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By Steve Pomper
I remember when department trainers began teaching officers about “Excited Delirium” (ED). We’d all seen it, but this training put a name to it. Regardless, officers are not using this term as an excuse to kill black people. That’s delusional. We saw it as a psycho-medical term describing the extreme mental and physical reaction of some people when high on drugs like Fentanyl, which can be fatal.
The problem is the radical left had to get a guilty of murder finding in Saint George Floyd’s likely O.D. death in police custody. So, they fit the square block in the round hole by apparently ignoring all kinds of exculpatory evidence.
During my research for this article, I discovered both media and government sites acknowledged ED was humming along just fine as a descriptor until the anti-cop radicals needed the Saint Floyd murder narrative to continue. They found several scapegoats: Minneapolis police officers and Excited Delirium.
For example, a report at NIH.gov explains, “Even in the United States, restraint-related deaths ascribed to excited delirium are being re-examined in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.” Why? This provided the radical anti-coppers with the perfect opportunity to blame cops. Why after Saint Floyd’s death? Because he was the fairytale they chose to carve into stone—and paint on walls.
The descriptive term seemed accurate to us, and every Seattle cop I knew had dealt with ED to some degree. If I recall correctly, ED refers to the condition of an individual under the influence of drugs, which includes being non-communicative, erratic, aggressive, shouting incoherently, complaining they can’t breathe, and often shedding clothing. Many of these folks also possess unusually enhanced strength because they don’t feel pain.
I remember my first ED call after the training where the person displayed precisely what the instructors had described. I was driving in my patrol car and saw a man walking on the sidewalk shouting at no one in particular, sometimes stepping off and into a lane of traffic. Yeah, he got my attention. Another clue: he was stark naked.
When my backup officer arrived, we contacted the young man (with no plans to kill him). He was still meandering on the sidewalk. We handcuffed him for safety, had him sit down against a sign pole, and called for an ambulance for an involuntary commitment for medical and psychological evaluation.
Though he tried to get up a few times, we managed to keep him sitting. Once the ambulance arrived, he became more aggressive, so we put him in four-point restraints on the gurney for transportation to the hospital.
Now, that incident was tame compared with those whose drug intake causes death, as likely happened with Saint Floyd in Minneapolis, who’d reportedly ingested enough Fentanyl to kill a bull elephant.
According to Lou Raguse at KARE 11 News, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, handwrote in a report that “Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.” Raguse also wrote, “The new documents say Floyd had a ‘heavy heart’ and ‘at least one artery was approximately 75% blocked.’”
Often, these people say or yell that they are unable to breathe. My firefighter/medic friends assure me that if a person can yell, “I can’t breathe,” they can breathe. More likely, they are panicking from the effects of the drugs, which increases their increased heart rate and makes them believe they “cannot breathe.”
At Law Enforcement Today, Pat Droney recently wrote about how the governor of Minnesota dealt with this medical condition: He just canceled it. Wipe the phrase out of existence not by curing a condition that exists but by pretending it doesn’t.
Why?
So, they can blame police officers when a suspect, with super-strength, resists, and officers must use physical force to control him, and the suspect dies in custody or soon after, as happened with Saint George Floyd.
Droney’s explanation mirrors my recollection from training: “Excited delirium is a term used by police officers to describe suspects who are typically under the influence of drugs who experience symptoms of ‘extreme agitation, aggression, excitability, and distress.’”
But ED is no longer a problem because radical, Gov. Tim Walz, who signed knee-jerk, anti-police legislation in 2020, outlawed the term for training cops (Hey, can we get rid of heart attacks by pretending they don’t exist?). So, an officer can continue to describe ED symptoms just not use the term. This is the explicit act of a despot to control the language—or worse yet, outlaw it.
Incidentally, other blue state legislatures and governors have also banned the term with more states likely to join in the anti-police insanity.
Whether called ED or not it is still a thing, and people are dying because of this self-induced condition—not because cops are murdering them. The cynical thing here is the radical left, led by public officials like Gov. Walz, prefer to blame the police for deaths by overdose by accusing cops of reflexively using ED to excuse their “excessive force.”
Without proving this is the case, it seems the governor would rather demonize law enforcement officers, blaming them for wantonly killing people. The thing is, as much as the radicals don’t want ED to be a thing, the symptoms officers describe when dealing with these folks are remarkably consistent across law enforcement agencies and will continue—ED or no ED.
Are the radical anti-coppers alleging some grand national conspiracy by police officers to commit racist murder? When I was trained to be aware of the condition, instructors didn’t wink and nod surreptitiously encouraging us to use the excuse of ED to kill black Americans. As the NPA’s own Chief Joel Shults, showing a lack of consensus in the medical establishment, wrote:
“The American Medical Association has proposed that the diagnosis of excited delirium is a cover for the killing of black men in police custody. The State of Colorado has outlawed the use of one of the most effective drugs in calming the condition, which is Ketamine. This is yet another example of politicians removing vital life-saving tools from police and other first responders. In a yet unpublished bit of science and research, the American College of Emergency Physicians has taken the position that excited delirium is a valid medical condition that requires early medical intervention.”
The AMA’s proposition is another reason so many ordinary Americans no longer trust medical institutions. Claiming that police officers use a diagnosis as “cover” to murder “black men” is appalling. It also offends reason (as well as statistical evidence), insults honorable law officers, and is just plain nonsense.
It’s revealing that Gov. Walz chose to cite information from the politically biased American Medical Association (AMA) over the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) (who believe ED is a thing). The ACEP consists of ER docs who deal directly with the ED cases the cops bring to them—they see it and treat those experiencing it.
While police critics claim this condition almost exclusively happens to individuals involved in police encounters, Droney reported, “That claim runs counter to a report published in the National Library of Medicine in 2011, which noted that although victims often die while being restrained or in the custody of law enforcement, ‘it is important to note that the vast majority of deaths occur suddenly prior to capture, in the emergency department (ED), or unwitnessed at home.’”
So, what happens now? Cops will still have to deal with these individuals regardless of what the condition is called. However, terms given to conditions like ED have come into being to facilitate efficient communications geared toward applying the correct solutions for a given problem.
Previously, a Minnesota cop could immediately inform other first-responders and hospital staff, “This appears to be excited delirium.” Will they now have to waste valuable time explaining each action and symptom.
Or could they adopt the ACEM’s alternative term, “hyperactive delirium,” and send Walz back to the drawing board to outlaw more words. Make no mistake. Gov. Walz’s actions are designed to create culpability for officers where it doesn’t belong, so they can further taint the police, including putting more cops in prison.
Like other anti-police laws and policies that have proliferated, of which many have been or are currently being rescinded (as in Washington State), we will very likely revisit this nonsensical Walz diktat based on an anti-police mythology, and American cops should keep another I-told-you-so handy for when that happens.
This article originally appeared at the National Police Association and was reprinted with permission.
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