15 thoughts on “Three Police Officers, Two Paramedics Indicted In Connection With Elijah McClain’s Death

  1. This guy’s death reads like a movie farce, something you’d see on the Simpsons.

    Making some assumptions here…

    Very small, very meek, guy was dancing to music only he could hear (so ear buds). Cops confront him, he can’t hear them and ignores them, they get violent, he gets flustered and they take it as contempt of cop and get really violent. They stop short of killing him and summon the paramedics. Paramedics make a series of medical errors and kill him. System covers for the lot of them.Report

  2. It’s the Ketamine that has me the most confused.

    Is this something that is done regularly?

    How was this relationship set up? “When we arrest people, you shoot them with Ketamine.”

    I mean, I know that the hippocratic oath is anti-woman and all that, but is there a feminist version of something that is close to the original that we can make paramedics take?Report

    1. Ketamine is a medication that is used to induce loss of consciousness, or anesthesia. It can produce relaxation and relieve pain in humans and animals. Ketamine is a medication primarily used for starting and maintaining anesthesia. It induces dissociative anesthesia, a trance-like state providing pain relief, sedation, and amnesia.

      So if you have someone freaking out and running wild, you use Ketamine to KO them and stop them from hurting themselves and/or make the arrest easier.

      Note it’s unclear whether this is ever good idea, much less in general, and it clearly was a bad idea here.Report

      1. Oh, I understand the *UTILITY* of shooting up people you’re arresting with ketamine.

        Sounds like it could solve a lot of problems!

        I’m more wondering at the whole “WHO AUTHORIZED THIS BULLSHIT” thing than questioning how useful it would be when arresting autistic Black kids.Report

        1. The first obvious problem is they have no reason to arrest him.
          The 2nd is they have no reason to be violent.
          The 3rd is they have no reason to drug him up.

          Even ignoring the “no reason” issue (which we shouldn’t), all three of those steps were done incompetently.

          Now after that we have the moral and procedural backflips used to avoid any consequences.Report

          1. I’m wondering at the whole “if you need to shoot someone up with ketamine, you can” thing.

            I’m sure they felt they had a reason. My “what the hell?” is not founded on “but they didn’t have a reason to shoot him up”.Report

            1. My guess is this (from here):

              Ketamine has a wide margin of safety; several instances of unintentional administration of overdoses of ketamine hydrochloride injection (up to ten times that usually required) have been followed by prolonged but complete recovery.

              Report

              1. My point is that the wide margin of safety is how the policy is justified.

                I suspect that the prosecution will not attack the use of ketamine, but the after care (did the paramedics monitor the patient and get him to a hospital with all reasonable speed, or were they bullsh*tting with the cops and ignoring the guy while they dithered?).Report

            2. If they have enough reason, they can ignore traffic rules. For that matter they can kill people.

              Giving someone a KO drug is way less than that. It’s easy to envision situations where it’d be appropriate… although since I’m not a doctor, that could be wrong.Report

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