Once, when I was about seven years old, I accidentally walked halfway out of an Almacs supermarket with one of those plastic candy canes filled with M&Ms. I wasn’t trying to steal it, I assume I just forgot I had it in my hand when I started thinking or talking about about something else. My father, however, caught me and figured this would be a good time to teach me a Very Special Episode-style lesson about not stealing, so he made me go up to the cashier and apologize for trying to steal the candy cane thing I definitely did not remotely care about (never had a single feeling one way or another about M&Ms), and she was like “Eh, what do I care? Take it.” So it was not a very successful lesson on any account.
But that was just A Thing that parents used to do. It’s probably in some parenting book next to dinnertime clichés about “children starving in China” and punishing kids caught smoking by making them sit down and chainsmoke until they got sick (did that ever work on anyone?).
In 2021, Vermont mother Cathy Austrian tried to do something similar when she caught her 14-year-old son coming home with a bunch of vapes he stole from a Cumberland Farms gas station convenience store and refused to hand them all over to her. Thinking she was teaching him an important life lesson, she called the police to come over, so they could give him some kind of scared straight talking-to so that he would hand over the e-cigs and promise to never ever steal anything again.
That … is very much not what happened.
Rather, he was assaulted by police and shot up with ketamine, which has been known to cause the death of at least one other person detained by police recently.
This week, Austrian, represented by the ACLU of Vermont, filed a lawsuit against the Burlington police alleging that they “used excessive force and discriminated against her unarmed son, who is Black and has behavioral and intellectual disabilities.” As her son is a minor, he is identified only as “J.A.” in the filing.
According to the lawsuit, Austrian asked two police officers to come and talk to J.A., who when last tested was found to have an IQ of 67, after she discovered the stolen e-cigarettes, in hopes that they would help him understand why he had to give them back.
She told them about J.A.’s issues and that he had been acting strangely since his ADHD medication was upped the previous week and had also recently had an MRI of his heart.
“He’s on medicine for ADHD and we just increased it last week, and I’ve just been noticing that he’s been more distant and sort of irritable, but just can’t put your finger on it,” Austrian can be heard telling the officers on a body-camera video. “Like he gets stuck on things, like he’s just been looking at his iPod all day and trying to figure out what wallpaper to get, and just not really, not based in reality.” These are actually classic signs that he was taking too high a dose of stimulant ADHD medication or that the medication wasn’t working for him, period. (I have reacted similarly to stimulant ADHD meds and that is why I do not take them. They’re not the only option, and if this child has heart problems they may not be a good one anyway.)
Via ACLU of Vermont:
When the officers entered J.A.’s room, he was sitting calmly on the bed and eventually relinquished all but one of the vape pens at Ms. Austrian’s request. J.A. did not engage the officers and presented no danger; the officers could have simply issued a citation or walked away. Instead—despite their knowledge of J.A.’s disabilities and recent medical history—the officers threatened J.A. with arrest and handcuffing if he did not produce the final item.
Although the officers could have engaged in a number of different de-escalation techniques—including continued verbal engagement, calling a supervisor for guidance, or requesting a clinician for support—the officers abandoned BPD policies and instead grabbed J.A., forced his arms behind his back, and wrested the pen from his hands. When J.A. started to panic, the officers did not disengage. Instead, they handcuffed J.A. and ultimately pinned him to the floor, where the terrified teen screamed and contorted himself in distress.
Police summoned paramedics, who did not adequately discuss with Ms. Austrian or BPD J.A.’s disabilities or health needs. Instead, the paramedics proceeded to wrap J.A.’s head with an opaque mesh bag, or a “spit hood,” further terrifying him.
You may recall that in 2020, Daniel Prudie of Rochester, New York, died of asphyxiation from a “spit hood” placed on him by police.
Given the prevalence of police killing unarmed Black men, it’s hardly surprising that J.A. panicked when handcuffed and pinned by white officers — a fear he made clear when he told them that he was scared they were going to “do to me what you did to George Floyd.”
As that risk to the young man’s life apparently wasn’t enough, they then sent him into a K-hole.
Paramedics then injected J.A. with ketamine—a powerful, fast-acting anesthetic used to induce loss of consciousness and approved for restraint use on adults only—contrary to established protocols. Ms. Austrian watched, horrified, as officials carried her unconscious child from his room in a stretcher bag and took him to the hospital. J.A. was discharged the next day—bruised, disoriented, and traumatized.
Officials at the scene “diagnosed” J.A. with “excited delirium” a term used by police but rejected by the medical community to describe a mysterious medical condition that Black people spontaneously die of when in police custody — often when tased, shot up with ketamine or other sedatives, or prevented from breathing in some capacity. You may recall that Elijah McClain in Colorado died when paramedics shot him up with ketamine.
You may recall a lot of things.
You may recall that while officer Derek Chauvin was kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes, another officer said “I am concerned about excited delirium or whatever.”
The “risk factors” for this purported condition include “bizarre behavior generating phone calls to police”, “failure to respond to police presence”, and “continued struggle despite restraint”. The “syndrome” also supposedly endows individuals with “superhuman strength”, and being “impervious to pain”, and remains disproportionately diagnosed among young Black males, underscoring the racist undertones of these “diagnostic features.”
To be fair, the man who initially repurposed the term back in the 1980s was also quite sure that 32 Black female sex workers also died from the condition, though it later turned out that they were all murdered by a serial killer that police were not looking for because they were sold on this “excited delirium” nonsense.
After the paramedics sedated him, J.A. was sent to a nearby hospital to recover from the ketamine and to be treated for the injuries sustained while the police were assaulting him.
“The police chose to respond to my son with unprovoked violence and use of force, when they could and should have followed their own procedures and used safe, supportive methods,” Austrian said in a statement provided by the ACLU of Vermont. “Every parent, regardless of their child’s abilities or race, should be able to call for help without fearing a disastrous outcome. We want Burlington to be held accountable for the harm their officials caused my son. We don’t want other families to have to endure this pain and lasting trauma.”
Austrian, by the way, is white. She adopted her son when he was two years old after fostering him from the age of five months, and while I’m sure she’s a lovely person, it is somewhat concerning that she thought it was a good idea to ask the police to help her teach her adopted Black son any kind of lesson. She’d have been better off hiring a stripper in a police uniform.
In addition to monetary punitive damages to be awarded to J.A. for what he went through, the lawsuit also asks that the city of Burlington be required to take several steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again to anyone else — including implementing training in accommodating and interacting with individuals with disabilities, addressing “the stereotyping and biases that underlay BPD’s and BFD’s race-based disparate treatment” and prohibiting the use of ketamine in the field.
These police officers were not trying to stop a bomb from going off, they were trying to extract a vape pen from a developmentally disabled child. There was no urgency. They weren’t supposed to be there to stop a terrible crime, they were supposed to help him understand why he needed to return the merchandise. There was no danger to them or to anyone else — well, anyone else but the 14-year-old child they could have killed.
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