Testimony: Mpls police trained to ignore city's civil rights report on ketamine and excited delirium

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-trained-ignore-citys-civil-rights-report-on-ketamine-excited-delirium-inspector/600141547/

This is the trial of the other three officers who were present while Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck.

In the trial of three former officers, training on "excited delirium" is becoming central to the defense's argument.

The Minneapolis Police Department instructed officers to ignore the findings from a watchdog investigation conducted by the city's Civil Rights Department that documented cases of police inappropriately asking paramedics to sedate uncooperative people during emergency calls, according to court testimony from the Police Department's former training commander.

At the federal trial of three former Minneapolis officers Monday, a defense attorney asked Minneapolis Police Inspector Katie Blackwell about a PowerPoint presentation on training for "excited delirium," a controversial diagnosis that usually refers to a person who is experiencing a potentially fatal state of agitation.

The training slideshow cited a draft of a 2018 report by the Minneapolis Office of Police Conduct Review that found a sharp rise in ketamine injections given to police detainees, along with examples of police asking emergency medical services for the sedative by name and joking about its powerful effects. A footnote on the police training slideshow dismissed the report as a "reckless use of anecdotes" that will "prevent the saving of lives."

"What you train these officers is this draft report is wrong and uninformed?" asked Robert Paule, attorney for former officer Tou Thao.

"Yes," Blackwell replied.

Blackwell said "one of our medical professionals" leads the training on excited delirium, but that she and former Police Chief Medaria Arradondo had reviewed and approved the slideshow. Mayor Jacob Frey, who is in charge of the Police Department and expressed deep concern over the sedation report's findings in 2018, did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

Also from the article:

Last week, Blackwell told jurors that former officers Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng defied department training when they helped restrain George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and Thao and Kueng failed in their duty to intervene when Floyd fell unresponsive. On cross-examination, Paule showed slides on the department's excited delirium training that included videos and photos of other officers pinning down suspects with their knees, similar to how officer Derek Chauvin detained Floyd.

More money for training!!111!!1!11111!!!

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Iggo]

2. I've never needed training to learn how to avoid murdering unarmed black people.

Weird.