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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   21712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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I can believe that police restraint is safer for generally healthy but uncooperative people, given that hospitals aren't primarily in the business of provisioning well-built men to wrestle criminals into submission. By the same token, police aren't primarily concerned with the finer details of managing overdose patients, and training in this area seems to be spotty. Every source I've found indicates that the knee-on-neck restraint Chauvin used was a bad choice for someone who was obviously high on drugs. Having a nurse on hand to give pointers could have averted a major fiasco, just as nurses could stand to have a few burly guys on hand in a pinch.

My suspicion is that medical support on hand would be of minimal help - front line and psychiatric nurses tend to be extremely burn out and intolerant of certain kinds of bad behaviors and therefore unsympathetic to people like Floyd.

Scene securing also comes first and the crowd made the situation worse IIRC. That's a good example of something a layman doesn't really think about and is not sympathetic to as a complicating factor but is an absolutely critical facet of emergency situations. A well trained nurse is likely going to strongly differ to an officer getting the scene under control before moving onto provisioning medical care.

A poorly trained nurse is probably going to be yelling at him and calling him a shit head.

You'd be shocked at how useless most people are deescalating this stuff even when trained and supposedly well equipped.

Yeah, I meant it more figuratively. Literally embedding nurses with police isn't going to work out for the reasons you mention, and hiring random meatheads without police training to manhandle uncooperative patients could also go very wrong. Police need adequate, medically-informed training in identifying overdosing suspects and adjusting their restraint techniques to minimize accidental death. Instead of a nurse literally standing over their shoulder, they need to internalize the basic knowledge to make the best calls.

Step 1 in any emergency is secure the scene first, even with more "medically informed" training an irritable crowd with an insufficient number of officers and a very large suspect is going to mean that options are excruciatingly limited. I'm not sure there really is anything different to do with more medical training anyway. There isn't any secret sauce for managing overdose or agitated patients. Additionally "I can't breath" or "that hurts" "you're hurting me" is not useful information from a restrained perp or patient, since the fact that they aren't going to be a useful source of information is intimately related to why you are doing it. Excessive struggle (secondary to discomfort) or no struggle at all (secondary to the position being...unhealthy) are not useful pieces of information since most patients will either go crazy or try and wait and save energy.

Obviously their are minor things you can do to make things safer but its never "safe" it's all risk mitigation, and elsewhere in this thread someone noted that this whole thing could easily be Chauvin getting abandoned for following standard operation procedure, or a small miscalculus based on how long it was supposed to take backup.

Now you may say "doc you paint a pretty stark picture, where the fuck are the rest of the people in the medical community agreeing with you?" I have no idea. It was a huge black pill for me. We know this.

I agree that, speaking fully generally, it's very difficult to detain a suspect who is high on drugs in a way that is completely benign when considering all the unknowns in securing a scene and maintaining officer and public safety. This is not a fully general scenario, though, but one with a very specific fact pattern:

  • Chauvin had the backup of three other officers, two of whom were helping him physically restrain Floyd, and the other controlling the crowd.
  • The officers knew Floyd was on drugs based on their own judgment and experience of suspect behavior. Tou Thao made reference to it on video.
  • Floyd was already cuffed.
  • Floyd was uncooperative, but not a violent threat.
  • Thomas Lane twice expressed concern and suggested moving Floyd into a recovery position, but Chauvin replied no.

Under this specific fact pattern, where officers were well in control and could spare time to contemplate the well-being of the suspect, the refusal to try changing restraint position seems incompetent or negligent. This wasn't some split-second decision made under gun fire, it was simply a bad call by the senior officer, and it led to an unnecessary death.

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