Deaths reveal risks of U.S. police injecting sedatives

Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived.

The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask.

Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug.

“It’s just going to calm you down,” an officer assured Jackson. Within minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later.

Jackson’s 2021 death illustrates an often-hidden way fatal U.S. police encounters end: not with the firing of an officer’s gun but with the silent use of a medical syringe.

The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Based on thousands of pages of law enforcement and medical records and videos of dozens of incidents, the investigation shows how a strategy intended to reduce violence and save lives has resulted in some avoidable deaths.

At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Jackson.

Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.

The use of sedatives in half these incidents has never been reported, as scrutiny typically focuses on the actions of police, not medics. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Two paramedics were convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine, the same drug given to Jackson. One was sentenced last month to five years in prison and the second faces sentencing Friday.

It was impossible to determine the role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths, which often involved the use of other potentially dangerous force on people who had taken drugs or consumed alcohol. Medical experts told the AP their impact could be negligible in people who were already dying; the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed; or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.

While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.

Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.

Paramedics drugged some people who were not a threat to themselves or others, violating treatment guidelines. Medics often didn’t know whether other drugs or alcohol were in people’s systems, although some combinations cause serious side effects.

Police officers sometimes improperly encouraged paramedics to give shots to suspects they were detaining.

Responders occasionally joked about the medications’ power to knock their subjects out. “Night, night” is heard on videos before deaths in California, Tennessee and Florida.

Emergency medical workers, “if they aren’t careful, can simply become an extension of the police’s handcuffs, of their weapons, of their nightsticks,” said Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and an addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

Supporters say sedatives enable rapid treatment for drug-related behavioral emergencies and psychotic episodes, protect front-line responders from violence and are safely administered thousands of times annually to get people with life-threatening conditions to hospitals. Critics say forced sedation should be strictly limited or banned.too risky to be administered during police encounters.