Demetrio Jackson really needed medical help and the paramedics came to assist him.
The 43-year-old man was caught by the police and arrested for trespassing in a parking lot in Wisconsin. The police used a Taser on him and held him down while he begged for help because he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with his hands tied behind his back and breathed in air through a mask.
Next, the police moved Jackson onto his side so that a medic could give him a strong drug to make him fall asleep.
“A police officer told Jackson that it will help him relax. ” In just a few minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped beating. He never woke up and died two weeks after.
Jackson died in 2021 because of something not many people know about – sometimes, instead of shooting, the police use a medical syringe to cause harm.
For the past 15 years, police have been giving calming drugs to people they detain. The drugs are based on uncertain science and are supported by experts who are aligned with the police. This is happening all over the country. The investigation looked at lots of police and medical records and videos of many incidents. It found that a plan to stop violence and save lives has led to some deaths that could have been prevented.
Between 2012 and 2021, at least 94 people died after being given medicine to make them sleepy and held down by police. This information was found by the AP working with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. This is almost 10% of the over 1,000 deaths found during the investigation of people controlled by police in ways that are not supposed to cause death. Almost half of the 94 people who died were Black, including Jackson.
Racial inequality is tied to a debated medical condition called excited delirium, which led to an increase in sedation outside of hospitals. Critics say the symptoms of “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance play into racist ideas about Black people. This can lead to unfair decisions about who needs sedation.
In half of these cases, the use of sedatives was not mentioned in reports. Reports usually pay more attention to what the police did, not what the medics did. Elijah McClain died in Aurora, Colorado in 2019. Two paramedics were found guilty of giving him too much ketamine, the same drug that was given to Jackson. One person was sent to jail for five years last month, and the other person will find out their punishment on Friday.
It was difficult to figure out how much sedatives might have affected the 94 deaths. Many of these deaths involved using other harmful force on people who had taken drugs or drank alcohol. Doctors said to the AP that the vaccines might not make much of a difference for people who were already very sick. They could make things worse for people who were already in bad shape, or if they were given in the wrong way.
Sedatives were listed as a cause of death in twelve cases, but officials didn’t check if the injections were necessary. Doctors usually think these treatments are not harmful. Now, some people believe that they might be doing a more important job than we thought before and need to be looked at more closely.
Repeatedly, the AP discovered that upset people who were being restrained by the police facedown, sometimes with handcuffs and officers pushing on their backs, had trouble breathing and tried to escape. The paramedics gave medicine to calm down the aggressive person, which made them breathe even slower. Many times, the heart and breathing stopped within a few minutes.
Paramedics gave medication to some people who weren’t a danger to themselves or others, which goes against the rules for treating them. Doctors sometimes do not know if other drugs or alcohol are in people’s bodies, but mixing them can cause serious problems.
Sometimes police officers wrongly told paramedics to give shots to people they arrested.
Sometimes the people helping would make jokes about how strong the medicine was in making their patients fall asleep. Videos from California, Tennessee, and Florida show people saying “night, night” before they die.
Claire Zagorski, who works as a paramedic and does research on addiction at the University of Texas at Austin, said that emergency medical workers can end up acting like the police if they are not careful.
Fans of sedatives say that they help quickly treat drug-related behavior emergencies and psychotic episodes. They also help protect first responders from violence. Sedatives are given safely to thousands of people each year to get them to the hospital for life-threatening conditions. Critics say giving people drugs to make them sleepy should be allowed only in very few cases or not allowed at all. They argue that giving these drugs to people without their agreement is too dangerous when the police are involved.
Ohio State University teacher Dr. Mark DeBard thought that sedation could help calm down really upset people in emergency situations. He believed it could be useful for police officers dealing with these kinds of situations. Today, he said he’s upset that police officers are still using too much force instead of treating those situations like medical emergencies. He is also shocked that paramedics have given unnecessary injections by overdiagnosing excited delirium.
Some people believe that the idea was wrong because using sedatives and police restraint together can be very dangerous. The deaths have made many people sad all across the country.
“I saw people giving strong medicines on the streets that could kill someone,” said Honey Gutzalenko, a nurse. Her husband died after getting a shot of midazolam in 2021 while being held down by police near San Francisco.
Please, I’m asking you to stop.
Jackson was on a truck near a radio station between two small cities in Wisconsin. A worker called emergency services early in the morning on October 8, 2021, because they wanted the police to help remove a stranger who seemed strange but not dangerous.
The police video and many documents from law enforcement and medical reports explain how the situation got worse.
An Altoona cop saw Jackson in the parking lot. Jackson seemed worried and anxious, he kept looking around and speaking quietly. He had used methamphetamine to help himself deal with his schizophrenia, as a psychiatrist explained. He had been going to jail and living on the streets. He went to the emergency room often to find a place to sleep.
The police officer, along with another officer and a deputy, said he could go if he told them his name. Jackson said no.
The police found out who he was by looking at his tattoos, and found out that he was on probation for having meth. They saw that the truck was slightly damaged and chose to take him into custody.