‘I CAN’T BREATHE’
More than 1000 people have died after US police subdued them with force
Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting his head off the floor.
Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.
Donald Ivy Jr, a former athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him face down.
Each man was unarmed and not a threat to public safety. Despite that, each died after American police used a kind of force that is not supposed to be deadly — and can be much easier to hide than the blast of an officer’s gun.
Every day, police in the US rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them, such as physical holds, Tasers and body blows. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death — as happened with George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing. And while that encounter was caught on video, capturing Floyd’s last words of “I can’t breathe”, many others have escaped notice.
Over a decade, more than 1000 people died after police subdued them through means not intended to be lethal, an investigation led by The Associated Press found. In hundreds of cases, officers weren’t taught or didn’t follow best safety practices for physical force and weapons.
The deadly encounters happened just about everywhere.
The deceased came from all walks of life: a poet, a nurse, a saxophone player, a truck driver, a sales director, a rodeo clown, even off-duty officers.
The toll disproportionately fell on black Americans like Grant and Ivy. Black people made up a third of those who died despite representing only 12 per cent of the US population. Others feeling the brunt were impaired by a medical, mental health or drug emergency, a group susceptible to force even when lightly applied.
“We were robbed,” said Carl Grant’s sister, Kathy Jenkins. “It’s like somebody went in your house and just took something, and you were violated.”
The US federal government has struggled to count deaths following what police call “less-lethal force”, and the little information it collects is often kept from the public and incomplete. No more than a third of the cases AP identified are listed in federal mortality data as involving law enforcement.
In about 30 per cent of the cases, police were intervening to stop people who were injuring others or who posed a threat of danger. But roughly 25 per cent of those who died were not harming anyone or were committing low-level infractions or causing minor disturbances, AP’s review shows.
A Texas man loitering outside a convenience store who resisted going to jail was shocked up to 11 times with a Taser and restrained face down for nearly 22 minutes — more than twice as long as George Floyd, video shows.
After a California man turned silent during questioning, he was grabbed, dogpiled by seven officers, shocked five times with a Taser, wrapped in a restraint contraption and injected with a sedative by a medic despite complaining “I can’t breathe”. And a Michigan teen was speeding an all-terrain vehicle down a city street when a state trooper sent volts of excruciating electricity from a Taser through him, and he crashed.
In hundreds of cases, officers repeated errors that experts and trainers have spent years trying to eliminate.
Many policing experts agree someone can stop breathing if pinned on their chest for too long or with too much weight, and the Department of Justice has issued warnings since 1995. But there are no standard rules. In dozens of cases, officers disregarded people who told them they were struggling for air or even about to die, often uttering the words, “I can’t breathe”.
What followed deadly encounters revealed how the justice system frequently works to shield police from scrutiny, often leaving families without knowing what happened. Officers were usually cleared in internal investigations. Some had a history of violence and a few were involved in multiple restraint deaths. Local and state authorities that investigate deaths withheld information and in some cases omitted potentially damaging details from reports.
Medical examiners and coroners often don’t link the deaths to force, but to accidents, drug use or preexisting health problems.
Even when deaths receive the homicide label fatal police shootings often get, prosecutors rarely pursue officers. Charging police is politically sensitive and can be legally fraught: AP identified just 28 deaths that led to such charges. Finding accountability through civil courts was also tough for families, but at least 168 cases ended in settlements or jury verdicts totalling about US$374 million (NZ$625m).
The known fatalities averaged just two a week — a tiny fraction of the total contacts police have with the population. Police leaders, officers and experts say law enforcement shouldn’t bear all the blame. People under mental distress or who use stimulant drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine are increasingly on the streets. Officers sent to handle these emergencies are often poorly trained by their departments.
If incidents turn chaotic and officers make split-second decisions to use force, “people do die,” said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Baltimore police officer.
But because the US has no clear idea how many people die like this and why, holding police accountable and making meaningful reforms will remain difficult, said Dr Roger Mitchell Jr, a leader in the push to improve tracking and one of the nation’s few black chief medical examiners when he held the office in Washington, DC, from 2014 to 2021.
“Any time anyone dies before their day in court, or dies in an environment where the federal government or the local government’s job is to take care of you, it needs transparency.
“This is an American problem we need to solve.”
Disabled veteran
Carl Grant didn’t care much for football. So on Super Bowl Sunday in 2020, family members said, he eased into his black Kia Optima, intending to shop for groceries near his suburban Atlanta home. The 68-year-old wound up two and a half hours away, where he came face to face with police in an encounter that underscores several findings central to AP’s investigation: He was black, not threatening physical harm, and a seemingly routine matter rapidly escalated.
The former Marine and trucking business owner had dementia and qualified as a disabled veteran. As he drove that evening, he became disoriented and took an interstate west to Birmingham, Alabama. There, Grant twice tried to go inside houses he thought were his.
Both times, residents phoned 911. And both times, responding officers opted to use force.
At the first house, Grant was taken to the ground and cuffed after an officer said he’d stepped toward a partner. Even though one officer sensed he was impaired, police released Grant without asking medics to examine him — a decision a superior later faulted.
At a second house, police found him sitting in a porch chair. When he didn’t follow an order to get off the porch, a different officer pushed him down the stairs, according to previously unreleased body-camera video. Grant gashed his forehead.
Officer Vincent Larry, who pushed Grant, went with him to hospital. When Grant wouldn’t return to his exam room, Larry used an unapproved “hip toss” to lift and slam him, hospital surveillance video showed. The back of Grant’s head bounced four inches off the floor, a nurse estimated, wrecking his spinal cord in his neck.
After Grant awoke from emergency surgery, he thought his paralysis was a combat injury from the Vietnam War. “I’m so sorry this happened,” he told family, his sister recalled. He died almost six months later from the injury.
An internal investigation concluded Larry’s force at the hospital was excessive, and in a departure from many cases AP found, his department acted: he received a 15-day suspension. He is no longer a city employee, a Birmingham spokesperson told AP. A judge recently cited a procedural error in dismissing a lawsuit filed by Grant’s estate, which is appealing the ruling.
“He’s almost 70 and confused,” Grant’s partner, Ronda Hernandez, said. “That’s what I don’t get. You just don’t do that to old people.”
Grant was one of 1036 deaths from 2012 through 2021 that AP logged. That is certainly an undercount, because many departments blocked access to information. Files others released were blacked out and video blurred, while officers routinely used vague language in reports that glossed over force.
All but 3 per cent of the dead were men. They tended to be in their 30s and 40s, when police might consider them more of a physical threat. The youngest was 15, the oldest 95.
‘Should be alive’
When people died after police subdued them, it was often because officers went too fast, too hard or for too long — often, all of the above.
The United States has no national rules for how to apply force. Instead, Supreme Court decisions set broad guard rails that weigh force as either “objectively reasonable” or “excessive”, based in part on the severity of the situation, any immediate safety threat and active resistance.
That frequently leaves states and local law enforcement to sort out the particulars in training and policies. Best practices from the government and private law enforcement organisations have tried to fill gaps, but aren’t mandatory and sometimes go ignored.
In 2019, the mother of Taylor Ware, the former Marine with college plans, called 911 when he wouldn’t get back in their SUV during a manic episode caused by bipolar disorder. She told the dispatcher Ware would need space and urged police to wait for backup because he was a former wrestler and might be a handful — advice that tracked best practices, yet wasn’t followed.
The first officer to encounter Ware at a highway rest stop in Indiana saw the 24-year-old extending him a hand in greeting. Ware then calmly walked through a grassy field and sat down with folded legs.
The officer, an unpaid reserve marshal, assured Ware’s mother he’d had calls like this before. As she and a family friend watched, he stopped about 3m in front of Ware, according to video filmed by the friend and obtained by AP. His police dog barked and lunged several times — a provocation officers are told to avoid with the emotionally distressed. Ware remained seated.
After a few minutes, Ware walked toward the parking lot. There, the officer said, Ware pushed him away, an act disputed by the friend. Her video shows Ware running and the officer commanding the dog to attack, setting off a cascade of force that ended with Ware in a coma. He died three days later.
A police news release said Ware had a “medical event”, echoing how police first described George Floyd’s death. The prosecutor in Indiana declined to bring charges and praised officers for “incredible patience and restraint”. His office’s letter brushed past or left out key details: multiple dog bites, multiple stun-gun shocks, prone restraint and an injection of the powerful sedative ketamine.
A coroner ruled Ware’s death was due to natural causes, specifically “excited delirium” — a term for a condition that police say causes potentially life-threatening agitation, rapid heart rate and other symptoms. Major medical groups oppose it as a diagnosis, and say it is frequently an attempt to justify excessive force.
Two experts who reviewed the case for the AP said police actions contributed to Ware’s death.
“This was not proper service,” said police practices expert Stan Kephart, himself a former chief. “This person should be alive today.”
Lack of accountability
In 2000, Congress started trying to get the Justice Department to track deaths involving law enforcement. The department has acknowledged its data is incomplete, blames spotty reporting from police departments, and does not make whatever information exists publicly available.
Mortality data maintained by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention also has gaps. The AP found that when a death certificate does not list words like “police” and “law enforcement,” the CDC’s language-reading software doesn’t label the death as involving “legal intervention”.
This means the death data flagged police involvement in, at most, 34 per cent of the more than 1000 deaths the investigation identified.
In 2017, leading pathologists recommended adding a checkbox to the US standard death certificate to identify deaths involving law enforcement, as is already done with tobacco use and pregnancy. They argued better data could help inform better practices and prevent deaths. The proposal hasn’t gained traction.