequent pain I experienced, and I would gladly take the pain of the reduction over the ketamine any day. It basically felt like I was dying and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Think of the hypnosis scene from "Get Out" where you can feel your consciousness slipping away but you're not asleep either. I could hear everything happening around me but couldn't move a muscle or feel anything. My perception of time went out the window and it felt like I was in an empty void for an eternity when it was only a few minutes.
I thought I couldn't talk because I couldn't feel my mouth or move any other muscles, but realized I was actually speaking my thoughts after I heard a friend in the room responded to something I thought in my mind.
Overall, 0/10 would not do it again and the thought that police use it to pacify someone during an arrest is sickening.
I imagine there's also got to be a difference between getting it for a planned surgery that you can prepare for, vs having it thrust on you suddenly during a traumatic and painful experience. Kind of hard to let go in that situation.
An arrest sound like one of the worst set and settings to get dosed with ketamine. The person being arrested might not know what they were injected with. The person might not trust the police. The person is being detained against their will.
Regarding place attention on the positive: Check out Sam Harris interview with Francoise Bourzat. She goes into depth about so called negative trips and feels they are just as important and useful as positive ones. I'm not sure I can summarize why, but she suggested that even negative experiences can be mindfully approached and handled well.
> My perception of time went out the window and it felt like I was in an empty void for an eternity when it was only a few minutes.
This was my exact experience with disossiatives as well. I think they can be effectively and safely used, but there's a real danger there. Disossiatives like ketamine and DXM are incredibly powerful.
After my experience in that same eternal void I struggled with a fear that what I'd experienced was the natural state of consciousness, and what would happen to me for eternity after I died. I didn't actually believe it, but the fear was still there and talk. Took a few months for it to wear off.
So you were semi-conscious, could communicate, but could not move. I am afraid that is excellent drug to pacify someone. If we defund police and add more women in police force, we will see much wider use.
Unfortunately it turns out the police can't read instructions and have a tendency to put far too much in. It's almost like people who administer drugs need some kind of training...
Sounds terrible. In a recent surgery in pre op they gave me Versed/Midazolam. I was so spacey it was weird and kinda scary. I can’t imagine what ketamine would be like
Versed is pretty wild, even at preinduction doses. You can learn to be OK with it, but it was a little scary for me too, the first time I had a procedure that involved it.
That procedure also most likely involved ketamine - I don't know for sure, it was a long time ago and nobody told me the names of anything but the Versed and that only because I asked, but I had totally uncharacteristic recurring nightmares and emotional problems for the next little while afterward. When all of that came back up during planning for the surgery I had to have last year, my surgeon noted that that sounded in his experience like ketamine side effects, and that this time I'd be getting propofol, which is not at all a dissociative, instead. And, sure enough, I was just fine after that surgery, despite it being much more invasive and thus painful in its aftereffects.
Based on that, I'll echo what others here have already said: the thought of being given a surprise high dose of ketamine, in the context of a situation that also involves the use of violence against one's person, is horrifying, and complex PTSD is the least severe consequence I can imagine.
Are you experienced with drugs? Because most of my friends think ketamine is one the greatest drugs you can do. It would have probably a lot more fun if you were in a comfortable place, like your house, hanging out with your gf or something.
Some of the most chill and relaxed moments of my entire life have been on ketamine. I only do it occasionally because of the nasty chronic side-effects, though.
Do your friends generally take drugs involuntarily and without informed awareness of the effects and without a trusted trip sitter the first time they do something new and with associated negative circumstances (like a broken bone or an arrest)?
Ah, the comment was edited after I replied, oops. Yes.
(Though I don't believe whether it's enjoyable in the right setting has much to do with whether cops should be using it. I get that this is a defense of ketamine as a recreational drug, but e.g. alcohol would probably be un-fun if the first time you experienced it was at a high dose during either surgery or an arrest, and that one's widely accepted as a reasonable recreational drug.)
Nope, not experienced and don't plan to be. I totally believe it could be a nice experience in a different setting, but I doubt that experiencing it in the hospital or mid-arrest would ever be enjoyable.
Yep, I think the empty void feeling was only a few minutes and after that ended it took like 20-30 minutes to be able to open my eyes and regain motor control.
I had almost exactly the same response the first time I took ketamine. This is despite being experienced with psychedelics (all extremely positive lifechanging experiences), and despite that I was safe at home, knowing what I was taking. The only problem was that I was in a bad state of mind.
It is truly disturbing to imagine going through that during an arrest, with no idea what is happening
Yes this is commmonly known as a K-Hole. It's worse than a bad trip from what I've heard.
Ketamine is a party drug especially common among young gay people here in Brazil. It's usually briefly inhaled so I'm guessing very low doses. The 500mg mentioned in the article sounds terrible.
Accidentally doing too much ketamine and badly k-holing (by snorting) is one of the worst experiences of my life. Maybe the worst. It was exactly as you described, it's like you're being cut off from reality and have no way back. It's like being plunged into the bottom of the ocean, darkness, everything real is distant, you try to move but you can't - it's like someone has unplugged all your sensory organs and limbs.
And it comes in waves -- just when you think you're coming out of it, it pulls you back down.
I swore off ketamine for life after that and don't plan on ever touching it again. I would take a bad comedown from stimulants over that. I would take the feeling of hopelessness, anhedonia, and thorough depression from a bad MDMA comedown any day. To be fair, both things only happen if you do too much, it's avoidable, and it was entirely my fault for not weighing the dose.
And I still think therapeutic ketamine for depression should be studied and trialled and legal. But still, K-holing was an absolutely horrifying experience and I don't recommend it to anyone for any reason.
And it probably was only not even worse because I was also on MDMA.
It can be absolutely wonderful if you're properly prepared though, just lying in your bed with a dim pink light on listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms or something, enjoying escaping your body for a while and floating around in an undefinable sea of warm nothingness.
However, it absolutely sounds like it could be hell if you're not prepared though - especially in police custody, but even just fighting against it in a party situation where you want to exist and be social could be problematic.
I've dislocated my shoulder four times this year. The last three I've asked them to stop knocking me out w/ketamine for the reasons you describe, and just put it back while I scream; which I find quite preferable.
As a youth I did all the drugs and hallucinogens there are and most of them are _nothing_ compared to an anesthetic dose of ketamine. It's the most disassociate experience I've ever had. It feels like you're grasping at your consciousness but can't quite get hold. The hallucinations are incomprehensible. I was told my screaming was heard in the waiting room.
Drugging your suspects makes sense. It's hard to justify injuring someone before they're proven guilty. Traditional methods like tasers and pepper spray tend to leave evidence thats too obvious to the courts.
Disclaimer: There is so much that can go wrong administering drugs without somebody's medical background (like just getting the weight right in this case), random variables (say ate grapefruit beforehand), or just sheer dumb misfortune. Then there is the dystopian nature of yet another layer to diffuse responsibility. This is tragic, and I hope doesn't set precedent.
All that out of the way. Why is this on here? This seems to be just run of political muckracking to reinforce the narrative of "we live in an oppressive police state". Granted, I think society can do much better. This is ABC news, and I can say with a high level of confidence, we are very likely not getting the full picture here. I'm not one to normal point out guidelines, buts here we go:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This uptick in political content is really not doing this community a service.
This is technically true and misses the point. Police are ordering paramedics to inject it.
(edit: to be clear, I am saying that yes, ordering somebody else to do it is morally equivalent to doing it yourself... if it's wrong to do it yourself, it's just as wrong to order somebody else to do it)
Pointing out that the police aren't injecting it themselves is like pointing out that [insert name of murderous dictator here] didn't actually kill anybody with their own hands.
There is a huge difference between police injecting it and police ordering trained paramedics to inject it. The comment I was responding to was implying that it was dangerous for police to administer Ketamine because they are not trained, and I was saying that is not an issue since they are not the ones administering it.
I don't think police should be ordering EMS to administer Ketamine, but even if they are that is far different from doing it themselves.
The decision of whether or not to administer any drug should always be in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, and if that decision is not made by the person receiving the drug it should be made by somebody sufficiently detached from the situation so that they can make a good clinical decision as to how to medically treat the person for a condition they are suffering from. A cop who has someone in a chokehold is not sufficiently detached from the situation.
You cannot say “give them ketamine” and just leave the dose up to the paramedic and call it safe.
Police cannot "order" a paramedic to do anything to a patient. They can phrase it as an order, and the paramedic _should_ tell them to get stuffed, but that doesn't always happen (clearly...)
Ordering a paramedic is as criminal as doing it themselves. "Suggesting" it might be fine if the paramedics are free to say "no", but ordering using medication by non-doctors is criminal behaviour over here...
There are many instances of police officers arresting paramedics, nurses and firefighters for ridiculous reasons while they are trying to do their jobs as first responders. That includes refusing to break the law, such as when a nurse knows performing a procedure without a court order is assault.
The administration of medically unnecessary ketamine does not belong in the toolbox of things that the police request, or more realistically "order". It is irresponsible to assume police will defer to judgement of professionals with training and a code of ethics, when they are solely focused on making a person comply.
There are enough terrible public policy decisions where people later claim "we didn't know". People are saying now this is a recipe for abuses and unnecessary deaths.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure where you're getting that information. Ketamine is administered in pre-hospital settings only by paramedics. Police cannot give it nor can they order medics to do so.
Alcohol and ketamine is a known bad bad combination. 500mg is a damn lot of ketamine and morally there is no difference than drugging someone against their will by non medical people for no medical purpose.
Cops also use pepper spray. It's against someone's will, by non-cooks, for no culinary purpose.
Cops also use electric stun guns. It's against someone's will, by non-electricians, for no electronic purpose.
Mind proposing an acceptable method of restraint? Go ahead, and see people tear it apart as a human rights violation.
It's much like the hopeless situation in bad schools, where all possible methods of discipline have been banned. Things are a mess if we deny the need to impose proper behavior by force.
And cops use bullets, too. Soldiers use even better bullets, and these are a super effective method of disciplining people with great longterm success in reducing repeat offenders.
But the cost on the detainee (who is to be presumed innocent, who may be in distress themself, who may have a psychotic episode due to some unknown cross-reaction with medication or the like, who may be deeply scared) is much, much, much higher, which is why this sort of thing almost never happens where I live (not the US, obviously).
I feel there are good reasons to assume that force-injecting someone with a megadose of Ketamine without their knowing what they're getting, understanding what they're getting into, competent assistance during what follows, in a profoundly bad state of mind, likely in deep fear, under heavy stress, while being restrained (otherwise, how would you inject?), with no knowlegde of their medical history or current condition, administered by laypeople, who would be completely useless in case of complications – I believe that isn't quite the same as tasing someone, or using pepper spray. While it's not visible in the way beating injuries are, that sort of thing has big potential to really deeply traumatize and mentally scar people for a long time.
Cops here do not have such powers and no one has tried to give them such powers, so far; I hope it stays that way. If someone has to be sedated, a doctor and an ambulance have to be summoned, and the then-patient has to be brought directly to a clinic that can take care of them; all in a medical setting from that point, not primarily an arrest (though, of course, depending on the situation, they may not be allowed to just leave once they're lucid again). This is only ever to be done in case of people in a psychotic episode that cannot be calmed otherwise or the like, it's not something to put into annoying detainees to make them shut up and be easier to handle. Any emergency doctor willing to inject such drugs without proper medical indication would take on big personal risks.
And, finally:
> Things are a mess if we deny the need to impose proper behavior by force.
Things are a mess as well if the tools to do so are passed out without checks and safety mechanisms that are appropriate to their effects. Letting cops shoot people at will while there are other, less severe options, that's awfully bad. And letting them drug people into submission while there are other, less severe options, that too is really bad.
Almost universally not true. The Geneva convention prohibits many types of bullets that are allowed for civilian use. Hollow points, for example. And there are good reasons why they're allowed for civilians and not war.
2. It's not fair to give us a sanctimonious lecture about how great your country's police procedures are without stating your country. Put up, or drop the lecture.
I believe soldiers have bullets with a lot more kinetic energy behind them than bullets fired by ordinary police guns; that said, I'm not a gun person, so maybe a police small arms shot is more effective against people than one fired by an assault rifle.
Besides, the policy I described is what (AFAIK) most of Europe implements at the moment (might be all of Europe even), including Germany. I don't quite see why stating that requires chutzpah.
That wasn't intended as a sanctimonious lecture at all, but since there already is a lot of "nothing less drastic could ever work" in the comments, I thought I'd give an example of another policy that works well. I'm well aware there is no police force or security apparatus without fault, they all get some things wrong (and some are outright atrocious, like in Belarus currently), not trying to make it sound like some EU police service is perfect. I don't know where the US police falls on that spectrum, though reading US news makes it seem like they do have some serious issues currently. This particular policy doesn't exactly help, either.
"I don't know where the US police falls on that spectrum, though reading US news makes it seem like they do have some serious issues currently. "
Well that's the problem, isn't it? You read news coverage of the US. The observational bias there is huge. Consider:
The US is a country of 320 million. As of Brexit, larger than the EU and homogeneously English speaking with homogeneous press and institutions. The EU is smaller with 23 languages or so and a patchwork of everything.
So if a Eastern EU cop beats the shit out of a homosexual in jail who would ever find out?
At least in Greece it's pretty well documented that cops sodomized Albanian migrant workers with broomsticks. But you wouldn't know that unless you happen to have an Albanian wife who lived in Greece.
An Italian squad of carabinieri was just disbanded because it turned out to be running a drug dealing and extortion racket. This is literally current news. Have you heard about it?
Spanish police took COVID as an opportunity to abuse their power. National scandal in Spain, I haven't read any non-Spanish (and I mean Spain Spanish, not Spanish language) news about it.
In Hesse police computers were used to find out the personal details of a left-wing politician to send them neo-Nazi affiliated threats. Armed agents of the Germany with neo-Nazi links is quite the scandal today in Germany.
Notice the bias in my examples:
Spanish police - I'm half Spanish
Italian police - I'm half Italian
Greek police - My wife is Greek speaking Albanian.
German police - I suspect you're German so I specifically googled German police abuse
Notice I don't have specific French police abuse examples... because I don't speak French! I'm sure a google search will quickly inform me of Algerians young men beat to a pulp by a gendarme.
In general, as EU citizen living in the US for over a decade, I find that the EU perspective of the US couldn't be more wrong.
Sure, the military has access to more powerful rounds. Aircraft cannons, for example. But they don't typically load the soldier's rifles with rounds more powerful than what a civilian can buy.
- Soldiers' bullets really don't have more kinetic energy than civilian ones. For one, a civilian can always hand load, and get whatever K.E. they want (until they blow up their gun's chamber). Also, civilians can buy military rounds. Either surplus or whatever.
Smaller bullets means soldiers can carry more ammo. Not as important in the trenches of Europe, but crucial in the jungle colonial wars, I mean freedom wars, since WW2.
- Also, the military only wants a bullet powerful enough make it through any reasonable personal armor. The idea is that a bullet that isn't powerful enough to exit the body will cause more damage by tumbling inside and/or be more difficult to remove -> it's a way around the Geneva conventions that mandates rounds hold themselves together
- Third hunters, by law, have to use a bullet with a certain minimum K.E. The .30-06, for example, was initially used as a military round, but is today a popular deer hunting round. It has been replaced in the military by the much smaller, weaker, round used in the M-16.
The civilian .30-06 is considerably more powerful round than the AK-47's, whose round is considered too powerful for a modern rifle.
- Check out the perfectly legal, if expensive, .50 BMG.
Police small arms are equal to military small arms, but usage is different.
Police get better ammunition for destroying human flesh, due to treaty restrictions on the military. Police can get all of the military small arms ammunition.
Police normally leave rifles locked up in their cars.
But surprisingly, even in “good schools”, when the same offense happens by minorities vs. non minorities, it is criminalized when done by minorities.
I was amazed at the stories my son told me about kids getting caught with drugs, hitting a coach, vandalizing property and all that happened was that the parents got called and a few days of suspension and the police were never involved. Because “kids will be kids”. Of course this is in a high income district.
When I was previously married living in a predominantly minority neighborhood - great neighborhood, lower income minority school district - my step daughter would tell me about the even the most minor of offenses where administrators would get the police involved.
There have been plenty of studies showing the unequal treatment of Black and White kids.
That's a different school, run by different people. It does not prohibit attendance by students of any race. The only bias I see is that of the parents, who pay a housing premium to avoid being associated with some kinds of people.
The local people choose the school board, which then chooses the school policy and administration.
School policy is limited by what is allowed and by what seems to work. If the parents usually are quick to discipline students for misbehavior, then parents will be relied upon to do so. If the parents ignore or encourage misbehavior, there is no reason to involve them. The police will be called instead.
Still, you elected a school board that would permit that difference, and you chose where to live.
If telling parents gets students under control at one school, and it doesn't work at the other school, punishment will be different. You could get to that policy by trial and error, without any knowledge of the racial makeup of the student body.
A) Because someone who lived in my school district where rent was $600 a month - I had a house as part of the “gentrification” movement pre real estate bust - could pick up and move to a better school district like I did in the opposite side of the metro area over an hour away where the rent is now $2000/month.
B) if minorities are treated differently in the same school district, why would the majority care? Are you now going to argue that if you are a minority and face statistically unequal treatment by the criminal justice system you should move out of the city? state? country?
Things are different, yes, but I'm not seeing any racism on the part of the school administration or school board.
You are in "a high income district". You were in "lower income minority school district". I don't know the racial situation in your current district, though I could probably guess right. It's realistic, though not very nice, to imply that "minority" is the opposite of "high income".
For the discipline difference, it's enough that there is an income difference. That explains everything. There is no need to mention race.
The high-income people, of any race, care about education and discipline. Getting a kid to behave is usually as simple as telling the parents.
The low-income people, on average, don't give a damn. Telling a parent about bad behavior will just generate a tirade of insults. Calling the police works, so that is done.
It's unfair to the low-income people who aren't terrible. Well, life isn't fair. The group you associate with will determine how you are treated.
It's realistic, though not very nice, to imply that "minority" is the opposite of "high income".
Hint: Not only are “some of my best friends Black”, my parents, my wife, my children, and all of my family is too. Please don’t go all “woke” on me.
For the discipline difference, it's enough that there is an income difference. That explains everything. There is no need to mention race.
Studies show that it happens in the same district...
The high-income people, of any race, care about education and discipline. Getting a kid to behave is usually as simple as telling the parents.
Right because poor people don’t care about education.
The high-income people, of any race, care about education and discipline. Getting a kid to behave is usually as simple as telling the parents.
Uhh, this isn’t new. I went to a private school growing up. By definition if they were paying to go to the school I went to, they weren’t poor. I saw myself how much different the “bad” White kids were treated than the Black kids.
The group you associate with will determine how you are treated.
Oh that’s all I have to tell my six foot 3 son to do! Make sure he has one of his White friends with him (he usually does) when he hangs out so police won’t wonder what he’s doing in our part of town.
He was going to walk from school one night down the street to a Waffle House after a football game to meet his other classmates. His friend group is like the rainbow coalition, but this one night he wasn’t sure whether his non-Black friends were going to the game and walking down there with him. We told him if not, just take an Uber. Two Black kids walking down the street were an easy target for harassment. Not by other kids - kids aren’t as stupid as the older generation - they were worried about being harassed by the cops.
I'm nearly the opposite of “woke” but I try to be nice, and that wording reminded me of this awful Biden quote: “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”
As a general rule, yes, poor people don't care about education. That's typically a contributing factor to being poor. Exceptions are common.
Poor areas and poor families have a sort of cultural rot. Some have given up. Some see other things, often less honest or less productive, as an easier path to getting by in life. Some fear loss of friends if they choose a different path in life. In those areas, a kid who does well in school will be attacked by peers.
So at home, the parents are not reading to kids. The parents are not asking about homework. The parents are not taking away sources of entertainment that distract from success. The parents are not bothered by a non-A grade or in a panic over a below-B grade. Instead, the parents are creating chaos. The parents are getting arrested, coming to blows while drunk or high, and cranking up the TV volume. Very often, the families are broken. Sometimes the kids don't even know their father. All sorts of non-academic nonsense is glorified. The priorities are just all wrong. That is not an environment that promotes discipline, studying, or academic success.
If teachers are really treating black kids of equivalent income and wealth different from white kids, that is interesting. It's particularly interesting because teachers are among the most “woke” of all, commonly marching for BLM while accusing the MAGA crowd of being racist. In the name of BLM people have torched black neighborhoods (both business and residential) and torn down statues of people who fought against slavery, and the arrested people have included numerous teachers.
Life isn't fair, so some hints for your son: wear a nice suit, speak crisp standard English, and keep the grooming strictly traditional. Basically, adopt the mannerisms of a lawyer.
Life isn't fair, so some hints for your son: wear a nice suit, speak crisp standard English, and keep the grooming strictly traditional. Basically, adopt the mannerisms of a lawyer.
You did see the article I posted where Ving Rhames had five cops show up to his house pointing guns at him because they thought he was breaking into his own home? Should he have been wearing a suit in his own home?
No “acting White” doesn’t keep you from getting pulled over. My (step)son grew up in the burbs all of his life. No matter how “White” he talks he will still be treated with suspicious. So he is suppose to wear a suit everywhere? Do you tell your son to wear a suit when he is going to play basketball?
I know for a fact according to statistics I make more than twice the median in my county - the most affluent in the state and one of the top 25 in the country - the benefit of working for BigTech remotely while living in the south, I’m by no means rich - and yes we still get looked at suspiciously walking into our own homes.
So you mean all Black people have to do is wear a suit everywhere and they won’t get harassed? You have singlehandedly solved racism, police misconduct, the disenfranchisement of minorities, racial profiling, etc in one sentence!
And no, teachers come from their communities just like cops do. Do you really think they earn a degree and automatically become “woke”?
So poverty couldn’t possibly be caused by systemic racism, educational funding based on property taxes, the War on Drugs that habitually punishes minorities more than Whites for the same offenses that also makes it harder to get a job.
My son is actually paranoid of cops when he goes to play basketball. But anyway, life isn't fair, and if you're having a problem then there are things you can do to improve perception. The lawyer look/mannerisms get you out of the "might be lower class" bucket, which is where the fear and hostility comes from. Although I admit that being white can help avoid that bucket, any white person can put themselves into the "might be lower class" bucket with awful grooming choices. Facial tattoos will do it, a slurred voice will do it, etc.
The kind of people who become teachers are generally not the kind of people who become cops. The education is radically different. So that is a different starting point and a different path to the career. The teaching degree is nearly 100% “woke” garbage, none of it practical in the classroom. Some, for example the methods for reading instruction, has even been proven to be actively harmful.
Educational funding has nearly nothing to do with educational success. The per-child budget for the DC schools should make this very clear. Culture is nearly everything. Some cultures are toxic.
The lawyer look/mannerisms get you out of the "might be lower class" bucket, which is where the fear and hostility comes from.
So should Ving Rhames had “the lawyer look” in his own home? Would that have stopped five cops from coming to his house? If the Black guy sitting in his own home who got shot by the cop because she thought she was entering her house not have been shot if had gone to sleep in a suit not been killed?
Do you also tell your female relatives if they dress appropriately they won’t be raped?
They're not injecting this with tranq darts. Someone who is restrained enough to inject with a syringe, is already restrained enough. Probably with handcuffs/leg-irons/etc., but some cops also like to kneel on necks.
There is another method you neglected to mention: deescalation.
From all I've seen of US law enforcement, this seems to be applied very seldom, with cops actively escalating the situation and quickly reaching for tools of violence (beatings, batons, pepper spray, tasers, guns).
Most (all?) of the rest of the western world doesn't have these issues to anywhere near the degree the US does. Nobody in their right mind outside of the US would be justifying injecting people with massive doses of disassociative drugs, yet some people in the US think this is OK. That kind of says it all, really.
If someone is waving a knife or gun about and is a danger to others, I would say there is a moral difference. I am assuming that the police use it mainly for cases like that, but that is just an assumption. It still seems better than shooting at them. The linked article doesn't say anything like that though, but it is quite low on details leading to the arrest.
If someone is waving a weapon around I really doubt the police are getting near enough to inject drugs. There seems to be zero good reason for the use of this.
Set aside the ethics, legality, and saneness of doping an arrestee for a moment. Anyone know if this impacts the arrested person's 5th amendment rights?
Once you administer a mind altering drug against that person's will, any and all statements made by that person ought to be out of bounds for using against them at trial.
I was going to ask the same question. After this injection, is there a minimal time before you can spontaneously decide to make a confession without a lawyer?
Agents of the state randomly jumping you, beating you up because of their unilateral and arbitrary determination that you are resisting being randomly jumped, and then injecting you with a sedative and psychoactive so powerful that you die?
No, that's a distinctly American version of civil rights.
They might also arbitrarily take your property, while everyone gaslights you into thinking that this is a staple of non-American marxist regimes.
If you care about hearing a serious response, I think most Americans would agree that this protocol is on the wrong side of the line, but at the same time not thoroughly murderous in intent. It sounds like an extreme tactic that should be re-thought, and it is perfectly legal and normal for me to share this opinion or organize votes for change.
Your entire article describes convicted death row prisoners, whether we agree with or respect China's due process at all.
Why did you think it bolstered your argument to talk about Chinese due process in an article about a lack of due process in the US? beCaUsE wE cAN taLk AbOut iT? that's gold, its really the icing on the cake.
You think all the other non-“notable” people executed in one of those things got the appropriate legal protections too?
Anyway I’m just trying to say that if you want to apply the most unfriendly interpretation to some happening in America, in order to compare it to “non-American Marxist regimes”, at least be consistent.
> “execution vans” with no other purpose even suggested
> article shows purpose suggested with convicted prisoners
You presented them as if they just scoop people up off the street and execute them on the spot.
No, that's just America.
I'm asking you to compare the same things and all you did was present a different thing, masqueraded it as a worse thing, failed to find any comparison. If you want to elevate Chinese processes as a charade, thats pretty much what I would expect you to do, but people get railroaded in the US all the time too. So let's just talk about the things completely devoid of due process, or instead of deflecting we can just talk about how the US does not have a better process at all and we should put it under so much more scrutiny.
"We can talk about it" and thats how we got to this outcome, because everyone talked about giving the government all the power, stripping their need for due process, and siding with them by default way too often.
"Agents of the state randomly jumping you, beating you up because of their unilateral and arbitrary determination that you are resisting being randomly jumped, and then injecting you with a sedative and psychoactive so powerful that you die?
No, that's a distinctly American version of civil rights.
They might also arbitrarily take your property, while everyone gaslights you into thinking that this is a staple of non-American marxist regimes."
This was an accurate and a substantive comment which is only guilty of bruising a few egos.
> He got 500 milligrams because they thought he weighed 220 pounds, but he was only 140 pounds and should have received 315 milligrams.
315 milligrams is still.. a lot. Especially injected into the bloodstream (I presume?) all at one time. Enough to really wrangle your marbles even if you're used to that kind of stuff.
edit: To expand, that's about the dosage most people would get delusions of some sort, but not be 100% immobilized. That is a recipe for disaster around angry cops.
edit2: It's bio-availability is actually twice as high intramuscularilly than insufflated.. well you wouldn't be fighting the cops but dear god I would not want to experience that.
I know how much I weigh, but I don't know how much anyone else weighs. I guess some other people don't even weigh themselves so don't even know how much they weigh.
> pay attention when you hear someone’s weight to see if it matches your heuristic
I don't think I've ever heard an adult male ever mention their own weight in public. You can see why it'd be hard to estimate when you don't have any data.
You’ll have to get a job at a county fair running the weight guessing attraction to get enough data. There’s no other way to do it, it’s how we all figured out how to estimate the weight of a human. I’ll call my friend Chucky, he’ll get you a gig in a traveling carnival for the summer.
I'll second this. Climbers tend to get at least half-way decent estimating the weight of other climbers because it's pretty relevant if you're lead belaying somebody.
In fairness, we're usually estimating the weight of people of fairly fit builds, but with some practice estimating people of other builds, I agree that you'd get within 10%.
A very large part of police work is providing and reacting to descriptions of suspects. If there is no training on this provided then this seems to be a very large oversight. Based on the fact that police constantly arrest and harrass people who 'matched the description' perhaps there is no training, or perhaps the officers simply don't care and are just looking for a person that fits their bias.
I would be really surprised if they estimated this poorly and would guess they were just irritated by him and decided to up the dose as punishment. If I am wrong then they receive zero training when estimating weight and multiple officers are terrible at it. To mistakenly confuse a 140lb for 220lb is poor judgement to the point that it strains credulity.
FWIW: My wife work in health care and just a couple of months or so told me how difficult it can be to estimate the weight of a person. She had recently seen some pictures with examples of persons and their actual weights and it had surprised even her.
It doesn't strain credulity for me. Most descriptions of the black victims of police brutality by law enforcement inflate them to a monstrous size, and use animal metaphors to describe their terrifying faces.
Never underestimate the degree to which racism is driven by actual, irrational terror.
There are actually documented cases of police officers in the early 20th century requesting heavier calibers and hotter loads from gun manufacturers because they believed their firearms were incapable of stopping an enraged <slur deleted>.
Biologically, this is utter nonsense. But the belief that black people are tougher, stronger, and more capable of withstanding pain and drugs is a surprisingly common belief. Doctors are notorious for downgrading black pain in clinical situations as compared to white patients, and administer less pain killers.
The uncomfortable truth is that authorities regularly misidentify black men as being bigger/taller/older/darker than they actually are. Whether that's an issue specific to police indoctrination or to American culture in general, it's clearly part of what happened here.
Apologies to the HN users who will be incensed at the notion of race playing a role in this situation.
Even today a common misconception among white doctors is that black people have thicker skin than white people or even that their nerv endings are less sensitive.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, cops in the early 20th century requested larger calibers and hotter loads from gun manufacturers because they believed black people survived gun shots better than white people.
> 315 milligrams is still.. a lot. Especially injected into the bloodstream (I presume?)
Iv dose for induction of general anesthesia is ~3-5 mg/kg. Or ~5 mg/kg intramuscularly.
The main thing with ketamine is that it causes tachycardia/arrhythmias and increases blood pressure. While that can be desirable for people in shock, it is a big problem if the person is already under proarrhythmic drugs (e.g. cocaine).
In Europe, we use antipsychotics for similar situations (haloperidol).
I’m pretty sure the lit goes up to 8 mg/kg for IM. In the case of a 100lb pt, that’s what, 50kg? So they give the pt 6 mg per kg. It’s not out of the range of sanity, all else equal.
Key point though: you wouldn’t give the pt 8 mg/kg in a fucking bolus. Time to onset for sedative effect is fast (10min or so); time to peripheral adverse effects can easily take an hour. You’d start way lower than 8, and work your way up if you needed to.
I’ve seen club kids go into what I can only describe as an ‘ambulatory trance state’ at the dosage levels you speak of.
I talked down one or two people from completely destroying their environment while in such a state, by using deliberately de-escalatory calming techniques.
I’m aghast the police would use such a substance because it is indeed a recipe for disaster when mixed with their expectations of behavior.
Social workers and ER nurses, in particular, have field-tested practices for dealing with people who are anxiously disoriented — or violently psychotic - in a manner which resolves the situation peacefully.
All I can say for what I did at the time was an intuition that I was confronted with a half-tranquilized, large confused ape and so acted as to prevent them from panicking and running amok with calm words, movements, and (most importantly I suspect in that state) caring touch.
People taking ketamine in clubs usually use much less than k-hole or anaesthetic doses, because the effects are more conducive to partying. They generally take small bumps over the course of a night.
I really doubt the club kids to saw had taken anything like the equivelant of 300mg or 500mg taken IM (2x the bioavailability of intranasal), or even intranasally. If you are standing, 50-75mg taken intranasally can cause transient, trance-like states like you describe. 100mg taken intranasally (50g IM equivalent) is enough such that most people couldn't safely walk, and would have closed-eye visuals almost like a lucid dream. 150mg intranasally will guarantee a k-hole for most people, and 300mg plus would render all but those with extreme tolerances unconscious.
Let’s say these particular kids had access to the good stuff. Cooked straight from the vial, albeit from Mexico or some further place. Done by the plateful and not in bumps.
I should also add that the ones whom I had to talk down were probably also on heaven-knows what other substances at the time.
What worries me most about this is that ketamine on its own is psychoactive to a degree where it can cause hallucinations. I believe it is usually given in order to minimize pain, alongside a real sedative like midazolam before narcosis. By itself, it is really more fuzzy than sedating.
Ever seen someone come out of narcosis? They talk a lot of stupid things.
At least they say that ketamine must be approved by a physician first. Also a bit weird that I can’t find any other articles saying this. Maybe I am searching the wrong thing
And I swim all the time without drowning, yet swimmers drown all the time. So what?
This isn't a software function, there are thousands of factors involved and a cop is walking in knowing a handful. I don't think you're being realistic.
Pretty much everywhere in the world, paramedics are allowed to inject sedatives when treating a patient. Ketamine is used in many places (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Austria) by paramedics, because it is very safe relative to other sedatives. So the main concern should whether or not police are ordering EMS to administer it when it is not actually required (police do not administer it themselves), since I don't think administering it after an arrest should be an issue if it is actually required.
The article doesn't really give much evidence that this actually happens very frequently. The main piece of evidence is this:
In Minneapolis, a report conducted by the Office of Police Conduct Review found eight of those cases between 2016 and 2018, ranging from officers requesting paramedics use the drug to emergency medical workers asking officers for their opinions on sedating someone.
8 cases across three years in one city, where some of those cases were just paramedics asking for a second opinion, does not seem to indicate a very widespread issue across the US, especially when the city being investigated is know to have a bad police department.
Paramedics here are only allowed to do so if a doctor is not available and there is an emergency waranting using medication. After giving such medication, close monitoring and hospitalisation is mandatory, except if the physician arrives in time and releases the patient (which is very rare in such circumstances). The article never talks about a doctor arriving, an EKG, hospitalisation or any other appropriate measures, from which I conclude that there were none. Which is unconsciable, ketamine isn't "just an aspirin".
8 cases across three years in one city, where some of those cases were just paramedics asking for a second opinion, does not seem to indicate a very widespread issue across the US, especially when the city being investigated is know to have a bad police department.
First of all, it's a big jump from "the article only mentions 8 cases across the US" to "there were only 8 cases across the US". The case of Elijah McClain, for instance, is in Denver.
And the issue seems to be one of cruel and unusual punishment. At least in the US, people expect the police to use and carry guns. They don't expect them to order paramedics to inject you with weird sedatives when you're under restraint, and especially not to make broadly reasonable decisions while doing so.
Look at the McClain case, he was 140 pounds with six officers restraining him, and they needed to inject ketamine? I wouldn't blame the paramedics for miscalculating the weight, they probably thought this was some enormous muscular man that six police officers couldn't hold down.
I agree that this is something that should never happen at all, but you're hyperbolizing the parent's statement. They didn't say there are only 8 cases in the US, they said it's uncommon.
Taking Minneapolis as an average (parent believes they are worse than average), it happens to .00063% of the population there per year or 1890 Americans per year. I'm having trouble finding the arrest rate in Minneapolis, which would help get to a more accurate estimate.
What do you feel should happen, then, in the rare cases where medical personnel need to treat someone who's uncontrollably violent? Police on their own can be (and are) trained to just physically restrain the guy indefinitely, but paramedics can't treat someone if they're thrashing around.
(I agree it'd be dystopian if police were themselves carrying around sedatives, but that's not happening here.)
> First of all, it's a big jump from "the article only mentions 8 cases across the US" to "there were only 8 cases across the US".
The parent does not make that jump, it merely cites 8 cases over 3 years in one city and asks if there isn't more evidence. And that does not even allege police directing paramedics to do things (as claimed in another thread here), just people discussing the situation with each other.
> Ketamine is used in many places (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Austria) by paramedics,
The original claim did not say anything about police. You interjected police. However, I searched for "australia paramedics using ketamine" in DDG. The first page was nothing but pages regarding Colorado. Page 2 returned a more relevant study of Australian paramedics using Special-K[0]. I then searched "canadian paramedics using ketamine", and again first page totally about CO with page 2 yielding relevant results[1].
> Pretty much everywhere in the world, paramedics are allowed to inject sedatives when treating a patient.
I don't know how you define pretty much everywhere, but in the EU it's illegal pretty much everywhere. [0]
I know in practice those laws get ignored, but, as a paramedic or doctor, you could get into trouble if someone decides to sue over it. The reality is that the law isn't on your side on this issue.
If you want the evidence that this happens frequently read the MPD civilian oversight report[0] on the subject.
In my opinion the main issue is the "excited delirium" diagnosis. One of the main symptoms of "excited delirium" is "Police Noncompliance"[1] which makes the police an essential part of its diagnosis.
To use a powerful animal tranquilizer on a human being just to make some cops' job "easier" is about the most abhorrent, sickly thing I have heard in years. I don't want to read any more of this.
To think of all the complications in a person's body from experiencing a drug that puts your conscience in a literally black hole (K-hole) is just sick. It's wrong.
> powerful animal tranquilizer on a human being just to make some cops' job "easier"
You’re waxing hyperbolic. It’s a sedative drug used in normal human clinical practice, and in many settings is preferable because it has -fewer- risks of complications than other sedatives. And while I’m highly critical of it’s being used without strict medical protocol, I’ve worked psych ED enough to understand that there are occasionally absolutely, 100% ridiculously “agitated” patients that are going to have to be brought in, and will not do so without large amounts of physical force - something that is also prone to unfortunate complications.
The video shows that police escalated every chance they got.
After receiving a phone call of a “suspicious person” they went from in their car to hands on Elijah in less than 10s.
In a matter of minutes Elijah was on the ground surrounded by a dozen officers.
They’re saying “was he suspected of anything”, “why are we here”?
They don’t even know why they’re there... but they know that they need to indiscriminately dominate a young black man until he’s puking and crying and ultimately has a heart attack.
Ridiculously agitated, my foot. They (Police) create the situation, then they (Police) prescribe ketamine. These are not the people who should be making these calls. No one should be allowed to have this kind of latitude when dealing with another human.
They're plain fucking murderers and should rot in jail. That is all about it. It is just too bad that the land of free telling every other country how to behave does not seem to give a flying fuck about the egregious behavior of their own agents. Well not unless the case gets much publicity on FB and the likes.
> They don’t even know why they’re there... but they know that they need to indiscriminately dominate a young black man until he’s puking and crying and ultimately has a heart attack.
And this, for the benefit of folks here who still want to treat these incidents as individual aberrations, is what BLM is about.
Sure, police can be good or bad, sometimes make mistakes, etc... But POLICING, as it is practiced in this country, is a horrifying disaster. And at this point it seems almost completely beyond rescue. We need new cops, new practices, new laws, new equipment, new training. I don't see how you "reform" a culture like that.
> I don't see how you "reform" a culture like that.
You do it through hard work on real reform at the local level, something that BLM (the organization) isn't really interested in. I don't agree with everything but the ideas outlined here https://www.joincampaignzero.org are a good start. Some communities are in much worse situation than others and I think new leadership is urgently needed in many of these places (i.e., vote for change).
The rhetoric that you are using is supremely dangerous. Look what is going on in Portland as the police and local political leadership have withdrawn from the basic goal of public safety and ensuring a peaceful, civil community. It is devolving into warring tribes. It is actually astonishing to me that it hasn't escalated further than it has but I see that this weekend things have changed a bit as some new tribes arrived resulting in brawls/skirmishes/fighting between the tribes as opposed to with police.
To advocate or even suggest that policing, as a system, is irredeemably flawed and can't be reformed is to actively invite in chaos and civil unrest. Instead of a civil police force you will end up with an ad-hoc collection of private security, thugs, violent gangs, protection rackets, and so on. Due process will not exist and whatever problems you attribute to the current system will be much, much worse in this new "system".
> You do it through hard work on real reform at the local level, something that BLM (the organization) isn't really interested in.
But aren't you making the same type of over-generalization as the comment you are replying to?
I think there are many within the BLM movement who are working towards thoughtful change at the local level within their respective communities. But just like any large organization, the most extreme viewpoints tend to get the most attention, and those within the organization with the loudest voices tend to be the ones who push for the more extreme agendas.
I think it's important to keep in mind that any large organization is made up of individual people who each have their own opinions, motivations and goals, and often times those may be in conflict with the broader messaging of the group.
Your last paragraph really lost me though. I get it that you are addressing the most extreme version of the original post, but for me personally that didn't seem very constructive and I didn't find the appeals to fear mongering very convincing either.
> Instead of a civil police force you will end up with an ad-hoc collection of private security, thugs, violent gangs, protection rackets, and so on
Uh... I don't think that's what I said, at all. I said we need new cops and a new law enforcement organization, because the old one is polluted beyond redemption.
Perhaps I assumed a bit too much. You did indeed suggest that everything had to be replaced as opposed to discarded. I don't see how that is practical in the real world though.
I still would argue that your generalization that all policing is broken is very dangerous rhetoric and I don't think it is true). Civil society exists in part because of a tacit assumption that the police are always there to "police". At some level we agree to be policed. The non-police outnumber the police so there has to be some basic agreement that people will behave for it to all work.
If you convince everyone that the police as a whole are irredeemably bad/evil/racist etc. you've destroyed that tacit agreement and that civil society breaks down. We are seeing glimpses of that in the places where politicians and DAs have decided to put a pause on basic policing. A lot of people are discovering they don't have to behave.
The fact that ketamine is also used by veterinarians is unremarkable. Almost every common human antibiotic is also used for fish; are broad-spectrum antibiotics “fish drugs”?
Ketamine is routinely used by paramedics, I think more routinely in Western Europe than in North America.
The real question is whether it is appropriate for police to request the use of sedatives while effecting an arrest; and you could argue in some cases that it is entirely appropriate even if your only priority is the wellbeing of the arrestee.
> To use a powerful animal tranquilizer on a human being just to make some cops' job "easier" is about the most abhorrent, sickly thing I have heard in years. I don't want to read any more of this.
I used to drink. Heavily. Enough where I would lose control and neighbors would call 911 because they were concerned. I was removed from my home and handcuffed and brought to the ER more than once. A couple times I went smoothly, but a few times I fought back, hard. One time I was told it took 5 people to subdue me and I kicked an ambulance driver in the head. Another time I fought so hard against the handcuffs that I have permanent nerve damage in my right wrist. I also have shoulder problems that may have stemmed from being restrained by police.
I would’ve rather been ketamined than kick an ambulance driver in the head or have nerve/physical damage to my body. If you’ve never completely lost control of yourself and fought against multiple people, you have no idea what they’re dealing with. Once I got to the ER, they dosed me with haloperidol anyways shrug Might as well have been ketamine when I was being detained.
I hate cops, but I think ketamine could potentially help in some situations where someone has lost their goddamn mind and is fighting back hard.
Edit: This all happened in the 3rd Precinct of Minneapolis, famous for murdering George Floyd
Ketamine is one of the most used human sedatives. It's also available by prescription (esketamine) and I know someone who used it under medical supervision.
This use is also medical, to try to help calm people who have major drug overdoses and save their lives. As with all things medical, sometimes things go wrong. It's not clear to me that the ketamine had anything to do with the death, nor does the article even make that case. Cardiac arrest is the literal opposite of what one would expect of someone dying of too much ketamine.
Instead, it talks about police training... even though medical professionals are the ones who inject this on site. There's a reasonable call for medical standards and study, but not a whole lot else.
Policemen do one of the toughest jobs in society, especially in places where crime is high. Society owes them a great debt for enforcing the law because there are some hard criminals out there who would run amok if a weak and ineffective police force were the norm.
Armchair criticism of the police with zero consideration for their point of view is not helpful to anyone, most of all victims of crimes.
They do, and this is precisely why we must prosecute the bad policemen with extreme rigor. We allow them to use lethal force against our fellow people on the condition they do so only as a last resort and in order to protect society.
Police should never be permitted to direct medical professionals to do anything to a person in their custody unless it is to save their life. Medical professionals should be hyper-trained on how to tell police “hell no” and to report their requests to an independent agency for investigation.
There are other types of scenarios where out of control cops bully doctors and nurses into doing illegal things, two that I have read about:
- forcing a suspect to be subject to anal cavity search by a doctor at a hospital after a traffic stop
- forcing hospital staff to run blood tests on an awake, non-consenting suspect
Everyone who has ever dealt with the medical world for a personal or family problem understands that there are few “sure things” and that something that worked miraculously for someone’s problem might not work for yours, even if they seem like the same problem. Allowing police a position to direct medical care is utterly outrageous and irresponsible.
That said, what was done to Elijah McCain is one of the sickest, most unacceptably fucked up nightmare scenarios I’ve ever heard of. The initial interaction was a result of racist police who then had their victim murdered because they never saw him as a person, just another potential criminal.
Medical professionals do refuse! If you remember Alex Wubbels a nurse who refused to do a blood draw stating that she would not unless the patient was under arrest, a warrant had been issued or the patient had consented.
She was arrested, although not charged and was later apologized to. The cop was fired and it also lead to Utah changing its blood draw laws.
It's used as a treatment for drug overdoses ("excited delerium") which appears to be why it was used here. Of course it's a catch-all term, there's no way to tell offhand just what street drugs someone is on. There has to be a reason it took half a dozen people to hold him down.
Also, there's no mention in this article of police directing the paramedics to do anything. Can you point me to what gave you that idea?
I said that's what ketamine is used for. I never said he was on drugs, as I do not know that. I only said that it's not normal to need a bunch of people to hold someone down.
Those on the scene certainly thought this was the case, which is basically the only reason they use that drug in the first place in the context of an arrest. I don't claim to know one way or another whether they were right, but I would note that dying of a heart attack is inconsistent with ketamine as the cause.
Maybe they gave him too much, but the article leaves one to conclude that this was somehow related to his death even though it never actually says so.
I did get this from Wikipedia, 'After McClain was restrained more officers arrived and audio of the conversation records them saying that McClain was "acting crazy", that he was "definitely on something", and that he had attacked them with "incredible, crazy strength" when they tried to restrain him.'
They did not use the words, 'he was on drugs', but there is a strong implication based on the audio that this is what the police were claiming.
> There has to be a reason it took half a dozen people to hold him down.
This is the kind of rationalization that gets policies like this instituted. Having to be held down by six people isn't a requirement for being diagnosed with "excided delirium," anything is sufficient, because it's not a falsifiable diagnosis. The look in someone's eye can be enough. Talking back can be enough.
Also, by "enough," I mean enough for people who are already reactionaries of the law and order type to rationalize it. If it happened to a hypothetical white guy in some office complaining about his tax bill (who also showed no aggression and only tested positive for trace amounts of marijuana), could you imagine that people would still be alluding to "some reason" why "excited delirium" was actually a cool and reasonable diagnosis?
I mean, this is a violinist massage therapist who volunteered at animal shelters. This event is just more evidence that video will neither save you nor avenge you. You're as likely to be able to keep law enforcement from injecting ketamine into you on a whim as you are to keep law enforcement from being able to search your person or your car. With "There has to be a reason it took half a dozen people to hold him down," the reaction justifies itself.
It's a catch-all term to describe people who have likely overdosed on various stimulants. To argue that it's non-specific is to argue that the police have no way of knowing what medical conditions underlie the problem.
That's why they summon medical professionals, as was done here and in other similar cases.
You say that like its a positive. It would be much more straightforward to prosecute an officer injecting ketamine. The medical "professionals" are catspaws.
The cops involved went back to where they killed Elijah McCain and posed for a group photo, reportedly re-enacting his death.
This is the behavior I’d expect from a serial killer.
Edit: they then distributed or showed this photo to the rest of the precinct. We know because a whistleblower notified the media. To my eye, this means that they expected the rest of the precinct to approve of this behavior, which is extremely alarming.
The difference between our points is the subtle difference between alarm and surprise. I’d contend that one can be alarmed even if they’re not surprised; although even I am inclined to admit that this is pretty low value pedantry on my part.
I believe the positions naturally draws people who are bullies. Not that all of them are, but the power over, and respect from the general population is probably very attractive to people who get a kick out of being asshole. Also, while I can't confirm the prevalence, there's a ton of anecdotes you here about shady hiring practices. There's the now popular story about a department refusing to hire people who had too high an IQ, and a friend told me how a department in a large city was attempting to recruit his cousin, despite him being diagnosed bipolar.
> Also, while I can't confirm the prevalence, there's a ton of anecdotes you here about shady hiring practices. There's the now popular story about a department refusing to hire people who had too high an IQ
this is not just anecdotal, and has even been tested in court[0].
Another police department got caught bending down the notches on their police badges as a way of signifying how many kills a given officer had, and even had a ceremony for officers first kill. Reports say at least 25% of the precinct participated, probably most knew.
American police live in what we call a “siege” mentality; they believe that they’re the only thing protecting society from chaos and crime. This results in a belief that their actions are inherently just, and that any criticism risks exposure of society to the chaos they’re barely holding back.
It’s not a convincing pitch when viewed in the light of blatant police brutality, but it appears to be what they believe.
I work as a paramedic, and on occasion have to sedate folks. I have never (and will never) sedated someone at the request of the police. I can think of two occasions where the decision to sedate was a discussion between the cops and I (trying to come up with alternatives). It's also common for me to ask the police for assistance physically restraining someone in order to make the sedation process safer. That's as far as the involvement of the police should go. I agree 100% with your assessment of Elijah McCain's killing.
That being said, sedation is an important tool, and often the safest course of action for a patient that would otherwise be a danger to themselves or others. A prolonged fight can be fatal for someone who is pushing their body further than it should go.
It definitely has to be done correctly though, and given the number of cases where it was very clearly done incorrectly, I do think changes need to be made.
It's unquestionably a lynching. But this is what this perverted culture tolerates. Rather than the public participating in the lynching directly, it has hired professional lynchers.
True, and I think there are lot of deniers of how the racist history of the US influences its racist present.
The mindset that permits people to shrug off the killing of Elijah McClain, and assume he must have done something to deserve it, is the same that celebrated public lynchings.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Especially not the ideological flamewar style? We're trying for something other than scorched earth here.
They're being completely civil. This does not at all sound like an "ideological flame war."
Racism in society isn't an ideologocal point. It's reality. They're pointing out facts that are uncomfortable.
If the "spirit" of HN is truly about intellectual curiosity around things that relate to tech and entrepreneurship, then HN needs to embrace the fact that society ultimately rules over all -- most certainly tech and business.
I fear that your comment here and re-direction to "the rules" is a censorship attempt because this is an uncomfortable thing go think about. Is HN a place where discussion about social problems that infect all of tech, business, and entrepreneurship not allowed? Is talking about racism "ideological"?
HN has been having lots of discussion about racism, just as the rest of society has been (or rather, societies, since many countries are represented here). If your question ("Is HN a place where discussion about social problems [is] not allowed") comes up, that can only be because of unfamiliarity with the history. If you want to get more familiar, HN Search is a great resource (see the box at the bottom of every page).
Don't forget psych evaluations - with the implication that they should be found unfit for release. This one is a favorite of "cops" that don't actually have authority to arrest people or no probable cause for it.
Cops are some of the stupidest, most violent people in our society. In many jurisdictions you can be disqualified from law enforcement if you are too intelligent, because they just need their thugs to follow orders and not to ever think. Cops have absolutely no business ordering a paramedic to do anything.
> In many jurisdictions you can be disqualified from law enforcement if you are too intelligent
There's obviously at least one department that did this at one point in time because of the notable lawsuit allowing it, but what is the source for it being a practice in “many jurisdictions”?
Holy smokes. This shouldn't happen. Ketamine is also an amnesiac, which means this could be used to erase the memory of your violent arrest and abuse by police.
In most of these police death stories, there's at least a _tiny bit_ of a rationale for the police behavior.
In the case of Elijah McClain there's absolutely nothing I've seen or read in reliable news sources that indicates the police had any reason to be forceful with him or even to arrest him. It is simply outrageous.
Fascinating. The end of the CNN article about this is incredible:
> Richard Harris, the Australian anesthesiologist, was one of only two cave-diving anesthesiologists in the world. "I didn't think it would work at all," Harris told National Geographic. "I expected the first two kids to drown and then we'd have to do something different. I put their odds of survival at zero."
what and why? Specifically, what and why is insane and how is being an anesthesiologist relevant?
Note, I don't think police should inject anyone with a substance (personally, I'd rather get shot with a bullet than involuntarily shot with an anesthetic), but how is being an anesthesiologist relevant?
The question: "should cops direct paramedic to administer K shots" is an ethics, or a religious, question. Not a medical one. Certainly relevant medical questions can inform the debate; questions such as "how to determine safe and effective dosage of an anesthetic in field situations" "What does the person experience when involuntarily subjected to this drug?".
A very important medical question can be: "How lethal is this technique?" So that the technique's lethality can be properly classified for street use.
Subjecting the person to mortal danger is not anesthesiology. It's ethics, law, and religion.
You comment is pendatic and assumed that OP is commenting specifically on the ethics of this practice. OP could just be commenting on the safety of the practice, where their expertise is highly relavent.
Absolutely true. However, there is not much assuming being done. The absolutely stark, clear, and unassailable fact that many police in the US are violent, racist thugs has been repeatedly shoved into my face over the last few months. Not all of them are, by any means. But even the good cops are part of a system that enables and rewards racist, thuggish behavior.
Well I can't argue with that since you said 'many' police in a country of 350+ million people. But what is many? 5? 100? 1000? It's easy to pick these instances and assign blame retrospectively when in reality, things like this almost never happen. If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it. Business as usual.
This is a nonsense argument. Police in the United States kill civilians at a rate more that 3x the rate of the next first world nation. In almost all cases of police acting with bias, those same officers are surrounded by other officers who do nothing. All of these bystanding officers are guilty of the same crime. These cases are just the ones that are brought to the national attention there are many more that are not. In very many of these cases several police body cameras just stopped working or were not on.
"in reality, things like this almost never happen"
I am willing to bet your life experience is very different than those of minorities.
" If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it"
Not sure what you base this on, I feel like to could be based on nothing but the narrative you are attempting spin. Is your argument that police should be more aggressive based on what could happen? Should police just gun everyone down because they may have a gun and pull it out and shoot them in the head?
In this country, police have godlike life or death power, every instance of police killings should be heavily scrutinized by neutral parties and stringent protocols put in place to prevent it with harsh criminal penalties for those that dont follow the rules. How you can just shrug and accept any cases of police brutality is beyond me.
1. I am black.
2. There is no police brutality in my area, or crime for that matter.
3. I don't shrug and accept police brutality, those are your words.
4. I am not trying to spin a narrative, merely point out a narrative that is being spun by the media that directs attention away from actual solutions in favor of self-dealing sensationalism.
Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made.
There are very few areas on the United States with no crime...
"Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made."
They are but when they make mistakes people die or are sent to jail for decades or are stripped of their property. To give people this much power and shrug and say its a mistake is not acceptable. Very often these same cops have many / dozens of complaints against them and they still continue to act with impunity because they know that they are not going to be punished. A mistake is a mistake, 10 / 15 mistakes in and it is a pattern, extrapolated out over tens of thousands of officers and it is a systematic problem.
>It's easy to pick these instances and assign blame retrospectively when in reality, things like this almost never happen.
In reality USA has 3-10x the number of police shootings per capita than a random western country (heck, worse than many developing countries of even dictatorships).
So, yeah, the metrics are off.
If your counter-argument is "yeah, but US has more crime too", then maybe think long and hard if your whole legal system, approach to crime, society goals, etc, are justified then....
“Good” cops regularly stonewall investigations into bad cops, and vote for police unions that will do everything in their power to literally allow bad cops to get away with murder.
I've googled up the bodycam videos of the incident [0]. I think, the police started acting the way they did, because the suspect didn't stop when the police clearly asked him to do so, and pushed one of the officers when they grabbed him.
It would be fair to call it racism, if there was another instance of a white suspect acting the same way, and getting treated differently.
That would be fair if you could detangle if from specific suspicious behavioral patterns. Like wearing a mask (pre-pandemic) in a neighborhood where robberies by mask-wearing perpetrators are common.
Is it illegal to wear a mask? If the answer is no then the police have no right to stop him for wearing a mask. Police having the leeway to determine what is suspicious vs having to obey the law is what leads to thousands of minorities being stopped, roughed up and arrested for resisting arrest. If you are a minority and do nothing wrong, how many stops for being black would it take before you became a little defensive or frustrated? Imagine your life being constantly interrupted by uniform wearing people with a track record of killing people with your complexion.
Elijah was wearing headphones. Since you’ve seen the video, how long from the moment the police are out of their cars before they put their hands on Elijah?
Would you put your hands on someone Who showed no physical resistance in that amount of time?
The Police escalate quickly, and then, since the situation has escalated, feel justified in their response, which killed Elijah. They killed Elijah.
Well, how many people wearing masks (pre-pandemic) would be trying to avoid getting identified while committing a robbery? How many people pushing the officer away would be trying to attack them next? Does police have a way of knowing in advance, whether this exact mask-wearing arrest-resisting individual is actually a threat?
I don't think it is entirely fair to put 100% of the blame on the police. A much healthier solution would be to try de-escalating general tensions between the police and the population.
This is why we shouldn’t be employing people whose job it is to snatch people they don’t know anything about, who just assume you’re a threat until YOU PROVE that you’re innocent.
"I don't think it is entirely fair to put 100% of the blame on the police. A much healthier solution would be to try de-escalating general tensions between the police and the population." Right, its not the fault of the armed people with godlike power to kill, arrest and detain to their hearts content based on nothing but a feeling or bias. Its the fault of the people being harassed and killed for not properly genuflecting before the the ones killing them. I am sure your user name is meant to be in jest but I am having a hard time thinking you are not just a human bot in a call center that is bad at their job.
Well, the day-to-day job of these armed people is to deal with other violent, and often armed people, before they go out on the general public.
Besides, there are quite a few cities that have considerably limited the police power by now. Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland for example. The safety of regular law-abiding people has considerably dropped. Murders are up, gun sales are up, almost every type of violent crime is up.
If you don't like police, go ahead, move to one of these cities. Or at least, search for some videos from them on DuckDuckGo.
I find it very disheartening and hypocritical to hear anti-police rhetoric from people living in 7-figure-property neighborhoods, completely shielded from the problems that the police is supposed to solve.
And no, I am not a human bot in a call center, I happen to be a Canadian that is actually satisfied with the way RCMP works here. And I don't understand why our southern neighbors would rather shoot themselves in their feet and have their cities burnt, than try to copy some techniques that do make police more efficient up here.
I'm not a person living in a 7 figure property neighborhood, and the cops definitly make this worse.
If you want to know about how great the RCMP, you should read how nice they are to help local police departments to give free one-way tours into the forest at night in the winter to minorities, by very helpfully shielding them from the evil bureaucrats.
I am sure you are satisfied, your police force kills civilians at a rate 1/3 that of the US. What techniques work there that we are ignoring? Does your police force use de-escalation? Majority of ours does not.
Perhaps the problems that the police are meant to solve are in part caused by the police? If I was always treated as a suspect after a while I may start to become resentful. If I was a minority representing 13% of the general population but represented 38% of the prison population I may start to become resentful and argue that there is a problem. Your argument that just because people live in peaceful 7-figure neighborhoods they should be grateful to the police for suppressing the riff raff, poor and minorities is very grating, classist and very much racist.
The NYPD has a budget of $10 billion dollars, and the only limits imposed on it were to please stop beating, murdering, framing and raping people. If those limits are too stringent I am not really sure where to go from here.
I have been ticketed for speeding on both sides of the border. RCMP makes is extremely professional. The whole conversation almost sounds like getting a bill from a roofer guy, explaining how to pay it and why you should check your roof more often. U.S. cops have a lot more of the "Ha-ha, now you're mine, bastard" attitude. I was extremely polite and complying both times.
Police often camps out in public events, like car shows, building trust with people. Silly things like giving stickers to kids and letting them climb on police ATVs for pictures, or officers showing off the tech in their cars to car enthusiasts.
When it comes to controversial topics, optics is everything. When a couple of student protestors blocked a major train line protesting against an oil pipeline, and commuters got really pissed off, since they couldn't get to their workplaces, the officer arresting them looked like a 60+ year old grandma with the "stop fooling around, kids" look. Nobody got hurt and the media got zero chance to blow it to any kind of a scandal.
"U.S. cops have a lot more of the "Ha-ha, now you're mine, bastard" attitude."
I am not sure how this helps your argument. You are saying that right off the bat the cops were aggressive for no reason and you were polite. How is that situation any ones fault except the cops?
Just to give some local context about Portland. We're getting some reforms pushed through, and it's now very likely the Mayor will lose his runoff election to someone that has promised far more substantial reforms. That said, the police continue to behave in unaccountable ways including blatantly violating the law on camera. This is going to be a very prolonged fight for reform.
Explaining how the US got to this state is a long discussion, but it helps to understand the origin of the police here in the south was to catch escaping slaves, and in the north was to keep "undesirables" out of wealthy neighborhoods. In more recent times politicians have used the War On Crime rhetoric to motivate people out of fear to vote for them, even though actual violent crime has been steadily falling.
The Canadian approach to police violence is the starlight tour -- rather than bringing someone to jail, drop them off in the middle of nowhere to freeze overnight.
Some parts of the US could take this approach, but there's a lot of places in the US that are either too nice out or there's too many fast food restaurants/Starbucks to take shelter in
Sure, I don't mind; it was something like 15 years ago anyway, and obviously didn't amount to anything in the first place.
Baltimore PD officers wear black uniforms. One night one of them was standing in the middle of the street I was driving down, and there weren't enough streetlights in that section. I was doing something like 40 in a 30, and the first thing I knew that anything was wrong was when I heard a loud thump from my left side. Looking in the wing mirror, I could see the guy in the light of the upcoming streetlight, where the one I'd last passed was too far back to show him.
So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase. Imagine my surprise when, on seeing my white skin, short hair, and slacks-and-button-down professional attire, he waved me off and went back to what he'd been doing!
In retrospect, I have to figure the mirror clipped something on his belt, rather than the car striking his actual person. But the fact remains that, had I not been white or not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Especially since, being as I was on my way home from a visit to my connection, I had a quarter ounce of pot in my left front trouser pocket. Remember, this was back before decriminalization, more than a decade before dispensaries even existed in this town; not only that, but my guy hadn't had any baggies that night, so he just gave me the smaller portions he got from his own guy, who mostly did street work. So it would've been charged as possession with intent, and that's a felony.
The time I hit a cop with my car while I was carrying wasn't a major reason why I quit smoking that shit entirely a couple of years later, but never having another few seconds of that kind of sheer terror was not absent from the list of reasons why I was glad when I did quit.
Just imagine if I were a black man, though. That cop could have shot me dead on the spot and who'd have said a word? I mean, I so obviously would've had it coming, a drug dealer doing drug dealer crimes and, if that weren't enough, I swerved my car to try to murder a police officer in the middle of it. Probably had a gun in my back pocket, or in the glovebox at least. Who would dare blame an officer of the law for doing what he had to do in the face of an obviously murderous criminal like that?
...is what white people would mostly say. But that's the thing. I had that moment of terror because I was acting like a damn fool - I could drive more carefully and just quit buying pot, and I did. People of color can't "live more carefully", or "just quit" having their skin. And there is a night in my past that, if I had skin of a similar shade to theirs, it'd be through bars that I saw the next sunrise - if I had lived to see it at all.
I don't blame you for saying it sounds unrealistic. I'd probably likewise have some trouble taking a story like that seriously on its face, except that I happened to live it, and a lot of other wild stories too. But there are far more stories that I haven't lived, and some of them sound as wild to me as the one I've just told sounds to you. That's how life is, though. The world is far wilder than any one of us, with our individual and limited perspective, ever gets to see. If we want to understand how things really work in the places and times and lives that we don't get to see, we have to listen to the stories people tell us who do see those things - listen, and not assume that they must be lying, any more than you would assume I had been lying to you just now.
If you take anything away from this conversation, I hope you'll make it that.
I didn't apologize! Dude was sixty feet away still standing in the street when I got out of the car, I didn't say anything and neither did he. He looked me once over, waved me off, and forgot me.
And that's just my point. Based entirely on how I looked, he judged the incident to have been a harmless accident and not worth pursuing, despite that I had a felony charge worth of dope in my front pocket at the time. Pretty important, if you get to make that bust! But he never had any idea of the chance that passed him by, because, to him, I looked like somebody who wouldn't.
What I'm saying is, think for a minute about how that could've played out differently if, in that cop's eyes, I'd have looked a different way.
>So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase.
>not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
This may have had more to do with with him waving you off than anything else. The type of people police are purportedly there to handle are not those who would do what you did. If this is Baltimore we're talking about, he may be tuned to a much more violent type of normal criminal encounter. Keep in mind that given the limited resources of the judicial system, they are better spent on more disruptive crimes to the social fabric.
Perspective is important in these things. Those that come to you to be dealt with are practically priority zero. They know they screwed up, and as long as you (the officer) is okay, then all's good. They'll sort themselves out.
It's the ones that don't the police are out and willing to do paperwork for.
Oh? And suppose he'd assumed when I got out of the car that I was going for a gun? They tell you these days that you do not ever get out of the car during a traffic stop unless instructed, and while this wasn't precisely a traffic stop, it wasn't all that far off - and I was far too frightened to be thinking about being careful with my hands. Or even to be thinking, really; I knew I was about to go to jail, and all I could fit in my mind beyond that was, I had better not try to make things even worse.
That officer made the judgment he did in a matter of seconds; as I noted in another comment here, I didn't have time to speak, or to take so much as a step toward the officer, before he waved me off - which was just as well in retrospect; God alone knows what I'd have said. But if any one aspect of the gestalt I presented had in any way varied from "harmless", he might well have drawn on me, and if he hadn't done that then he'd for damn sure have come over to see whether I was drunk or high or whatever the hell. And then he would have found my dope, and I would have gone to jail that night.
None of that would have happened because I was actually dangerous! He wasn't wrong to read me the way he did. But I was still extremely lucky that he did read me right. I could very easily have been less fortunate. And given everything I've seen in twenty years living in this town, I am very sure that the vast bulk of my good fortune that night lay in the accident of my having light skin.
Freddie Gray could talk about that, I think, if he were still alive to talk about anything. The federal consent decree that followed his death did not come about in a vacuum. And it is not in a vacuum that BPD officers interact with other citizens - both like and unlike myself - of this city.
>That officer made the judgment he did in a matter of seconds; as I noted in another comment here, I didn't have time to speak, or to take so much as a step toward the officer, before he waved me off - which was just as well in retrospect; God alone knows what I'd have said. But if any one aspect of the gestalt I presented had in any way varied from "harmless", he might well have drawn on me, and if he hadn't done that then he'd for damn sure have come over to see whether I was drunk or high or whatever the hell. And then he would have found my dope, and I would have gone to jail that night.
I don't see that as a "Thank God I'm White" outcome half as much as a "Thank God, he has something better to do!"
He could have been:
-Covering the exits of a hiding place of a known dangerous offender
-recon
-signaling someone or waiting for a signal from someone on the down low
-waiting on an informant
-up to no good in a part of town he shouldn't even have been on the beat in, and really not looking to explain why he was even there to make an arrest.
-on some other Op
To assume it was simply because you were white with no other data is really quite the knee jerk. Everything for a reason, and especially so with cops; a lone cop to boot.
Heck, you don't know. He might have been glad even if you were of a much darker complexion to see a brotha dressed for the office, pulling over and making every attempt to make himself easier to deal with rather than the alternative of a brotha in a trench coat/baggy clothes with a hand in his...oh shit!
Street wisdom is a thing. Supposedly, the better cops try to cultivate it amongst their numbers.
I get it's in vogue to assume that everyone is out to curbstomp the melanin enriched, but damn man. Cut the guy some slack. I mean he waved you off. Now I wish more cops extended the favor back, but, that's how it goes. Sometimes you get the ticket, sometimes you get let off the hook.
Yeah, I mean, that all sounds perfectly reasonable in a vacuum. But like I said before, none of this happens in a vacuum.
So what you're really doing here is, you're asking me to choose which to give greater credence. On the one hand, your reasonable-sounding thoughts in a vacuum about some purely theoretical interaction of cop and "brotha" (really?)
On the other, my so far twenty years of living in the city of Baltimore. Granted, as as a white man. But nonetheless, with eyes, ears, acquaintances across pretty much the whole spectrum of skin tones - two decades living in a busy city, you have time to meet a lot of people, especially when you do what most white people in this town don't do and use public transit a lot - and a subscription to the Sun paper. Plus, on top of my own experience and that of other people who've shared theirs with me, the outcome of the recent DOJ investigation, which accurately found "widespread unconstitutional and discriminatory policing in the city" [1] and that "...the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) had engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and certain provisions of federal statutory law." [2]
So, left to weigh all of that in one hand, and your vacuous theorizing in the other...look, I get that you're coming at this in good faith, and I respect that. But do you really need me to explain in detail how and why this effort falls so far short of the mark?
You're arguing essentially that Baltimore cops deserve the benefit of the doubt on questions of racial bias in policing. As I said, in a vacuum, sure, that seems reasonable. But, though I'm sure it's as tiresome to hear it repeated as it is to have to say it over and over again, none of this stuff happens in a vacuum. And the argument you've made is totally unable to survive outside one, because even the most cursory look at the recent history of policing in Baltimore is enough to see that the benefit of the doubt is in no way here deserved.
Even under the Trump administration, the US Department of Justice doesn't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt. The Baltimore Sun journalists who follow, investigate, and report on the actions of police in this city, they don't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt. [3] The folks I've known and whose stories I've heard in this town, for whom grossly excessive violence and abuse of power on the part of police have been a regular feature of life in their communities, they don't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt, either. In light of all that, why should I? Why should anyone?
> It would be fair to call it racism, if there was another instance of a white suspect acting the same way, and getting treated differently.
That comment really didn't age well, did it? I think just about anyone can see what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse and recognize that racism was a factor in the disparate treatment.
And it's not even up to the individual, racism is systemic in police, part of their everyday talk, their (real, not lip service) training discussions, their protocols, etc.
> 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.
From the very beginning this story makes no sense. Suspicious is not a crime.
An earlier story makes things seem even worse:
> While McClain was making his trip to the store, someone had called 911 to report a suspicious person. Referring to McClain, the caller described him wearing a mask said he looked "sketchy" but added that "he might be a good person or a bad person." When asked, the caller told the operator that there were no weapons and that no one was in danger. The operator advised him that officers were on their way to check it out.
> Wearing a ski mask in public during the summer, although odd, is not a crime, either.
I don't know much at all about the McClain case, but your statement seems to have a flawed assumption that a crime is required before police can legitimately get involved. Policing doesn't only occur after a crime is committed. A big part of policing is about deterrence: being visible, talking with people in the community, investigating suspicious activity, double-checking that nothing is wrong, etc.
> When officers Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt and Randy Roedema stopped Elijah McClain on his way home, one telling him that he was "being suspicious," according to police body camera video. McClain responded, "I have a right to go where I am going."
> The officers immediately grabbed McClain, who repeatedly told them to let him go.
This has nothing to do with being visible, talking with the community, investigating suspicious activity, or double-checking that nothing is wrong.
I wasn't responding to the specifics of that case. I was responding to the implied assertion that a crime is required before police interaction is justified, which is wrong. I tried to make that clear but apparently I wasn't clear enough.
Using that flawed assumption to argue that the police did something wrong in the McClain case is just noise. It distracts from understanding the facts of the matter.
434 comments
[ 16.5 ms ] story [ 456 ms ] threadThat’s 7.9mg/kg, not nearly enough ketamine to cause cardiac arrest in someone that size. LD50 in humans is at least 5-10x that.
Those officers that had him in a chokehold killed him, and are trying to scapegoat the EMS.
There is a name for this behavior: a lynching.
Erica Marrero, Kyle Dittrich, Jason Rosenblatt, and Jaron Jones, white cops, murdered an unarmed black man.
The entirety of the consequences they suffered? They lost their jobs. The police who declined to enforce the law against them are complicit.
Abolish the police.
Obviously it's more than he should have been given (and tbh am pretty uncomfortable with it being given here at all), but my decidedly non-expert opinion (and the official autopsy statement that the "ketamine in McClain's blood was at 'tolerable levels' ") is that there's all sorts of red flags about this situation.
Injecting a suspect with a drug without medical necessity or consent is a major human rights issue, and you wouldn’t be far off if you called it rape.
The whole thing is quite obviously pig lies; they had dogs and tasers on this 140lb black man who they had already had multiple cops choking out. Nothing about their dodge adds up.
My goodness that's a lot of ketamine.
A "strong" recreational dose would be about 1mg/kg. 2.5mg/kg and the person is anesthetized.
Just barely dangerous. You might see a bit of transient respiratory depression, but the risk of respiratory arrest or clinically significant hypoxia is very low even in an out-of-hospital setting. We have case reports of paediatric patients receiving as much as 50mg/kg without significant ill effect.
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/S0196-0644(99)800...
Ketamine doesn’t really depress respiration that much. If the airway is physically obstructed, however, because nobody had their eye on him...
For those who didn't know, the police culture becomes quite a bit more sickening when you find out that one of the arresting officers, along with 2 other colleagues, posed grinning in a photo mocking their brutality against McClain just days after he died! Across the street from a memorial to him, no less.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/us/Elijah-McClain-aurora-...
Sounds cool. I have had some bad experiences with cops.
Suppose someone breaks into your house because of your skin color or political leanings and there are no police. What course of action do you recommend? Spoiler alert. You are also heavily armed.
Whatever course of action you take, do something in addition to or besides call the police.
I am definitely not a conservative on most issues, but I am a strong believer in the right to have a gun in your own home and the various “Castle” laws. If you break into my house or try to take my car while I am in it, I am going to assume you mean me harm. Shoot first then call the cops.
Yes I know the statistics about a gun in the home is more likely to be used accidentally or on purpose (suicide/homicide/accidental shooting) against someone in the home.
Do you know how absurd this sounds to people in actual civilized countries? Kind of amazing how many of you Americans are living in some Wild West fantasy.
4 in 10 Americans live in a gun owning household. That number is probably greater in the south.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/22/facts-about...
It’s probably even greater for someone willing to break into your house.
Guns in the US is a “gravity problem” no matter how much you complain about them, they aren’t going anywhere.
We live in a country where the far right is arming up and when the left wants to “peacefully protest” and exercise their first amendment (not saying it always ends up being peaceful), the far right is “exercising their 2nd amendment”.
Which side do you think is going to come out ahead?
If an armed attacker breaks into your home, would not the first thing you do be to call someone to bring a gun over quickly to protect you and bring an end to the risk?
This is no different than keeping a fire extinguisher in your home versus relying 100% on the fire brigade to protect you.
Firearms are safety equipment, nothing more. The fact that you equate a common tool, used in every civilization in the world, to “some wild west fantasy”, says more about the baggage you attach to it than that which exists in reality.
The first half is at least arguably true, the second half is...not.
No, please do your research
It’s just like what happened when Reagan was the Governor of California. As soon as Black people started peacefully “exercising their second amendment rights”, both Reagan and the NRA were all for gun control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Even now while the liberals are fighting for more gun control, conservatives are arming up - especially in the South.
The far right is getting armed while the far left is talking about “give peace a chance”.
That still comes back to the same question - if the criminals have guns and neither law abiding citizens or the police have guns, where does that leave the law abiding citizens?
Stopping an uncooperative person is guaranteed to be upsetting to somebody. That is fundamental to the problem.
Every method tried so far has been objected to by squeamish people who refuse to understand. If we let criminals run amok, then we get a failed state, and then armed gangs form to impose their own idea of a justice system. I assure you, those armed gangs will be far more brutal than our fancy westernized police system.
So we medicalized the problem. That appeases more people than the cheap standardized billy club. We'll just ignore the needle-stick biohazard problem, because at least it won't look like a replay of Rodney King.
Personally, I favor hitting people with billy clubs, because it leaves evidence of what happened and it requires the police to actually take physical action against another human. Giving cops needles full of magic compliance juice seems less responsible to me.
The reason people were upset about Rodney King was because it was brutal and easy to understand. Injecting ketamine is also brutal but it's less visible. I cannot imagine anyone ever getting over the fact that they were restrained by authorities and injected into a k-hole.
They won't be visibly harmed in any way, but that will absolutely mess someone up for life.
You make a decent argument.
(From people that seem to know a bit about restraint techniques Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink discussed the use of choke holds on Joe's podacst. They both agreed that it was far better than a smack with a baton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=iUhdc1GAddk&...).
"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."
In that scenario, the police would be beating the culprit into compliance and we would all be looking at videos on youtube shaking our heads. I'm not saying cops should be carrying hypodermics in their utility belt, but how many non-lethal options do you remove before you have to accept more lethal outcomes?
It would help to be more specific about which other countries and when. There are a lot of reasons why things happen in one place and not another.
But those police batons break bones. Also, there's evidence of ketamine sedation: they need to summon paramedics to perform the injection, etc.
So, I don't know. I'm sure we at least agree that the answer is to avoid letting things escalate to that point so frequently.
"Not injecting people with a drug without their consent" is not the equivalent of "let criminals run amok."
I have trouble reconciling the notion that after someone has been restrained to the point where it is considered safe to inject them with a drug, they find it necessary to inject a drug for the purpose of restraint.
It's a bit like placing your knee on the back of someone's neck who is already handcuffed and crying for his mother. Unnecessary, cruel, and dangerous.
One gains a lot of respect by showing wisdom and courage.
Most scenarios are essentially communication problems to be solved. Not defaulting to the most violent means of "cooperation" is and should be an option for any police force in a 21st century democracy.
Look to the best in the past and in other countries.
Successful policing actually needs skin in the game.
I haven't always agreed with them, but they have always cooled things down nicely without resorting to violence or even arrests.
Training varies widely by locale, but I believe de-escalation is indeed a nearly universal part of their training. It must also be noted that de-escalation certainly is much easier for the police officers themselves: less hassle, less danger, less paperwork, less repercussions. These people generally just want to get through their shift and get home.
They are certainly capable of de-escalation and, in most instances, are trained and motivated to de-escalate.
So, it's very telling when (nearly always white) officers leap to unnecessarily violent tactics on (nearly always Black) victims.
Specifically, every one of these is subject to selection bias:
You won't see a news report when the tactics are peaceful, when a black cop is involved, or when the supposed victim is non-black. Nobody is going to riot over that, so why report it? It goes unseen by you, so you get the wrong impression about reality.A different sort of bias comes into play with word choice, using "victims" to refer to people who typically are violent criminals being apprehended. The word ought to be "perpetrators", "suspects", or simply "criminals".
"The media" also exalts policemen and soldiers as heroes, with countless reminders to thank our "heroes" and millions of hours of Hollywood entertainment devoted to showcasing heroic soldiers and cops. Much of the media denounces the protests as well.
Surely you see the irony in using an equally loaded set of terms yourself?In all of the incidents that sparked outcry, police were shown on video using vastly asymmetrical force against victims who were nonviolent or who had already been subdued. One, Breona Taylor, was in bed when police knocked down the wrong door when serving a no-knock warrant. Elijah, the teen injected with ketamine, was nonviolent and had no history of violence or crime.
There are a lot of incidents of police violence in which the suspect is behaving violently and, in these cases, I have not seen public outcry.
Statistics paint a different picture. Given that there is a police response to crime, a white criminal is more likely to be shot by the police.
I have seen plenty of public outcry over police violence when the suspect was behaving violently. The riots in Ferguson are the obvious example. Evidence of powder burns and of DNA in the car show that the BLM story was clearly false. The evidence is consistent with the story given by the cop. It's been like that for every case that I've researched, so at this point I'm done with research. It's always the same, more or less.
You got that distorted perspective from the media bias.
It's just not that way. Some statistics even point the other way.
Nonetheless, while the overall reality of police killings in America is less dramatic than "nearly always", but it worrisomely lopsided. Black Americans are killed by police at a per-capita rate of roughly 2:1 compared to white Americans.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/data-show-de...
That is... not good. How do you explain that?
1. What race has the biggest number being killed by cops? (answer: white)
2. What race has the most per-capita being killed by cops? (answer: black)
3. What race is most likely to be killed by cops if they get in a police confrontation? (answer: white)
The obvious solution for non-equality with #2 is to fix the culture so that conflict with the cops is less likely. Don't do crime. If you are stopped by cops, be fully compliant and don't look like a threat. When stopped by the cops, don't even think of reaching for something they can't see. You just wait, and then you'll be able to sort things out in court.
Eh, we also should fix the non-equality with #3. It shouldn't be more excusable to shoot white people.
a) gunning them down in the streets
b) beating the shit out of them
c) injecting them with hilarious overdoses of drugs and crossing our fingers
then why would we pay for police?
If that's ok, we might as well go back to old west times and just have everyone carry revolvers, possibly calling the town apothecary with his bottle of ether if we think we need it. It'll be way cheaper than maintaining a standing police department.
The whole point is that police are supposed to be trained and equipped to handle disturbances without harming the person being detained. There are options for this, including that so rarely used tactic, defusal.
Like, we pay police overtime. Cordon the person off, give them space but don't let them leave, wait until they get hungry even if it takes 12 hours, and then bribe them with pizza to come quietly. Build rapport with them over the entire incident. How often do we see that strategy deployed before we fall back to injecting ketamine?
I agree there is always room to consider other ways of handling outlying incidents. Injecting drugs into people violates so many principles of freedom it seems hard to justify it.
The pizza idea could work in some cases but I think we also have to realize that some people being taken into custody are irrational either from mental illness, and/or drug use, could be armed and/or violent, and cordoning them off may work or it may not. And then a potentially armed, violent, and irrational person is a threat to innocent people. The police have many objectives and one of those is to take suspects into custody safely so they can have just administrated. However, the safety of the public might be of higher priority and if asked to make a choice between hurting a suspect that appears irrational and violent so as to not risk the liberties of the public or respecting their liberties but putting the liberties of the public at risk, they’ll choose to optimize for the former.
Policing will never be perfect and there is a reasonable amount of error we should tolerate. And there should be accountability. I do agree that it would appear, at least from the stories that tend to make the news, that diffusion could be employed more.
I imagine your comment is probably symptomatic of the major societal issues within the US; it certainly worsens the image of the US to those fortunate enough to live in a Western nation which isn't actively regressing.
I would like to point out the America, one's treatment by police varies greatly.
I'm a white man in my 40s have never witnessed police brutality firsthand. In all my interactions with police, they have acted properly and de-escalated things nicely, even when perhaps I didn't agree with them.
This is the experience shared by many (most?) Americans who, once again, have trouble imagining experiences other than their own. They imagine that nearly all police are just, and therefore victims of police brutality must have done something to deserve the violence.
Essentially, it is the "just world" fallacy writ large. People like to think that the world is just, and therefore like to think that those who experience misfortune have done something to deserve it. It is more pleasant than realizing we live in a country where the police sometimes act in shockingly violent and inappropriate ways.
I do know many people who have experienced awful treatment by police. And of course in recent years much light has been shone upon this misconduct.
nit: They haven't been to a place where there is low crime, low police brutality, and high population density. To most observers, most of the US is low crime and low police brutality. From this perspective, violent police are a city problem where things are so out of control that the police have no choice but to act that way.
(I don't why this is getting downvoted. I'm certainly not condoning the state of affairs, just trying to elaborate on the perspective that keeps supporting the uniformed criminals)
The UK has a population of almost 70MM. The factor of ~5 needed to account for population pales in comparison to the two orders of magnitude difference between 25 days and 25 years.
Putting aside that police shouldn’t be utilizing drugs period, there is zero justification for administering drugs to someone who isn’t a danger to themselves or others, as was the case for McClain. It makes more sense when you realize that the Aurora PD is eighth in the nation for police killings per capita.
The "but they're considered innocent" argument proves too much.
EDIT: I'm surprised by the heavy downvoting. Do people really think arrests should be voluntary and consensual?
There's no exemption that allows innocent people to resist lawful arrest.
This is not to say that injection sounds like a great solution for everyday arrests.
I'd naively hope that a judge wouldn't side with a police officer here, but I think the fact that resisting arrest is inherently criminal is a pretty big flaw in the US legal system.
I live in a jurisdiction [1] where resisting arrest is not criminalised in the same sense as the US, and the idea that a police officer could unlawfully arrest you and then immediately have lawful grounds if you resisted is very alien to me.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resisting_arrest#England_and_W...
This is a pretty good video analysing law enforcement and how it got to become the way it is through the analysis of Dirty Harry.
You can imagine the confusion that arises when plain clothes police seize people.
In some countries it's even enough that a police officer is acting (obviously) unlawfully, giving you the right to resist.[1]
[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__32.html
There are many instances of people using weapons in self defense and then police arrive and kill the gun owner. For instance; Jemel_Roberson' a black armed security guard that subdued a shooter in a bar. Cop showed up and immediately killed the security guard then lied that he was given multiple commands to drop the weapon. Witnesses said the cop arrived and shot the guard within 5 seconds. Later police changed their story and said it was just a case of friendly fire, very sad nothing can be done. And nothing was done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jemel_Roberson
> I can’t breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That’s my house. I was just going home. I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t eat meat! But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity, I’ll do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you. Try to forgive me. I’m a mood Gemini. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ow, that really hurt. You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t trying to do that. I just can’t breathe correctly.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elijah-mcclains-last-words...
It's a bit murkier than that in the US. In some states you can't even resist unlawful arrest, but in all states you're allowed to defend yourself against _excessive_ force.
In practice that's probably a bad idea, but if you survive the retaliation from somebody who's armed and who has already proven themselves prone to excessive use of force then you might win the ensuing court case.
In the end it cost him over a grand to get his car back and to pay for drug tests required by the probation. Again, he was never actually charged with anything.
Policing in this nation is fundamentally broken. The bad cops know how to use the system to brutalize people without consequences, and the rest of the police close ranks and protect them while they do it.
Alas, when someone is or is not "resisting arrest" is not something that is particularly well-defined. It's usually "when the officer says you are resisting," regardless of the actual facts at hand.
My point, basically, is that if a cop grabs you unexpectedly, and you push them away (a reasonable, normal reaction): the next thing you hear is "stop resisting!"
The crime of "resisting arrest" needs to go away.
Interesting reading: https://bostonreview.net/race-law-justice/lisa-cacho-jodi-me...
[1] https://www.parool.nl/nieuws/ketamine-steeds-populairder-gro... (Dutch)
If I and other HN commenters are not mistaken, ketamine is commonly used for this purpose in hospitals around the world.
However, leaving the theoretical behind... Elijah McClain was murdered by police for the "crime" of acting oddly. There was no reason for them to use force against him whatsoever. He was unarmed and committed no crime.
His death hurts me because he was, broadly speaking, "one of us" - an eccentric and intelligent person.
Based on all I have read about his life, I think many HN readers would recognize aspects of themselves in Elijah.
That being said, ketamine should be an EMS decision to minimize risk to patient and others, not "at LE direction".
Narcan I was already uneasy about, but it saved real lives in obvious situations. This is absolute lunacy.
Either way, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole of arguing life saving procedures. My entire point is that we should not be injecting people with non emergency drugs like Ketamine.
Instead your argument seems to be that we should be subjecting people to significant risk from rhabdo, hyperthermia, which to be clear can be entirely significant.
Hopefully your demise will be captured on video to use in training material for future generations of law-enforcement, as has been the case for many before you.
The attitude here is typical of bootlickers, however. Never mind that there were a dozen cops present. Never mind that they were not responding to an actual crime. Never mind that very few people in the general public are highly-trained choke-out ninjas. Some cops might get scared, so let's burn the world down. Pathetic.
This is what happens when medical personnel refuse illegal police orders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_University_of_Utah_Hospit...
Graphic video of police abusing the nurse who refused:
https://youtu.be/ihQ1-LQOkns
Any time you think you have a simple solution to a problem and your explanation to fix things starts with “just”, stop and think for a moment that perhaps someone else has already thought up your simple solution.
Having said that it blows my mind that it is considered necessary or appropriate to give someone ketamine to restrain them.
Anyone administering chlorpromazine and a benzodiazepine in this setting is criminally negligent - if the "patient" (and I very much hesitate to use that word in this context) has taken another CNS depressant, they're in deep trouble.
Adding a bento, like valium, to that mix is extremely dangerous because of the synergistic effect on respiratory depression.
For the purposes of this discussion, I thought it was safe to assume we were talking about doses that could actually alter your behaviour; high doses of opioids do not make exactly for agresssive behaviour, while lower doses are unlikely to have an impact either way.
A quick Google shows that only in the past few days, the cops are now trying to say he does from a fentanyl overdose, rather than the knee on his neck. TBH, this seems purely like an attempt at scapegoating, making him out to be the "stereotypical black man, crazed on drugs".
But we're veering off topic now. I'd rather not discuss the rights and wrongs of the police in this case, because I will disagree hard with any attempts to justify the actions of the police, so there is no interesting discourse to be had there, and HN is not the right platform regardless.
The ketamine experience was far worse than my fall and any subsequent pain I experienced, and I would gladly take the pain of the reduction over the ketamine any day. It basically felt like I was dying and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Think of the hypnosis scene from "Get Out" where you can feel your consciousness slipping away but you're not asleep either. I could hear everything happening around me but couldn't move a muscle or feel anything. My perception of time went out the window and it felt like I was in an empty void for an eternity when it was only a few minutes.
I thought I couldn't talk because I couldn't feel my mouth or move any other muscles, but realized I was actually speaking my thoughts after I heard a friend in the room responded to something I thought in my mind.
Overall, 0/10 would not do it again and the thought that police use it to pacify someone during an arrest is sickening.
I had ketamine during wakeful surgery.
Loved it. Grateful it was available.
But I had prev. experience w/ psychedelics & had learned/practiced how to: let go, place attention on what's positive & cease to have expectations.
This was my exact experience with disossiatives as well. I think they can be effectively and safely used, but there's a real danger there. Disossiatives like ketamine and DXM are incredibly powerful.
After my experience in that same eternal void I struggled with a fear that what I'd experienced was the natural state of consciousness, and what would happen to me for eternity after I died. I didn't actually believe it, but the fear was still there and talk. Took a few months for it to wear off.
You mean like paramedics? The article states that paramedics administer the drug.
That procedure also most likely involved ketamine - I don't know for sure, it was a long time ago and nobody told me the names of anything but the Versed and that only because I asked, but I had totally uncharacteristic recurring nightmares and emotional problems for the next little while afterward. When all of that came back up during planning for the surgery I had to have last year, my surgeon noted that that sounded in his experience like ketamine side effects, and that this time I'd be getting propofol, which is not at all a dissociative, instead. And, sure enough, I was just fine after that surgery, despite it being much more invasive and thus painful in its aftereffects.
Based on that, I'll echo what others here have already said: the thought of being given a surprise high dose of ketamine, in the context of a situation that also involves the use of violence against one's person, is horrifying, and complex PTSD is the least severe consequence I can imagine.
Some of the most chill and relaxed moments of my entire life have been on ketamine. I only do it occasionally because of the nasty chronic side-effects, though.
(Though I don't believe whether it's enjoyable in the right setting has much to do with whether cops should be using it. I get that this is a defense of ketamine as a recreational drug, but e.g. alcohol would probably be un-fun if the first time you experienced it was at a high dose during either surgery or an arrest, and that one's widely accepted as a reasonable recreational drug.)
> Think of the hypnosis scene from "Get Out"
this is EXACTLY right.
> an empty void for an eternity when it was only a few minutes.
if you maintained the ability to interpret audio and visual inputs, then probably 20-30 minutes, if SWIM had to guess.
> the thought that police use it to pacify someone during an arrest is sickening.
this is EXACTLY right.
reminds me of the psychonaught/rapist sex therapist guy who was mega-dosing women with MDMA or 2CB before forcing himself on them.
It is truly disturbing to imagine going through that during an arrest, with no idea what is happening
Ketamine is a party drug especially common among young gay people here in Brazil. It's usually briefly inhaled so I'm guessing very low doses. The 500mg mentioned in the article sounds terrible.
No, it doesn't have to be bad at all if it's not used in a bad setting and most people enjoy the effects. It wouldn't be a common drug otherwise. See https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/d3dxzq/we-asked-people-ab...
And it comes in waves -- just when you think you're coming out of it, it pulls you back down.
I swore off ketamine for life after that and don't plan on ever touching it again. I would take a bad comedown from stimulants over that. I would take the feeling of hopelessness, anhedonia, and thorough depression from a bad MDMA comedown any day. To be fair, both things only happen if you do too much, it's avoidable, and it was entirely my fault for not weighing the dose.
And I still think therapeutic ketamine for depression should be studied and trialled and legal. But still, K-holing was an absolutely horrifying experience and I don't recommend it to anyone for any reason.
And it probably was only not even worse because I was also on MDMA.
However, it absolutely sounds like it could be hell if you're not prepared though - especially in police custody, but even just fighting against it in a party situation where you want to exist and be social could be problematic.
As a youth I did all the drugs and hallucinogens there are and most of them are _nothing_ compared to an anesthetic dose of ketamine. It's the most disassociate experience I've ever had. It feels like you're grasping at your consciousness but can't quite get hold. The hallucinations are incomprehensible. I was told my screaming was heard in the waiting room.
All that out of the way. Why is this on here? This seems to be just run of political muckracking to reinforce the narrative of "we live in an oppressive police state". Granted, I think society can do much better. This is ABC news, and I can say with a high level of confidence, we are very likely not getting the full picture here. I'm not one to normal point out guidelines, buts here we go:
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This uptick in political content is really not doing this community a service.
This is a disturbing (and new) phenomenon. At least for someone outside the US.
(edit: to be clear, I am saying that yes, ordering somebody else to do it is morally equivalent to doing it yourself... if it's wrong to do it yourself, it's just as wrong to order somebody else to do it)
Pointing out that the police aren't injecting it themselves is like pointing out that [insert name of murderous dictator here] didn't actually kill anybody with their own hands.
I don't think police should be ordering EMS to administer Ketamine, but even if they are that is far different from doing it themselves.
You cannot say “give them ketamine” and just leave the dose up to the paramedic and call it safe.
The administration of medically unnecessary ketamine does not belong in the toolbox of things that the police request, or more realistically "order". It is irresponsible to assume police will defer to judgement of professionals with training and a code of ethics, when they are solely focused on making a person comply.
There are enough terrible public policy decisions where people later claim "we didn't know". People are saying now this is a recipe for abuses and unnecessary deaths.
But if they are requesting, ordering and even determining dosages is completely disturbing and inappropriate.
Cops also use electric stun guns. It's against someone's will, by non-electricians, for no electronic purpose.
Mind proposing an acceptable method of restraint? Go ahead, and see people tear it apart as a human rights violation.
It's much like the hopeless situation in bad schools, where all possible methods of discipline have been banned. Things are a mess if we deny the need to impose proper behavior by force.
But the cost on the detainee (who is to be presumed innocent, who may be in distress themself, who may have a psychotic episode due to some unknown cross-reaction with medication or the like, who may be deeply scared) is much, much, much higher, which is why this sort of thing almost never happens where I live (not the US, obviously).
I feel there are good reasons to assume that force-injecting someone with a megadose of Ketamine without their knowing what they're getting, understanding what they're getting into, competent assistance during what follows, in a profoundly bad state of mind, likely in deep fear, under heavy stress, while being restrained (otherwise, how would you inject?), with no knowlegde of their medical history or current condition, administered by laypeople, who would be completely useless in case of complications – I believe that isn't quite the same as tasing someone, or using pepper spray. While it's not visible in the way beating injuries are, that sort of thing has big potential to really deeply traumatize and mentally scar people for a long time.
Cops here do not have such powers and no one has tried to give them such powers, so far; I hope it stays that way. If someone has to be sedated, a doctor and an ambulance have to be summoned, and the then-patient has to be brought directly to a clinic that can take care of them; all in a medical setting from that point, not primarily an arrest (though, of course, depending on the situation, they may not be allowed to just leave once they're lucid again). This is only ever to be done in case of people in a psychotic episode that cannot be calmed otherwise or the like, it's not something to put into annoying detainees to make them shut up and be easier to handle. Any emergency doctor willing to inject such drugs without proper medical indication would take on big personal risks.
And, finally:
> Things are a mess if we deny the need to impose proper behavior by force.
Things are a mess as well if the tools to do so are passed out without checks and safety mechanisms that are appropriate to their effects. Letting cops shoot people at will while there are other, less severe options, that's awfully bad. And letting them drug people into submission while there are other, less severe options, that too is really bad.
Almost universally not true. The Geneva convention prohibits many types of bullets that are allowed for civilian use. Hollow points, for example. And there are good reasons why they're allowed for civilians and not war.
2. It's not fair to give us a sanctimonious lecture about how great your country's police procedures are without stating your country. Put up, or drop the lecture.
I mean, imagine the chutzpah if you're German!
Besides, the policy I described is what (AFAIK) most of Europe implements at the moment (might be all of Europe even), including Germany. I don't quite see why stating that requires chutzpah.
That wasn't intended as a sanctimonious lecture at all, but since there already is a lot of "nothing less drastic could ever work" in the comments, I thought I'd give an example of another policy that works well. I'm well aware there is no police force or security apparatus without fault, they all get some things wrong (and some are outright atrocious, like in Belarus currently), not trying to make it sound like some EU police service is perfect. I don't know where the US police falls on that spectrum, though reading US news makes it seem like they do have some serious issues currently. This particular policy doesn't exactly help, either.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? You read news coverage of the US. The observational bias there is huge. Consider:
The US is a country of 320 million. As of Brexit, larger than the EU and homogeneously English speaking with homogeneous press and institutions. The EU is smaller with 23 languages or so and a patchwork of everything.
So if a Eastern EU cop beats the shit out of a homosexual in jail who would ever find out?
At least in Greece it's pretty well documented that cops sodomized Albanian migrant workers with broomsticks. But you wouldn't know that unless you happen to have an Albanian wife who lived in Greece.
An Italian squad of carabinieri was just disbanded because it turned out to be running a drug dealing and extortion racket. This is literally current news. Have you heard about it?
Spanish police took COVID as an opportunity to abuse their power. National scandal in Spain, I haven't read any non-Spanish (and I mean Spain Spanish, not Spanish language) news about it.
In Hesse police computers were used to find out the personal details of a left-wing politician to send them neo-Nazi affiliated threats. Armed agents of the Germany with neo-Nazi links is quite the scandal today in Germany.
Notice the bias in my examples:
Spanish police - I'm half Spanish
Italian police - I'm half Italian
Greek police - My wife is Greek speaking Albanian.
German police - I suspect you're German so I specifically googled German police abuse
Notice I don't have specific French police abuse examples... because I don't speak French! I'm sure a google search will quickly inform me of Algerians young men beat to a pulp by a gendarme.
In general, as EU citizen living in the US for over a decade, I find that the EU perspective of the US couldn't be more wrong.
[EDIT] grammer
Sure, the military has access to more powerful rounds. Aircraft cannons, for example. But they don't typically load the soldier's rifles with rounds more powerful than what a civilian can buy.
- Soldiers' bullets really don't have more kinetic energy than civilian ones. For one, a civilian can always hand load, and get whatever K.E. they want (until they blow up their gun's chamber). Also, civilians can buy military rounds. Either surplus or whatever.
Smaller bullets means soldiers can carry more ammo. Not as important in the trenches of Europe, but crucial in the jungle colonial wars, I mean freedom wars, since WW2.
- Also, the military only wants a bullet powerful enough make it through any reasonable personal armor. The idea is that a bullet that isn't powerful enough to exit the body will cause more damage by tumbling inside and/or be more difficult to remove -> it's a way around the Geneva conventions that mandates rounds hold themselves together
- Third hunters, by law, have to use a bullet with a certain minimum K.E. The .30-06, for example, was initially used as a military round, but is today a popular deer hunting round. It has been replaced in the military by the much smaller, weaker, round used in the M-16.
The civilian .30-06 is considerably more powerful round than the AK-47's, whose round is considered too powerful for a modern rifle.
- Check out the perfectly legal, if expensive, .50 BMG.
Police get better ammunition for destroying human flesh, due to treaty restrictions on the military. Police can get all of the military small arms ammunition.
Police normally leave rifles locked up in their cars.
I was amazed at the stories my son told me about kids getting caught with drugs, hitting a coach, vandalizing property and all that happened was that the parents got called and a few days of suspension and the police were never involved. Because “kids will be kids”. Of course this is in a high income district.
When I was previously married living in a predominantly minority neighborhood - great neighborhood, lower income minority school district - my step daughter would tell me about the even the most minor of offenses where administrators would get the police involved.
There have been plenty of studies showing the unequal treatment of Black and White kids.
The local people choose the school board, which then chooses the school policy and administration.
School policy is limited by what is allowed and by what seems to work. If the parents usually are quick to discipline students for misbehavior, then parents will be relied upon to do so. If the parents ignore or encourage misbehavior, there is no reason to involve them. The police will be called instead.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/03/police-pun...
If telling parents gets students under control at one school, and it doesn't work at the other school, punishment will be different. You could get to that policy by trial and error, without any knowledge of the racial makeup of the student body.
A) Because someone who lived in my school district where rent was $600 a month - I had a house as part of the “gentrification” movement pre real estate bust - could pick up and move to a better school district like I did in the opposite side of the metro area over an hour away where the rent is now $2000/month.
B) if minorities are treated differently in the same school district, why would the majority care? Are you now going to argue that if you are a minority and face statistically unequal treatment by the criminal justice system you should move out of the city? state? country?
You are in "a high income district". You were in "lower income minority school district". I don't know the racial situation in your current district, though I could probably guess right. It's realistic, though not very nice, to imply that "minority" is the opposite of "high income".
For the discipline difference, it's enough that there is an income difference. That explains everything. There is no need to mention race.
The high-income people, of any race, care about education and discipline. Getting a kid to behave is usually as simple as telling the parents.
The low-income people, on average, don't give a damn. Telling a parent about bad behavior will just generate a tirade of insults. Calling the police works, so that is done.
It's unfair to the low-income people who aren't terrible. Well, life isn't fair. The group you associate with will determine how you are treated.
Hint: Not only are “some of my best friends Black”, my parents, my wife, my children, and all of my family is too. Please don’t go all “woke” on me.
For the discipline difference, it's enough that there is an income difference. That explains everything. There is no need to mention race.
Studies show that it happens in the same district...
The high-income people, of any race, care about education and discipline. Getting a kid to behave is usually as simple as telling the parents.
Right because poor people don’t care about education.
The high-income people, of any race, care about education and discipline. Getting a kid to behave is usually as simple as telling the parents.
Uhh, this isn’t new. I went to a private school growing up. By definition if they were paying to go to the school I went to, they weren’t poor. I saw myself how much different the “bad” White kids were treated than the Black kids.
The group you associate with will determine how you are treated.
Oh that’s all I have to tell my six foot 3 son to do! Make sure he has one of his White friends with him (he usually does) when he hangs out so police won’t wonder what he’s doing in our part of town.
He was going to walk from school one night down the street to a Waffle House after a football game to meet his other classmates. His friend group is like the rainbow coalition, but this one night he wasn’t sure whether his non-Black friends were going to the game and walking down there with him. We told him if not, just take an Uber. Two Black kids walking down the street were an easy target for harassment. Not by other kids - kids aren’t as stupid as the older generation - they were worried about being harassed by the cops.
As a general rule, yes, poor people don't care about education. That's typically a contributing factor to being poor. Exceptions are common.
Poor areas and poor families have a sort of cultural rot. Some have given up. Some see other things, often less honest or less productive, as an easier path to getting by in life. Some fear loss of friends if they choose a different path in life. In those areas, a kid who does well in school will be attacked by peers.
So at home, the parents are not reading to kids. The parents are not asking about homework. The parents are not taking away sources of entertainment that distract from success. The parents are not bothered by a non-A grade or in a panic over a below-B grade. Instead, the parents are creating chaos. The parents are getting arrested, coming to blows while drunk or high, and cranking up the TV volume. Very often, the families are broken. Sometimes the kids don't even know their father. All sorts of non-academic nonsense is glorified. The priorities are just all wrong. That is not an environment that promotes discipline, studying, or academic success.
If teachers are really treating black kids of equivalent income and wealth different from white kids, that is interesting. It's particularly interesting because teachers are among the most “woke” of all, commonly marching for BLM while accusing the MAGA crowd of being racist. In the name of BLM people have torched black neighborhoods (both business and residential) and torn down statues of people who fought against slavery, and the arrested people have included numerous teachers.
Life isn't fair, so some hints for your son: wear a nice suit, speak crisp standard English, and keep the grooming strictly traditional. Basically, adopt the mannerisms of a lawyer.
You did see the article I posted where Ving Rhames had five cops show up to his house pointing guns at him because they thought he was breaking into his own home? Should he have been wearing a suit in his own home?
No “acting White” doesn’t keep you from getting pulled over. My (step)son grew up in the burbs all of his life. No matter how “White” he talks he will still be treated with suspicious. So he is suppose to wear a suit everywhere? Do you tell your son to wear a suit when he is going to play basketball?
I know for a fact according to statistics I make more than twice the median in my county - the most affluent in the state and one of the top 25 in the country - the benefit of working for BigTech remotely while living in the south, I’m by no means rich - and yes we still get looked at suspiciously walking into our own homes.
So you mean all Black people have to do is wear a suit everywhere and they won’t get harassed? You have singlehandedly solved racism, police misconduct, the disenfranchisement of minorities, racial profiling, etc in one sentence!
And no, teachers come from their communities just like cops do. Do you really think they earn a degree and automatically become “woke”?
So poverty couldn’t possibly be caused by systemic racism, educational funding based on property taxes, the War on Drugs that habitually punishes minorities more than Whites for the same offenses that also makes it harder to get a job.
The kind of people who become teachers are generally not the kind of people who become cops. The education is radically different. So that is a different starting point and a different path to the career. The teaching degree is nearly 100% “woke” garbage, none of it practical in the classroom. Some, for example the methods for reading instruction, has even been proven to be actively harmful.
Educational funding has nearly nothing to do with educational success. The per-child budget for the DC schools should make this very clear. Culture is nearly everything. Some cultures are toxic.
So should Ving Rhames had “the lawyer look” in his own home? Would that have stopped five cops from coming to his house? If the Black guy sitting in his own home who got shot by the cop because she thought she was entering her house not have been shot if had gone to sleep in a suit not been killed?
Do you also tell your female relatives if they dress appropriately they won’t be raped?
From all I've seen of US law enforcement, this seems to be applied very seldom, with cops actively escalating the situation and quickly reaching for tools of violence (beatings, batons, pepper spray, tasers, guns).
Most (all?) of the rest of the western world doesn't have these issues to anywhere near the degree the US does. Nobody in their right mind outside of the US would be justifying injecting people with massive doses of disassociative drugs, yet some people in the US think this is OK. That kind of says it all, really.
Once you administer a mind altering drug against that person's will, any and all statements made by that person ought to be out of bounds for using against them at trial.
No, that's a distinctly American version of civil rights.
They might also arbitrarily take your property, while everyone gaslights you into thinking that this is a staple of non-American marxist regimes.
In China there are “execution vans” with no other purpose even suggested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van
From your article
> Liu was convicted
> a reprieve after appealing
> given a retrial
Your entire article describes convicted death row prisoners, whether we agree with or respect China's due process at all.
Why did you think it bolstered your argument to talk about Chinese due process in an article about a lack of due process in the US? beCaUsE wE cAN taLk AbOut iT? that's gold, its really the icing on the cake.
Anyway I’m just trying to say that if you want to apply the most unfriendly interpretation to some happening in America, in order to compare it to “non-American Marxist regimes”, at least be consistent.
> article shows purpose suggested with convicted prisoners
You presented them as if they just scoop people up off the street and execute them on the spot.
No, that's just America.
I'm asking you to compare the same things and all you did was present a different thing, masqueraded it as a worse thing, failed to find any comparison. If you want to elevate Chinese processes as a charade, thats pretty much what I would expect you to do, but people get railroaded in the US all the time too. So let's just talk about the things completely devoid of due process, or instead of deflecting we can just talk about how the US does not have a better process at all and we should put it under so much more scrutiny.
"We can talk about it" and thats how we got to this outcome, because everyone talked about giving the government all the power, stripping their need for due process, and siding with them by default way too often.
Why bother even reading up on it if just making things up will work?
You think everyone in China is a saint? Why would somebody go through all of the time and expense to execute you if there weren't a reason?
We'll he's got $50K worth of bullets in him. He must have done something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZrFVtmRXrw
"Agents of the state randomly jumping you, beating you up because of their unilateral and arbitrary determination that you are resisting being randomly jumped, and then injecting you with a sedative and psychoactive so powerful that you die? No, that's a distinctly American version of civil rights.
They might also arbitrarily take your property, while everyone gaslights you into thinking that this is a staple of non-American marxist regimes."
This was an accurate and a substantive comment which is only guilty of bruising a few egos.
315 milligrams is still.. a lot. Especially injected into the bloodstream (I presume?) all at one time. Enough to really wrangle your marbles even if you're used to that kind of stuff.
edit: To expand, that's about the dosage most people would get delusions of some sort, but not be 100% immobilized. That is a recipe for disaster around angry cops.
edit2: It's bio-availability is actually twice as high intramuscularilly than insufflated.. well you wouldn't be fighting the cops but dear god I would not want to experience that.
But yes, it’s a lot.
I know how much I weigh, but I don't know how much anyone else weighs. I guess some other people don't even weigh themselves so don't even know how much they weigh.
How do you estimate it?
I don't think I've ever heard an adult male ever mention their own weight in public. You can see why it'd be hard to estimate when you don't have any data.
Practice. In theory if you're doing this a lot, you should be able do a decent job of estimating +/- 10%, which is more than accurate enough.
There are certainly other complications (some medications are dosed on "ideal body weight" (ignoring subcutaneous fat), etc...)
In fairness, we're usually estimating the weight of people of fairly fit builds, but with some practice estimating people of other builds, I agree that you'd get within 10%.
Never underestimate the degree to which racism is driven by actual, irrational terror.
Biologically, this is utter nonsense. But the belief that black people are tougher, stronger, and more capable of withstanding pain and drugs is a surprisingly common belief. Doctors are notorious for downgrading black pain in clinical situations as compared to white patients, and administer less pain killers.
Apologies to the HN users who will be incensed at the notion of race playing a role in this situation.
No apologies necessary, receiving a dose of reality is good for them.
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patient...
https://inpublicsafety.com/2015/01/tackling-the-obesity-epid...
and here:
"FBI: 80 Percent Of Police Officers Are Overweight"
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/08/14/fbi-80-percent-of-police...
Why on earth would you come to challenge something without first checking if its true?
Iv dose for induction of general anesthesia is ~3-5 mg/kg. Or ~5 mg/kg intramuscularly.
The main thing with ketamine is that it causes tachycardia/arrhythmias and increases blood pressure. While that can be desirable for people in shock, it is a big problem if the person is already under proarrhythmic drugs (e.g. cocaine).
In Europe, we use antipsychotics for similar situations (haloperidol).
Key point though: you wouldn’t give the pt 8 mg/kg in a fucking bolus. Time to onset for sedative effect is fast (10min or so); time to peripheral adverse effects can easily take an hour. You’d start way lower than 8, and work your way up if you needed to.
Well yeah, but as I understand it the goal is not to intubate in this case, right? So in my opinion, 6 is already way too much.
In fact, I don't think we can agree on a safe standard dose in this case. Which suggests that it's not the right choice of drug for that use case...
I talked down one or two people from completely destroying their environment while in such a state, by using deliberately de-escalatory calming techniques.
I’m aghast the police would use such a substance because it is indeed a recipe for disaster when mixed with their expectations of behavior.
All I can say for what I did at the time was an intuition that I was confronted with a half-tranquilized, large confused ape and so acted as to prevent them from panicking and running amok with calm words, movements, and (most importantly I suspect in that state) caring touch.
I really doubt the club kids to saw had taken anything like the equivelant of 300mg or 500mg taken IM (2x the bioavailability of intranasal), or even intranasally. If you are standing, 50-75mg taken intranasally can cause transient, trance-like states like you describe. 100mg taken intranasally (50g IM equivalent) is enough such that most people couldn't safely walk, and would have closed-eye visuals almost like a lucid dream. 150mg intranasally will guarantee a k-hole for most people, and 300mg plus would render all but those with extreme tolerances unconscious.
I should also add that the ones whom I had to talk down were probably also on heaven-knows what other substances at the time.
Ever seen someone come out of narcosis? They talk a lot of stupid things.
Imagine landing that government contract. Imagine approving that government contract. Think about who these people are. Use your noggin.
This isn't a software function, there are thousands of factors involved and a cop is walking in knowing a handful. I don't think you're being realistic.
The article doesn't really give much evidence that this actually happens very frequently. The main piece of evidence is this:
In Minneapolis, a report conducted by the Office of Police Conduct Review found eight of those cases between 2016 and 2018, ranging from officers requesting paramedics use the drug to emergency medical workers asking officers for their opinions on sedating someone.
8 cases across three years in one city, where some of those cases were just paramedics asking for a second opinion, does not seem to indicate a very widespread issue across the US, especially when the city being investigated is know to have a bad police department.
First of all, it's a big jump from "the article only mentions 8 cases across the US" to "there were only 8 cases across the US". The case of Elijah McClain, for instance, is in Denver.
And the issue seems to be one of cruel and unusual punishment. At least in the US, people expect the police to use and carry guns. They don't expect them to order paramedics to inject you with weird sedatives when you're under restraint, and especially not to make broadly reasonable decisions while doing so.
Look at the McClain case, he was 140 pounds with six officers restraining him, and they needed to inject ketamine? I wouldn't blame the paramedics for miscalculating the weight, they probably thought this was some enormous muscular man that six police officers couldn't hold down.
Taking Minneapolis as an average (parent believes they are worse than average), it happens to .00063% of the population there per year or 1890 Americans per year. I'm having trouble finding the arrest rate in Minneapolis, which would help get to a more accurate estimate.
(I agree it'd be dystopian if police were themselves carrying around sedatives, but that's not happening here.)
The parent does not make that jump, it merely cites 8 cases over 3 years in one city and asks if there isn't more evidence. And that does not even allege police directing paramedics to do things (as claimed in another thread here), just people discussing the situation with each other.
—-
Also, I googled “Canada” and “Australia” alone with “Ketamine” “police” and got nothing. Can you support your claim that other countries do this?
The original claim did not say anything about police. You interjected police. However, I searched for "australia paramedics using ketamine" in DDG. The first page was nothing but pages regarding Colorado. Page 2 returned a more relevant study of Australian paramedics using Special-K[0]. I then searched "canadian paramedics using ketamine", and again first page totally about CO with page 2 yielding relevant results[1].
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1742-6723.12... [1] https://ajp.paramedics.org/index.php/ajp/article/view/763
Original claim seems accurate.
Firstly, eliminate qualified immunity in the USA. Until everyone can be held accountable for their actions, this convo is moot.
I don't know how you define pretty much everywhere, but in the EU it's illegal pretty much everywhere. [0]
I know in practice those laws get ignored, but, as a paramedic or doctor, you could get into trouble if someone decides to sue over it. The reality is that the law isn't on your side on this issue.
[0] https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/chafea_pdb/assets/files/pdb/200...
In my opinion the main issue is the "excited delirium" diagnosis. One of the main symptoms of "excited delirium" is "Police Noncompliance"[1] which makes the police an essential part of its diagnosis.
[0] https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/File/1853/Pre-Hospit...
[1] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/acep_repo...
To think of all the complications in a person's body from experiencing a drug that puts your conscience in a literally black hole (K-hole) is just sick. It's wrong.
You’re waxing hyperbolic. It’s a sedative drug used in normal human clinical practice, and in many settings is preferable because it has -fewer- risks of complications than other sedatives. And while I’m highly critical of it’s being used without strict medical protocol, I’ve worked psych ED enough to understand that there are occasionally absolutely, 100% ridiculously “agitated” patients that are going to have to be brought in, and will not do so without large amounts of physical force - something that is also prone to unfortunate complications.
The video shows that police escalated every chance they got.
After receiving a phone call of a “suspicious person” they went from in their car to hands on Elijah in less than 10s.
In a matter of minutes Elijah was on the ground surrounded by a dozen officers.
They’re saying “was he suspected of anything”, “why are we here”?
They don’t even know why they’re there... but they know that they need to indiscriminately dominate a young black man until he’s puking and crying and ultimately has a heart attack.
Ridiculously agitated, my foot. They (Police) create the situation, then they (Police) prescribe ketamine. These are not the people who should be making these calls. No one should be allowed to have this kind of latitude when dealing with another human.
And this, for the benefit of folks here who still want to treat these incidents as individual aberrations, is what BLM is about.
Sure, police can be good or bad, sometimes make mistakes, etc... But POLICING, as it is practiced in this country, is a horrifying disaster. And at this point it seems almost completely beyond rescue. We need new cops, new practices, new laws, new equipment, new training. I don't see how you "reform" a culture like that.
You do it through hard work on real reform at the local level, something that BLM (the organization) isn't really interested in. I don't agree with everything but the ideas outlined here https://www.joincampaignzero.org are a good start. Some communities are in much worse situation than others and I think new leadership is urgently needed in many of these places (i.e., vote for change).
The rhetoric that you are using is supremely dangerous. Look what is going on in Portland as the police and local political leadership have withdrawn from the basic goal of public safety and ensuring a peaceful, civil community. It is devolving into warring tribes. It is actually astonishing to me that it hasn't escalated further than it has but I see that this weekend things have changed a bit as some new tribes arrived resulting in brawls/skirmishes/fighting between the tribes as opposed to with police.
To advocate or even suggest that policing, as a system, is irredeemably flawed and can't be reformed is to actively invite in chaos and civil unrest. Instead of a civil police force you will end up with an ad-hoc collection of private security, thugs, violent gangs, protection rackets, and so on. Due process will not exist and whatever problems you attribute to the current system will be much, much worse in this new "system".
But aren't you making the same type of over-generalization as the comment you are replying to?
I think there are many within the BLM movement who are working towards thoughtful change at the local level within their respective communities. But just like any large organization, the most extreme viewpoints tend to get the most attention, and those within the organization with the loudest voices tend to be the ones who push for the more extreme agendas.
I think it's important to keep in mind that any large organization is made up of individual people who each have their own opinions, motivations and goals, and often times those may be in conflict with the broader messaging of the group.
Your last paragraph really lost me though. I get it that you are addressing the most extreme version of the original post, but for me personally that didn't seem very constructive and I didn't find the appeals to fear mongering very convincing either.
Uh... I don't think that's what I said, at all. I said we need new cops and a new law enforcement organization, because the old one is polluted beyond redemption.
I still would argue that your generalization that all policing is broken is very dangerous rhetoric and I don't think it is true). Civil society exists in part because of a tacit assumption that the police are always there to "police". At some level we agree to be policed. The non-police outnumber the police so there has to be some basic agreement that people will behave for it to all work.
If you convince everyone that the police as a whole are irredeemably bad/evil/racist etc. you've destroyed that tacit agreement and that civil society breaks down. We are seeing glimpses of that in the places where politicians and DAs have decided to put a pause on basic policing. A lot of people are discovering they don't have to behave.
Escalation of force to compliance.
They are literally trained to do that.
Ketamine is routinely used by paramedics, I think more routinely in Western Europe than in North America.
The real question is whether it is appropriate for police to request the use of sedatives while effecting an arrest; and you could argue in some cases that it is entirely appropriate even if your only priority is the wellbeing of the arrestee.
I used to drink. Heavily. Enough where I would lose control and neighbors would call 911 because they were concerned. I was removed from my home and handcuffed and brought to the ER more than once. A couple times I went smoothly, but a few times I fought back, hard. One time I was told it took 5 people to subdue me and I kicked an ambulance driver in the head. Another time I fought so hard against the handcuffs that I have permanent nerve damage in my right wrist. I also have shoulder problems that may have stemmed from being restrained by police.
I would’ve rather been ketamined than kick an ambulance driver in the head or have nerve/physical damage to my body. If you’ve never completely lost control of yourself and fought against multiple people, you have no idea what they’re dealing with. Once I got to the ER, they dosed me with haloperidol anyways shrug Might as well have been ketamine when I was being detained.
I hate cops, but I think ketamine could potentially help in some situations where someone has lost their goddamn mind and is fighting back hard.
Edit: This all happened in the 3rd Precinct of Minneapolis, famous for murdering George Floyd
This use is also medical, to try to help calm people who have major drug overdoses and save their lives. As with all things medical, sometimes things go wrong. It's not clear to me that the ketamine had anything to do with the death, nor does the article even make that case. Cardiac arrest is the literal opposite of what one would expect of someone dying of too much ketamine.
Instead, it talks about police training... even though medical professionals are the ones who inject this on site. There's a reasonable call for medical standards and study, but not a whole lot else.
Armchair criticism of the police with zero consideration for their point of view is not helpful to anyone, most of all victims of crimes.
We should not forget that condition.
There are other types of scenarios where out of control cops bully doctors and nurses into doing illegal things, two that I have read about:
- forcing a suspect to be subject to anal cavity search by a doctor at a hospital after a traffic stop
- forcing hospital staff to run blood tests on an awake, non-consenting suspect
Everyone who has ever dealt with the medical world for a personal or family problem understands that there are few “sure things” and that something that worked miraculously for someone’s problem might not work for yours, even if they seem like the same problem. Allowing police a position to direct medical care is utterly outrageous and irresponsible.
That said, what was done to Elijah McCain is one of the sickest, most unacceptably fucked up nightmare scenarios I’ve ever heard of. The initial interaction was a result of racist police who then had their victim murdered because they never saw him as a person, just another potential criminal.
She was arrested, although not charged and was later apologized to. The cop was fired and it also lead to Utah changing its blood draw laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_University_of_Utah_Hospit...
Also, there's no mention in this article of police directing the paramedics to do anything. Can you point me to what gave you that idea?
No one has said that. You are fabricating.
Why does it “appear” that way?
Please edit your post rather than spreading misinformation.
Maybe they gave him too much, but the article leaves one to conclude that this was somehow related to his death even though it never actually says so.
They did not use the words, 'he was on drugs', but there is a strong implication based on the audio that this is what the police were claiming.
This is the kind of rationalization that gets policies like this instituted. Having to be held down by six people isn't a requirement for being diagnosed with "excided delirium," anything is sufficient, because it's not a falsifiable diagnosis. The look in someone's eye can be enough. Talking back can be enough.
Also, by "enough," I mean enough for people who are already reactionaries of the law and order type to rationalize it. If it happened to a hypothetical white guy in some office complaining about his tax bill (who also showed no aggression and only tested positive for trace amounts of marijuana), could you imagine that people would still be alluding to "some reason" why "excited delirium" was actually a cool and reasonable diagnosis?
I mean, this is a violinist massage therapist who volunteered at animal shelters. This event is just more evidence that video will neither save you nor avenge you. You're as likely to be able to keep law enforcement from injecting ketamine into you on a whim as you are to keep law enforcement from being able to search your person or your car. With "There has to be a reason it took half a dozen people to hold him down," the reaction justifies itself.
And for what it's worth, the reason could be that they overreacted--everything has a reason and I made no claims about what reasons that might be.
That's why they summon medical professionals, as was done here and in other similar cases.
This is the behavior I’d expect from a serial killer.
Edit: they then distributed or showed this photo to the rest of the precinct. We know because a whistleblower notified the media. To my eye, this means that they expected the rest of the precinct to approve of this behavior, which is extremely alarming.
What compels someone to do that?
The better question is, why are so many people in positions of authority like this?
this is not just anecdotal, and has even been tested in court[0].
0. https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
American police live in what we call a “siege” mentality; they believe that they’re the only thing protecting society from chaos and crime. This results in a belief that their actions are inherently just, and that any criticism risks exposure of society to the chaos they’re barely holding back.
It’s not a convincing pitch when viewed in the light of blatant police brutality, but it appears to be what they believe.
Yes, they're police in the United States...
That being said, sedation is an important tool, and often the safest course of action for a patient that would otherwise be a danger to themselves or others. A prolonged fight can be fatal for someone who is pushing their body further than it should go.
It definitely has to be done correctly though, and given the number of cases where it was very clearly done incorrectly, I do think changes need to be made.
The mindset that permits people to shrug off the killing of Elijah McClain, and assume he must have done something to deserve it, is the same that celebrated public lynchings.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
Racism in society isn't an ideologocal point. It's reality. They're pointing out facts that are uncomfortable.
If the "spirit" of HN is truly about intellectual curiosity around things that relate to tech and entrepreneurship, then HN needs to embrace the fact that society ultimately rules over all -- most certainly tech and business.
I fear that your comment here and re-direction to "the rules" is a censorship attempt because this is an uncomfortable thing go think about. Is HN a place where discussion about social problems that infect all of tech, business, and entrepreneurship not allowed? Is talking about racism "ideological"?
HN has been having lots of discussion about racism, just as the rest of society has been (or rather, societies, since many countries are represented here). If your question ("Is HN a place where discussion about social problems [is] not allowed") comes up, that can only be because of unfamiliarity with the history. If you want to get more familiar, HN Search is a great resource (see the box at the bottom of every page).
The process of how we moderate political and ideological topics on HN is pretty stable by now. If you want to know what it is, check out the past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... There's a lot there; you could start with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396.
People often feel like their most-important topic is under-represented or outright suppressed on HN. Even the most common topic feels "censored" to some people (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962). This is an unfortunate consequence of frontpage space being the scarcest resource on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
There's obviously at least one department that did this at one point in time because of the notable lawsuit allowing it, but what is the source for it being a practice in “many jurisdictions”?
In the case of Elijah McClain there's absolutely nothing I've seen or read in reliable news sources that indicates the police had any reason to be forceful with him or even to arrest him. It is simply outrageous.
> Richard Harris, the Australian anesthesiologist, was one of only two cave-diving anesthesiologists in the world. "I didn't think it would work at all," Harris told National Geographic. "I expected the first two kids to drown and then we'd have to do something different. I put their odds of survival at zero."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/04/health/thailand-boys-cave-ket...
Interesting and scary experience.
This is insane.
Note, I don't think police should inject anyone with a substance (personally, I'd rather get shot with a bullet than involuntarily shot with an anesthetic), but how is being an anesthesiologist relevant?
The question: "should cops direct paramedic to administer K shots" is an ethics, or a religious, question. Not a medical one. Certainly relevant medical questions can inform the debate; questions such as "how to determine safe and effective dosage of an anesthetic in field situations" "What does the person experience when involuntarily subjected to this drug?".
A very important medical question can be: "How lethal is this technique?" So that the technique's lethality can be properly classified for street use.
Subjecting the person to mortal danger is not anesthesiology. It's ethics, law, and religion.
Uhhhh anesthesiologists are experts in administratering sedatives to humans safely. The connection here seems pretty obvious to me...
"in reality, things like this almost never happen" I am willing to bet your life experience is very different than those of minorities.
" If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it" Not sure what you base this on, I feel like to could be based on nothing but the narrative you are attempting spin. Is your argument that police should be more aggressive based on what could happen? Should police just gun everyone down because they may have a gun and pull it out and shoot them in the head?
In this country, police have godlike life or death power, every instance of police killings should be heavily scrutinized by neutral parties and stringent protocols put in place to prevent it with harsh criminal penalties for those that dont follow the rules. How you can just shrug and accept any cases of police brutality is beyond me.
Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made.
"Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made." They are but when they make mistakes people die or are sent to jail for decades or are stripped of their property. To give people this much power and shrug and say its a mistake is not acceptable. Very often these same cops have many / dozens of complaints against them and they still continue to act with impunity because they know that they are not going to be punished. A mistake is a mistake, 10 / 15 mistakes in and it is a pattern, extrapolated out over tens of thousands of officers and it is a systematic problem.
In reality USA has 3-10x the number of police shootings per capita than a random western country (heck, worse than many developing countries of even dictatorships).
So, yeah, the metrics are off.
If your counter-argument is "yeah, but US has more crime too", then maybe think long and hard if your whole legal system, approach to crime, society goals, etc, are justified then....
It would be fair to call it racism, if there was another instance of a white suspect acting the same way, and getting treated differently.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5NcyePEOJ8
What about if the white person in the same situation wasn't even asked to stop in the first place?
It's not just about "how police treats blacks vs whites who refuse to stop" but also about "how often police asks blacks vs whites to stop".
Would you put your hands on someone Who showed no physical resistance in that amount of time?
The Police escalate quickly, and then, since the situation has escalated, feel justified in their response, which killed Elijah. They killed Elijah.
I don't think it is entirely fair to put 100% of the blame on the police. A much healthier solution would be to try de-escalating general tensions between the police and the population.
This is why we shouldn’t be employing people whose job it is to snatch people they don’t know anything about, who just assume you’re a threat until YOU PROVE that you’re innocent.
Besides, there are quite a few cities that have considerably limited the police power by now. Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland for example. The safety of regular law-abiding people has considerably dropped. Murders are up, gun sales are up, almost every type of violent crime is up.
If you don't like police, go ahead, move to one of these cities. Or at least, search for some videos from them on DuckDuckGo.
I find it very disheartening and hypocritical to hear anti-police rhetoric from people living in 7-figure-property neighborhoods, completely shielded from the problems that the police is supposed to solve.
And no, I am not a human bot in a call center, I happen to be a Canadian that is actually satisfied with the way RCMP works here. And I don't understand why our southern neighbors would rather shoot themselves in their feet and have their cities burnt, than try to copy some techniques that do make police more efficient up here.
If you want to know about how great the RCMP, you should read how nice they are to help local police departments to give free one-way tours into the forest at night in the winter to minorities, by very helpfully shielding them from the evil bureaucrats.
Perhaps the problems that the police are meant to solve are in part caused by the police? If I was always treated as a suspect after a while I may start to become resentful. If I was a minority representing 13% of the general population but represented 38% of the prison population I may start to become resentful and argue that there is a problem. Your argument that just because people live in peaceful 7-figure neighborhoods they should be grateful to the police for suppressing the riff raff, poor and minorities is very grating, classist and very much racist.
The NYPD has a budget of $10 billion dollars, and the only limits imposed on it were to please stop beating, murdering, framing and raping people. If those limits are too stringent I am not really sure where to go from here.
I have been ticketed for speeding on both sides of the border. RCMP makes is extremely professional. The whole conversation almost sounds like getting a bill from a roofer guy, explaining how to pay it and why you should check your roof more often. U.S. cops have a lot more of the "Ha-ha, now you're mine, bastard" attitude. I was extremely polite and complying both times.
Police often camps out in public events, like car shows, building trust with people. Silly things like giving stickers to kids and letting them climb on police ATVs for pictures, or officers showing off the tech in their cars to car enthusiasts.
When it comes to controversial topics, optics is everything. When a couple of student protestors blocked a major train line protesting against an oil pipeline, and commuters got really pissed off, since they couldn't get to their workplaces, the officer arresting them looked like a 60+ year old grandma with the "stop fooling around, kids" look. Nobody got hurt and the media got zero chance to blow it to any kind of a scandal.
Explaining how the US got to this state is a long discussion, but it helps to understand the origin of the police here in the south was to catch escaping slaves, and in the north was to keep "undesirables" out of wealthy neighborhoods. In more recent times politicians have used the War On Crime rhetoric to motivate people out of fear to vote for them, even though actual violent crime has been steadily falling.
Some parts of the US could take this approach, but there's a lot of places in the US that are either too nice out or there's too many fast food restaurants/Starbucks to take shelter in
Baltimore PD officers wear black uniforms. One night one of them was standing in the middle of the street I was driving down, and there weren't enough streetlights in that section. I was doing something like 40 in a 30, and the first thing I knew that anything was wrong was when I heard a loud thump from my left side. Looking in the wing mirror, I could see the guy in the light of the upcoming streetlight, where the one I'd last passed was too far back to show him.
So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase. Imagine my surprise when, on seeing my white skin, short hair, and slacks-and-button-down professional attire, he waved me off and went back to what he'd been doing!
In retrospect, I have to figure the mirror clipped something on his belt, rather than the car striking his actual person. But the fact remains that, had I not been white or not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Especially since, being as I was on my way home from a visit to my connection, I had a quarter ounce of pot in my left front trouser pocket. Remember, this was back before decriminalization, more than a decade before dispensaries even existed in this town; not only that, but my guy hadn't had any baggies that night, so he just gave me the smaller portions he got from his own guy, who mostly did street work. So it would've been charged as possession with intent, and that's a felony.
The time I hit a cop with my car while I was carrying wasn't a major reason why I quit smoking that shit entirely a couple of years later, but never having another few seconds of that kind of sheer terror was not absent from the list of reasons why I was glad when I did quit.
Just imagine if I were a black man, though. That cop could have shot me dead on the spot and who'd have said a word? I mean, I so obviously would've had it coming, a drug dealer doing drug dealer crimes and, if that weren't enough, I swerved my car to try to murder a police officer in the middle of it. Probably had a gun in my back pocket, or in the glovebox at least. Who would dare blame an officer of the law for doing what he had to do in the face of an obviously murderous criminal like that?
...is what white people would mostly say. But that's the thing. I had that moment of terror because I was acting like a damn fool - I could drive more carefully and just quit buying pot, and I did. People of color can't "live more carefully", or "just quit" having their skin. And there is a night in my past that, if I had skin of a similar shade to theirs, it'd be through bars that I saw the next sunrise - if I had lived to see it at all.
I don't blame you for saying it sounds unrealistic. I'd probably likewise have some trouble taking a story like that seriously on its face, except that I happened to live it, and a lot of other wild stories too. But there are far more stories that I haven't lived, and some of them sound as wild to me as the one I've just told sounds to you. That's how life is, though. The world is far wilder than any one of us, with our individual and limited perspective, ever gets to see. If we want to understand how things really work in the places and times and lives that we don't get to see, we have to listen to the stories people tell us who do see those things - listen, and not assume that they must be lying, any more than you would assume I had been lying to you just now.
If you take anything away from this conversation, I hope you'll make it that.
1. The professional attire and the fact that you pulled over and apologized.
2. The cop being busy with something else that's more important than busting a random pothead.
And that's just my point. Based entirely on how I looked, he judged the incident to have been a harmless accident and not worth pursuing, despite that I had a felony charge worth of dope in my front pocket at the time. Pretty important, if you get to make that bust! But he never had any idea of the chance that passed him by, because, to him, I looked like somebody who wouldn't.
What I'm saying is, think for a minute about how that could've played out differently if, in that cop's eyes, I'd have looked a different way.
>not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
This may have had more to do with with him waving you off than anything else. The type of people police are purportedly there to handle are not those who would do what you did. If this is Baltimore we're talking about, he may be tuned to a much more violent type of normal criminal encounter. Keep in mind that given the limited resources of the judicial system, they are better spent on more disruptive crimes to the social fabric.
Perspective is important in these things. Those that come to you to be dealt with are practically priority zero. They know they screwed up, and as long as you (the officer) is okay, then all's good. They'll sort themselves out.
It's the ones that don't the police are out and willing to do paperwork for.
That officer made the judgment he did in a matter of seconds; as I noted in another comment here, I didn't have time to speak, or to take so much as a step toward the officer, before he waved me off - which was just as well in retrospect; God alone knows what I'd have said. But if any one aspect of the gestalt I presented had in any way varied from "harmless", he might well have drawn on me, and if he hadn't done that then he'd for damn sure have come over to see whether I was drunk or high or whatever the hell. And then he would have found my dope, and I would have gone to jail that night.
None of that would have happened because I was actually dangerous! He wasn't wrong to read me the way he did. But I was still extremely lucky that he did read me right. I could very easily have been less fortunate. And given everything I've seen in twenty years living in this town, I am very sure that the vast bulk of my good fortune that night lay in the accident of my having light skin.
Freddie Gray could talk about that, I think, if he were still alive to talk about anything. The federal consent decree that followed his death did not come about in a vacuum. And it is not in a vacuum that BPD officers interact with other citizens - both like and unlike myself - of this city.
I don't see that as a "Thank God I'm White" outcome half as much as a "Thank God, he has something better to do!"
He could have been: -Covering the exits of a hiding place of a known dangerous offender -recon -signaling someone or waiting for a signal from someone on the down low -waiting on an informant -up to no good in a part of town he shouldn't even have been on the beat in, and really not looking to explain why he was even there to make an arrest. -on some other Op
To assume it was simply because you were white with no other data is really quite the knee jerk. Everything for a reason, and especially so with cops; a lone cop to boot.
Heck, you don't know. He might have been glad even if you were of a much darker complexion to see a brotha dressed for the office, pulling over and making every attempt to make himself easier to deal with rather than the alternative of a brotha in a trench coat/baggy clothes with a hand in his...oh shit!
Street wisdom is a thing. Supposedly, the better cops try to cultivate it amongst their numbers.
I get it's in vogue to assume that everyone is out to curbstomp the melanin enriched, but damn man. Cut the guy some slack. I mean he waved you off. Now I wish more cops extended the favor back, but, that's how it goes. Sometimes you get the ticket, sometimes you get let off the hook.
So what you're really doing here is, you're asking me to choose which to give greater credence. On the one hand, your reasonable-sounding thoughts in a vacuum about some purely theoretical interaction of cop and "brotha" (really?)
On the other, my so far twenty years of living in the city of Baltimore. Granted, as as a white man. But nonetheless, with eyes, ears, acquaintances across pretty much the whole spectrum of skin tones - two decades living in a busy city, you have time to meet a lot of people, especially when you do what most white people in this town don't do and use public transit a lot - and a subscription to the Sun paper. Plus, on top of my own experience and that of other people who've shared theirs with me, the outcome of the recent DOJ investigation, which accurately found "widespread unconstitutional and discriminatory policing in the city" [1] and that "...the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) had engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and certain provisions of federal statutory law." [2]
So, left to weigh all of that in one hand, and your vacuous theorizing in the other...look, I get that you're coming at this in good faith, and I respect that. But do you really need me to explain in detail how and why this effort falls so far short of the mark?
You're arguing essentially that Baltimore cops deserve the benefit of the doubt on questions of racial bias in policing. As I said, in a vacuum, sure, that seems reasonable. But, though I'm sure it's as tiresome to hear it repeated as it is to have to say it over and over again, none of this stuff happens in a vacuum. And the argument you've made is totally unable to survive outside one, because even the most cursory look at the recent history of policing in Baltimore is enough to see that the benefit of the doubt is in no way here deserved.
Even under the Trump administration, the US Department of Justice doesn't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt. The Baltimore Sun journalists who follow, investigate, and report on the actions of police in this city, they don't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt. [3] The folks I've known and whose stories I've heard in this town, for whom grossly excessive violence and abuse of power on the part of police have been a regular feature of life in their communities, they don't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt, either. In light of all that, why should I? Why should anyone?
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime...
[2] https://consentdecree.baltimorecity.gov/
[3] https://news.baltimoresun.com/cops-and-robbers/part-one/ https://news.baltimoresun.com/cops-and-robbers/part-two/ https://news.baltimoresun.com/cops-and-robbers/part-three/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/us/Elijah-McClain-aurora-...
That comment really didn't age well, did it? I think just about anyone can see what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse and recognize that racism was a factor in the disparate treatment.
And it's not even up to the individual, racism is systemic in police, part of their everyday talk, their (real, not lip service) training discussions, their protocols, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elijah_McClain
From the very beginning this story makes no sense. Suspicious is not a crime.
An earlier story makes things seem even worse:
> While McClain was making his trip to the store, someone had called 911 to report a suspicious person. Referring to McClain, the caller described him wearing a mask said he looked "sketchy" but added that "he might be a good person or a bad person." When asked, the caller told the operator that there were no weapons and that no one was in danger. The operator advised him that officers were on their way to check it out.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/happened-elijah-mcclain-protests-b...
Wearing a ski mask in public during the summer, although odd, is not a crime, either.
I don't know much at all about the McClain case, but your statement seems to have a flawed assumption that a crime is required before police can legitimately get involved. Policing doesn't only occur after a crime is committed. A big part of policing is about deterrence: being visible, talking with people in the community, investigating suspicious activity, double-checking that nothing is wrong, etc.
> When officers Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt and Randy Roedema stopped Elijah McClain on his way home, one telling him that he was "being suspicious," according to police body camera video. McClain responded, "I have a right to go where I am going."
> The officers immediately grabbed McClain, who repeatedly told them to let him go.
This has nothing to do with being visible, talking with the community, investigating suspicious activity, or double-checking that nothing is wrong.
Using that flawed assumption to argue that the police did something wrong in the McClain case is just noise. It distracts from understanding the facts of the matter.