Documenting Police Use of Force (full documentary) | FRONTLINE & @AssociatedPress

[Music] got it I got it right now you're going get T keep it up the project is about uncovering hidden deaths in collaboration with the Associated Press an investigation into police restraint people know about deaths in police interactions but no one really knows the extent of it in many cases it's sort of unclear what role the police force played in the death we're real world practitioner so we're dealing with a real world problem given this reality that officers are often the ones responding to Mental Health crisis how are they trained to do that that's one of the problems there's an inconsistency there and the impact on families we're devastated we want answers he should not have died you find so many families left with unanswered questions it's important to identify what went wrong and who was responsible now on front line document pres ing Police use of [Music] force this program contains mature content which may not be suitable for all audiences viewer discretion is [Music] [Music] advised it's a nice day it is it's still chilly this morning I like it yeah I like this weather Associated Press reporters Mitch Weiss and Kristen Hall have come to Bristol Tennessee to talk to Karen Goodwin about the death of her son Austin Hunter Turner Hunter knew everyone he was always into something always he decided one morning to uh show the neighbor over here how he was like Superman and jumped off her porch which is two stories basically they get hurt no he didn't get hurt look at that he was always trying to make you life I made sure to raise them in church I told them when they were little I give them to God so that no matter what God had them Hunter Turner became a high school athlete and loved motorcycles he had a history of minor seizures and had been using drugs but he never had problems with law enforcement until one night in August 2017 when he was 23 it's 11:15 11:20 at night my son's girlfriend Michelle she called and she said oh God Karen something's wrong and I said what's wrong Michelle Hunter started going in circles with his arm point pointed out and then he fa and now he's making moaning noises and he's not moving and I said Honey C 911 911 where is your emergency my boyfriend just started twitching and fell on the floor I think he's having a seizure okay and you said your boyfriend is having a seizure is he still seing he started tching himself on the floor he's foaming at the mouth hold him down just let him let him work the seizure out if he stops shaking I want you to turn him back to his left side and make sure that if he's got anything like saliva or anything in his mouth that it runs out okay shaking turn him to his left side that's the rescue position that'll keep his airway open and ain't clear okay don't put him on his stomach Karen Goodwin got to the apartment as the paramedics were arriving Hunter's down on all fours and then he sits up on his knees and he stands up and his body is just stiff and it's it's weird to watch because it wasn't that he and and I knew he wasn't in control paramedics were unable to control Turner and suspected he was on drugs they called the Bristol police for help is he here this body camera footage which was obtained exclusively by the AP shows the situation escalating quickly stop got his arm I got his arm right now you're going to get Tas if you keep it up I couldn't understand what they were doing or how they were doing it because you couldn't see very much there was anywhere between 8 to 10 people it look like and I'm trying to understand is he calming down is he coming to is he what's going on stop it now you're going to get tazed all right taser hold on me to get us [Music] too listen if I back off are you going to be Cal down cuz you're not going to win this batt understand put face down belly down y need spit soal down yeah there it is spit through all this I was totally helpless I couldn't help my kid this is my son I'm willing to lay my life down for him but these people are helping him so I didn't want to get in the way of the help that maybe he could get the officers and Medics ended up subduing Turner the handcuffed him strapped him face down on a gurnie and put a mesh fabric known as a spit sock over his head meant to prevent biting or spitting his mother planned to meet them at the hospital are you all done in there no ma' no if you don't mind is it you all going to be a while they just took you m we're going on the hospital yeah we'll make sure secure yeah I be here'll tell but when she arrived at the hospital she was told her son had stopped breathing they were doing compression swapping off the two the two nurses and they worked about 15 minutes and I asked the the doctor how long can you do this and he said we can do it for Mar or so uh cuz we've got oxygen going okay 30 minutes goes by and I looked cuz I'm standing right at his shoulder holding his hand and this whole side of his chest looked like jello when they pushed on it it was just given that free and easy and I told him that that's enough my baby needs to rest now stop the autopsy report said Turner died from multiple drug toxicity marijuana and Suboxone a medication prescribed to treat opioid dependency it also cited dilated cardiomyopathy a condition that affects the heart's ability to pump enough oxygen-rich blood we got the the autopsy back we actually took it to our family doctor I just wanted her to look at it I said just you know is there anything in here that's weird and of course she looks at it it doesn't look like there's anything wrong it does say an accidental overdose from a therapeutic to lethal dose of suboxin which he was prescribed and marijuana so then she and I are sitting here thinking okay he's had this episode The the seizure maybe his heart just gave out and that's why they never could get him back Hunter Turner was one of the hundreds of people who die every year after encounters with law enforcement most of those deaths are from shootings but others like Turners occur after Police use restraint methods that are not supposed to be deadly why don't we go ahead and get going here we've got a lot to get through for the past 3 years a team of reporters from the Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard centers for investigative journalism and Frontline have been compiling an investigating deaths following police encounters that involved tactics known as less lethal Force the murder of George Floyd really raised questions for a lot of people about the extent of Police use of force we're looking at deaths that don't involve someone being shot and killed deaths after interactions that involve at least a certain level of force that's beyond handcuff less lethal force can be a range of things and it doesn't always have to be excessive use of these things like a taser a baton it can be physical Force punching taking someone down it can be when they're down they're in prone position with a knee on their back forced sedation is an interesting one the goal is to subdue someone so that they will stop doing whatever they're doing and perhaps get help in the hospital not all of these people who die are sympathetic characters and police show a level of restraint in the sense of they they try and physically subdue them rather than shoot them for years the federal government has struggled to count these fatalities and the data it has collected is incomplete the responsibility of the federal government is to track these cases to understand the full scope of what's Happening across the country their data collection efforts are hindered by uh police departments that aren't always sending them the data that they need you have places not just individual departments but in some cases whole states where you just can't get very much information at all despite these limitations the reporters were able to build an unprecedented database through nearly 7,000 public record requests the reporters collected hundreds of thousands of pages of documents including autopsy and police incident reports and footage from cell phones and body warn cameras we went to medical examiners coroners offices police departments state agencies that investigate these deaths even when they turn over records sometimes the records aren't all the records it may be just the incident report which is the basics sometimes you'll get investigators reports and it'll have a little more detail each layer has more and more clues we took him to the ground he was combative he was agitated he didn't listen to us he had superhuman strength these are all red flags for us then what we'll do is we try to get the videos to see if the videos actually correspond to what's in the police reports based on the data they were able to gather from 2012 through 20121 they found 1,36 deaths that involved police using some kind of less lethal force a fraction of the overall police contacts with the population but still an average of about two per week Nationwide these are still rare but it happens more often uh than the public knows about in about about half of the cases medical officials cited law enforcement as causing or contributing to the deaths in many others significant police force went unmentioned and drugs pre-existing health conditions and other causes were blamed instead these incidents involving less lethal Force are often more complicated than a police shooting would be they often involve multiple factors that could lead to death in many cases it's sort of unclear what role the police force played in the death not all of these are a George Floyd level type of case or death in about onethird of the cases examined police were intervening to stop people who were injuring others or posed a threat police are stopping them from killing somebody else they've broken into someone's home you know they're menacing people they seem to be having either a mental episode or they seem to be extremely high on stimulant drug like methamphetamine or cocaine you have to consider what sort of a situation police are coming into was this person trying to hurt other people were they going at the police themselves that's one of the key takeaways is that there is a lot of nuance in these in the case of Austin Hunter Turner the body cam videos raised questions for reporter Kristen Hall got the very first thing that I saw was just how immediate the officers took steps to escalate the situation stop it now you're going to get T this started off as a medical emergency because he was having a seizure when the officers arrived they described using various kinds of force that you would typically see when somebody is being placed under arrest so they Ed a taser stop it now then they Shackled him with his legs and his arms and then they put a hobble restraint in between his leg restraints and his arm restraints don't put him on his stomach just try to L him to his left side when Hunter's girlfriend called 911 the dispatcher told her that he needed to be on his side not on his stomach put face down belly down putting somebody face down in restraints in a medical situation is usually not recommended the Bristol fire department provided to us guidelines that specifically point out that patients should be face up when they are secured for transportation on a stretcher then they put him into the ambulance I don't know what he's taking but he's fully dilated after a few minutes in the ambulance paramedics realized Turner was not breathing he breathing they turned him over and tried to resuscitate him for about 10 minutes what the hell happened here [Music] oh did we cut that damn Hairway off no yall like Rec recording no one from the Bristol Police or fire department would comment and the forensic pathologist on the case has since died the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation looked into the death but under state law their records are confidential the Sullivan County district attorney told us that after reading the investigative report and reviewing the body camera footage he agreed with the conclusion that Turner's death was drug related and that none of the police officer techniques had contributed but experts who reviewed the case for the AP and Frontline disagreed with the autopsy finding that the death was accidental and due to drug toxicity including Dr Roger Mitchell former Chief medical examiner of Washington DC the cause and manner of death that was established by the original medical examiner suggested that the drugs that were in his system um as well as his underlying heart disease was his cause of death but I challenge a notion that he died from a drug overdose and a heart disease when he strapped face down um with a spit hood on his face and being pushed into the soft padding of a of a stretcher how would you have ruled it based on what I saw I would I would rule his case a homicide I would suggest that his death was contributed to by another and when you have any individual that is in altercation with another and you believe that that is contributory then that case um should be designated as a homicide when an autopsy is done a pathologist will decide on What's called the manner of death which is homicide accident natural suicide or undetermined homicide doesn't mean that the officers did anything wrong by itself it just means that the medical examiner is concluding that but for the actions of the officers that's what caused this death the manner of death does not imply guilt you see the way that those determinations are so important to whether a case really has much accountability or not when you don't label it a homicide you are then less likely to receive Justice in a system that typically will investigate it if it's a homicide one of the findings of our project is that a majority of our cases the medical examiner ruled they were accidental undetermined or natural of the 957 cases for which the AP had documents indicating the manner of death 28% were classified as homicide there are some medical examiners that believe when law enforcement is engaged in an altercation that intent must be established in order to call it a homicide I don't hold that school of thought if those actions led to the death then I will call those cases homicides and then allow for the legal system to determine whether or not there was an intent or not um that legally needs to hold them liable one of the main findings from the database is that the death toll fell disproportionately on black people non-hispanic black people made up a third of the 1,36 deaths examined despite representing only 12% of the US population one case that Drew protests and concerns was the death of J Lowry in Patterson New Jersey a city with a history of tension between law enforcement and its black residents he was really outgoing and a goofball every morning he had a routine he called my mom straight from calling her he calls me what were some of maybe the challenges in his life he was bipolar so he um he went off his mes as far as how he lived with it he had some good days and he had some rocky days on January 5th 2019 low called 911 he told the operator he had taken ecstasy and was paranoid paramedics took him to the hospital where he was examined but removed by security for causing a commotion he then went to the Patterson Police Headquarters where he started filming himself broadcasting the video live to Facebook yo they try to kill me no he tried to kill me can I get some water please the officers remained at a distance please don't kill me officers please don't kill me BR I love you br after several minutes the live stream ended it is not entirely clear what happened next the police called for an ambulance to take Lowry to the hospital but by the time he arrived he was unconscious we rushed up to the hospital he was there and he was on life support and um they're not sure what's going on they told us they had no idea they found him unresponsive he was bruised really like really really really bad I knew he was gone Barry died 2 days later this is our city igniting protests and accusations of police brutality I'm going Justice I need the truth we're broken we're devastated we want answers the police and County prosecutor maintained that Lowry became combative and had to be restrained on the way to the hospital but that the officer's use of force was not a factor in his death Lowry's death was ruled an accident by the medical examiner who said he died of cardiac arrest while under the influence of a psychoactive drug known as bath salts but Lowry family filed a federal lawsuit against the hospital the city and three Patterson police officers yeah and they hired Dr Michael Boden to perform a second autopsy Boden also reviewed police and medical records including some which were not available publicly after he was put in the ambulance they had a struggle and in the course of the struggle they were trying to restrain him and with the hospital they d noosed that he had severe brain damage due to lack of oxygen which occurs when there is interference with breathing the bruises were consistent with a struggle and being punched while he was in the back of the ambulance and that whole process took just a few minutes boten said that Lowry suffered traumatic blunt force injuries and that the levels of drugs in his system were not enough to stop his heart he rejected that the death was accidental and attributed it to cardiac arrest and kidney failure from the police restraints the final diagnosis was wrong he died from the way he was restrained in the ambulance I want people to know what happened to them I don't want them to just look at my brother and think that oh he was just this Junie who had a mental breakdown like cuz that's the picture that they painted to the world of who my brother was and he wasn't that neither the police nor the prosecutor's office would comment but in court papers attorneys for the city said officers acted with reasonable and proportionate Force while placing Lowry in custody in 2023 the Patterson Police were put under State Control amid ongoing complaints about use of force and a lack of trust within the [Music] [Applause] community as with Jimmy Clow on Hunter Turner over and over in the database reporters found cases of police having to respond to people in medical and Mental Health crisis situations law enforcement is often not trained to handle police themselves are in many ways Frontline you know social workers and drug counselors and you know they have these these many different roles um because of the fraying of of the social safety net I think the infrastructure if you will outside of law enforcement uh there's been a dramatic fail uh and it seems to me that it's gotten worse and worse over the years Jack Ryan is a lawyer and retired police captain and one of the many law enforcement experts the AP in Frontline spoke to so given this reality that officers are often the ones responding to Mental Health crisis how are they trained to do that that's one of the problems there's an inconsistency there so for example when I do training I train hey look um this may not be something that you should be dealing with at all that's number one number two let's get EMS on the scene do we have mental health resources that will come out to the scene um do we have plenty of backup in case the thing does turn violent so there's steps that we can take and a big part of the training is recognizing that certain things are dangerous prone restraint for example prone restraint the Common Police tactic of restraining someone face down it is one of the most prevalent kinds of less lethal Force found in the database 740 instances there's times tactically where officers have to get people immobilized in order to accomplish handcuffing um that is a trained tactic to do that uh but you don't want to do that for any kind of prolonged period you want to do it get them handcuffed as quickly as possible and get them off their stomach when done properly in most cases it's not a dangerous situation but prone restraint can sometimes lead to Cardiac Arrest or positional asfixia on a person's position interferes with breathing especially if pressure is applied on the back people impaired by medical conditions or drugs are especially at risk I can't breathe there are cases in which we have someone saying I can't breathe and that can be said in a very haunting way they're crying out for their mom as they're dying mama the reporters found 27 cases where police continued to use prone restraint after handcuffing people and despite complaints of impaired breathing when a subject tells an officer that I can't breathe and they're on the ground um in prone restraint what should how should officers respond to that the officers should treat that as they can't breathe um you know one of the things one of the biggest myths out there is that if a person's talking they're breathing a lot of times we see things um like officers saying they were still actively resisting what officers perceive as active resistance that thrashing about may be unconsciously fighting for air the bottom line is as law enforcement we can immediately get them off their stomach as soon as they're handcuffed put them on their side which should enhance breathing we call that a rescue position in about half of the incidents where prone restraint was used the reporters found that officers didn't promptly turn over the person once they were handcuffed or under control despite Decades of warnings within law enforcement about the dangers although there is no national law or rule book on using prone in 1995 the Department of Justice warned that pinning someone face down could restrict breathing it later advised police departments to develop policies to prevent positional asfixia there were warnings that have gone out years ago and there are some training centers that have been teaching it for a long time that when you put somebody in prone you have to be careful to avoid position f c the AP looked at how officers are trained in prone restraint around the country I wanted to understand what sort of training officers had did they understand that if you hold someone in that position they might have trouble breathing training for police officers in the United States is inconsistent it's different in every state it's different in every Community I've looked at the agencies across the country there's they're called post it's peace officer standards and training and they all oversee what officers get training in the AP reached out to agencies in every state 27 responded 10 of them said they don't require positional asfixia training 17 did but even with training the AP found cases in which officers repeated errors that expert have been trying to eliminate as was the case in Sylvester Georgia of Terrell Allan Clark a 47-year-old Long Haul truck driver with a history of heavy cocaine use in October 2016 a woman called 911 and said that a paranoid man was banging on her door Sergeant Adam seninsky was the first officer on the scene pulled up and the guy came from around the house called him over to to the car and start talking to him come on right over here come right over here yeah I to call police come right over here what's going on I need some help sir you got anything on you no sir put your hand right here put your hand right here what's going on huh sininsky who is now a lieutenant with the county sheriff's office was one of the few police officers willing to discuss the events leading up to the death of someone he tried to restrain want to probably put him in cuffs and he went to fighting hands on the car don't don't don't move you hear me yes sir I'm scared man I understand but you need to stay calm okay yes sir all right we're going to put cuffs on you okay do nothing I know but you got to stop you got to calm down all right stop stop stop calm down man we fought he calmed down we talk we getting cuffs he tried to he'd explained a little bit more was going on he started fighting again calm down calm down did you take what did you take powder yes sir from her house across the street a filia fairy saw what was happening and recognized Al Clark I just saw two officers and a young man on the ground they had him down and handcuffed they wasn't being rough with him but he was scoring a little bit you know and I asked him to stop moving around so they wouldn't hurt him we going let him calm down we we we're not trying to hurt him they try to we're trying to still be stay still man by now Clark appeared to be physically in distress I can't believe yes you can calm down calm down we see you and he calmed down and uh and I told the officers to make sure he was breathing his heart's still beating he's still okay he's still breathing yeah it's just really shallow okay now on BFI subjects on conscious got shallow breathing so what went through your mind when he stopped moving and were you aware right away that that he had stopped breathing uh it took it took a second because I I didn't know if he was just he was finally just relaxing um cuz cuz he was starting to you know not be as combative and and and talking as much he was starting to slow down he ain't responding now now on the indome 1018 he is not responding not responding I I I don't remember exactly how long it was we checked his pulse checked his breathing and he wasn't so we immediately took the handcuffs off and started doing CPR on him over I'll do a starting R he'll wake up take hiss off he's not responding at all now one patient may not be breathing at this time Clark was pronounced dead at the hospital the medical examiner ruled the death in accident caused by cocaine and heart disease not due to police force a finding the experts consulted by the AP and Frontline agreed with but Jack Ryan said that even though the use of restraint may not have caused Clark's death officer seninsky didn't turn him over quickly enough after handcuffing in officers make mistakes of professional judgment they don't always rise to the level of criminality um this officer in this particular case is really trying to do the right stuff you can hear it you don't hear an officer screaming swearing yelling you hear an officer trying to calm the person down trying to deescalate the person unfortunately the method of restraint wasn't consistent with P practices that officer does not seem to be well trained or have familiarity with prone restraint although the risk of positional asfixia was officially part of solinsky's basic training curriculum he said whatever he may have been taught didn't stick with him and he said even if he had more training it wouldn't have changed the outcome I don't think that training for that particular incident would have made a difference I don't think in this case him laying on the ground was part of his reason for dying I felt like I was fair and I did everything I could minimally physically intrusive just wish he would have calmed down long enough for us to get help to him nevertheless sininsky said that he has since undergone more training and changed the way he uses prone I don't think now if we have to put somebody on the ground with their chest down hand behind the back we're going to do it on their side not completely on their chest on the ground cuz we've learned that hey that's that can make them difficult to breathe for a subject against a wall on a fighting stance despite the widespread agreement on the dangers of prone the reporters found several State Certified police training centers continuing to teach that it doesn't lead to positional asfixia goes to a prone control David Rose is among the most senior police instructors in California we in the real world we're real world practitioners so we're dealing with a real world problem he has trained generations of officers that prone restraint is safe the mere fact that you put somebody in a prone position um is is not going to kill them absence some other factors and as the Studies have shown putting weight on a person's back in the prone position does not lead to them expiring okay unless it's enough that it can actually Lally squash them and if that was true every football game we'd have bodies laying on the football field is there ever an instance where they're having trouble breathing there is a thing called agonal breathing and we were told years ago if they're talking they're breathing We Now teach cops you can sort of tell you can tell agonal breathing is pretty pretty unique it wouldn't be something saying I can't breathe breathe you know and then you go okay let's get this guy into custody quick and just get him rolled on his side okay and and get medics in here to treat himt like many experts we consulted Roger Mitchell disputed Rose's claims on the safety of prone and took particular issue with his football analogy individuals that are football players these are athletes they also have protective equipment on so this notion that those are the similar circumstances to an individual idual that is being placed on their stomach and wrestled down and placed in these positions with law enforcement to suggest that those are similar circumstances is is a faulty analogy determining the impact of any one form of less lethal force is difficult because multiple techniques are often used in tandem officers will generally get a person on the ground in prone so that they can handcuff them but if there's resistance then they end up using other types of force in the escalating chain of events the reporters found another controversial form of restraint being used we saw this pattern where people who had been subjected to the use of force and restraint by police officers were then given a shot of a powerful sedative like ketamine or verset by EMS professionals shortly therea they suffered cardiac and respiratory arrest and they died the sedatives are administered by paramedics sometimes encouraged by the police and supporters say it helps quickly deal with behavioral emergencies and is safely given thousands of times a year but as its use has grown it has come under increasing scrutiny including by some in the EMS Community like Eric joerger who has used it in the field himself and now trains other paramedics I think ketamine used properly is a very safe and effective drug I think that the way we roll it out to the MS Community without uh a proper understanding of the risks involved and how to mitigate those risks created the risk of harm among those risks are how the sedatives can interact with drugs or alcohol already in someone's system and how they can further restrict breathing of someone already being restrained and in distress there was a fair number of times where individuals were chemically sedated where with the understanding we now have we would elect not to perform that chemical sedation nearly one of every 10 people in the database had been sedated before they died although it was impossible for the AP to determine the role the medications played in the deaths the injections were rarely cited in official reports or investigated only in a small number of cases was the sedation listed as a as a cause or even a contributing factor to the deaths and they weren't necessarily looked at as a factor that could have resulted in uh the outcome of the case one such case was Taylor wear a 24-year-old veteran who grew up near Kansas City Missouri this is Taylor up top here look at that face in that yeah this this one's a good one um Taylor he had a very infectious smile um kind of smiling just it it it would touch your heart it would warm your heart when did he tell you that he was thinking about going into the Marines 6 months after he graduated I think he wanted to follow in my footsteps and My Father's Footsteps while in the Marines Taylor wear was diagnosed with bipolar disorder he was honorably discharged and moved to entucky with plans to attend college in 2019 he was arrested after exhibiting manic behavior in public and his mother and a friend came to drive him home for mental health treatment at a rest stop in Dale Indiana his mother called 911 for help 911 what's the location of your emergency um we are at a rest stop I believe it's in Dale Indiana my son is bipolar and I is trying to get him home to Kansas City and he is having an episode and he you know will not get back in the car he's getting very agitated and I I need uh mental help I need someone to come okay uh so that they can get help at a middle hospital we will get announc that way then will you please make sure that needs mental help okay okay yeah Pauline Engle his mother's friend captured parts of the incident on her cell phone at what point did you start to record so I think I'm going to record him so he can see how he's acting so he'll know why we're concerned and you know know what he does when he gets like this and that's when I started recording for Taylor to so we could show him because I think he blacked out like it's like he didn't really realize what he was doing when the first officer arrived and said you need to wait for backup and he got his dog out of the car and I said no you you need more officers my son's not in his right mind he has no idea where he's at he doesn't know what he's doing the cell phone video shows how the incident unfolded the first officer to arrive was an unpaid Reserve Marshal from the nearby town of Dale till whereare goes to shake his hand and they sit down in the grass [Music] first thing that happened is the dog tried to attack Taylor and that set him off why is the dog going crazy is he doing something I was like fck he eventually gets up and he starts walking away H get in St and the officer and his dog follow Taylor oh this is a bad part the officer says that Taylor wear pushed him and started running away and that's why he releases dog oh guys stop angle's footage doesn't show the confrontation stop but a few frames capture the officer's dog taking wear down oh my God stop Taylor I know Taylor don't don't stop please let go my dog Let go please let go my turn around oh my God turn around figh turn around stop please please stop my he's not fighting him he's not fighting his dog a second officer on the scene who said that wear had spat at him and tried to grab his taser shocked him three times what the taser oh God 911 we need Backup backup another officer arrived and helped handcuff wear a paramedic gave him a shot of ketamine what's that I don't know I'm guessing it's a oh they get a shot okay this is police body camera footage after they gave him the sedative he was then put on a stretcher he breathing shortly thereafter they noticed that you know he was not breathing and they rushed him to a hospital Pauline angle continued to film when the first responding officer approached her and Taylor's mother I wish maybe we should have just waited and let him sit there because I think well the thing is he's walking towards traffic and then he's started wrestling with that car and he came up to me and went like that my chest and that's an assault and so I gave him a lawful order to stock he ran classic textbook dog deployment wear had fallen into a coma he died 3 days later at the hospital the Indiana State Police said they investigated the case so we filed a request for their full investigation file and they told us that all of those records were confidential a letter from the local prosecutor in Indiana said he was not going to file any criminal charges against the officers involved the AP reached out to the police departments the officers and EMS and they declined to be interviewed three police practices experts reviewed the case for the AP in Frontline they said the first officer should have waited for backup and that using the dog was unnecessary and excessive canines are looked at as a significant use of force it's generally one level below deadly force so it's it's limited to Serious offenses bringing the dog out in my mind in a mental health case was not the right action because it's only going to make it more agitated more aggravated it's going to escalate the event based on even the report of this minor touching insignificant for purposes of the degree of force you're going to apply to the apprehension wasn't proportional not proportional the prosecutor who reviewed this case declined to to charge the officers and then in his letter announcing that he said they did absolutely nothing wrong they handled this incident with great restraint and great professionalism I'm curious your your thoughts on that you know I would I would disagree that it was properly handled um I would agree that it's probably not a prosecution case um the officer shook his hand the officer tried to establish a rapport you see that did the officer make some mistakes in my mind yes uh but were they rise to the level of criminality no what I see is definitely a lack of training um on the the when it's appropriate to do certain things the medical examiner didn't respond to requests for comment his ruling said that wear died from excited delirium a term used to describe a state of potentially life-threatening agitation but now widely discredited by the medical establishment we've now come to understand that exitum is a deeply flawed Concept in many cases the definition of exitum is built on racial stereotypes and probably more fundamentally excited delirium was a concept that in many of these cases served to shift the focus from the actions of the First Responders restraint or chemical sedation by the police or by EMS to the individual for using methamphetamine for engaging in criminal activity for uh in some cases suffering from mental health emergencies Tor wear is one of 142 cases in the ap's database that list excited delirium as a factor in the cause of death when did you start to see that it was flawed our recognition that exit delium was flawed uh really only came as we began to take a hard look at um cases like Elijah mlan and some of the other tragic deaths that we've seen where excited delium was used the night before we's encounter at the rest stop an unarmed man named Elijah mlan was restrained by police in Aurora Colorado the officers called for paramedics who injected mlan with ketamine he went into cardiac arrest and died a few days later Elijah mcan's case was a stepping off point where we began to take a harder look at other deaths and what we discovered was troubling we discovered there were many other cases where the combination of prone restraint and chemical sedation had resulted in death Colorado placed significant restrictions on the use of ketamine in the field including Banning police officers from directing paramedics to administer the sedative one officer involved in McLean's death was convicted of criminally negligent homicide and third degree assault two others were acquitted in a rare homicide prosecution of medical personnel the two paramedics who'd injected mlan with camine were also found guilty Dr Roger Mitchell was an expert witness in the trials every excited delirium case in this country should be looked at and establish what what the true cause of death is do think Mitchell has been advocating for a new system to record deaths in police custody there needs to be a check box on the US Standard death certificant that ensures that these cases can be reviewed as not just singular events but as systems of events that that occur there's a smoking check box on the US Standard death certificate so any disease that's associated with smoke smoking we can see that on a death certificate and so if we want to stop and prevent individuals from dying in the hands of law enforcement or associated with the criminal legal system then we need to create a category of data collection surrounding those so that we can generate the proper policies and proper ways of preventing these deaths we all love you and miss you so much the project is about uncovering hidden deaths these are the deaths that are the hardest to find this cuts across every state cuts across every socioeconomic boundary we love you bro those are the things that I think about as I'm reporting the story now he could ride like no man's business Roden was the one thing we all had in [Music] common once you put your helmet on you're in your own little world there's also some escapism involved in it it's you it's the bike it's the road that's [Music] it 6 years after the death of Hunter Turner Karen and Brian Goodwin visited a roadside memorial made by his friends it's amazing that kid's his age thought enough they wanted him up here and they tended to it quite a bit these hidden deaths these people all had loved ones and when they die like this there's no closure for the families he's always with us and you can feel his presence you know he was our baby [Music] for more on this and other Frontline program programs visit our website at pbs.org [Music] Frontline frontlines documenting Police use of force is available on Amazon Prime video oh [Music]

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 162,059

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Id: K0UEY1PVRVY

Length: 53min 16sec (3196 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024