We should be perfectly clear about the ultimate goal of Axon, its network, and the people behind The Fall of Minneapolis: They want to make it easier for police to kill people without consequence. – Radley Balko
Regular readers of this blog need no introduction to Radley Balko; in fact, many of my longest-term readers were introduced to me via a guest-blogging stint on his old blog, The Agitator, in July of 2012. If you are unfamiliar with his work, let me simply say that he is quite possibly the greatest living criminal justice journalist, and that is neither hyperbole nor flattery. His thoroughness and dedication are truly awe-inspiring, and I couldn’t be as fair and measured as he is when discussing horrifying injustices and nauseating atrocities if there were 10 million bucks riding on it. His latest project is a massive three-part debunking of copsucking authoritarians’ ongoing “effort to retroactively justify Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd“, and the third part includes a section on “excited delirium”, a fictional syndrome used to exonerate cops from culpability when they asphyxiate black people with their shockingly-brutal and sadistically thuggish arrest tactics. I’ve been paying attention to this peudoscientific claptrap for some time now, so given what I already know about “NHI” and sex workers being among the police state’s perenial guinea pigs for new evils, this probably shouldn’t have surprised me:
Excited delirium…posits that some people just spontaneously die during intense, high-stress interactions with police, through no fault of law enforcement. It’s…highly dubious and not supported by any major medical organization. Over the last several decades, there’s been a concerted effort to pressure medical examiners to diagnose excited delirium when the real cause of death was positional asphyxia. This not only exonerates cops who kill, it encourages police practices that will lead to more deaths…The origin of excited delirium is shonky and steeped in bigotry…it…was first described in the mid-1980s by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli after a wave of black sex workers were found dead under mysterious circumstances. Because some of the women had cocaine in their system, Wetli theorized that there must be something about the physiology of black women that causes them to spontaneously die after mixing cocaine with sex. Despite the absurdity of Wetli’s theory, it precluded homicide as a manner of death, which made it much more difficult for police to investigate the possible murders. It wasn’t until a victim was found in a similar state as the other bodies, but had no cocaine in her system, that the city’s chief medical examiner reviewed the…other cases…[and] found evidence of asphyxiation that Wetli had overlooked. Police eventually arrested a serial killer named Charles Henry Williams for the murders…
…The Miami debacle should have been an embarrassment that ended Wetli’s career. It did not. The controversy isn’t even mentioned in his fairly long New York Times obituary. Instead, he failed upward, becoming the chief medical examiner in Suffolk, County, New York…[where he] continued to develop his theory in ways that proved convenient for law enforcement. He expanded excited delirium to also include black men, particularly those who die in police custody. “Seventy percent of people dying of coke-induced delirium are black males, even though most users are white,” he once said. Instead of concluding that perhaps this was because police were more likely to use excessive force against black men, Wetli added, “It may be genetic”…Wetli’s work eventually landed him a lucrative side gig with Axon International, the company that makes the Taser (formerly known as Taser International), who began to pay Wetli to testify as an expert witness at the trials of police officers accused of brutality…
There’s a great deal more; this is just a small sample. Jesse Walker suggested that the best way to read the piece is to start with part three, covering the big picture, following links back to the first two parts as you go; that seems wise to me, given the depth and density of the piece, But however you read it, read it you should. And if you aren’t already following Radley’s work, you really need to correct that.
