New York PD Is Training Officers That Someone Saying ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Is Just ‘Excited Delirium’

Excited delirium just won’t go away. No medical association recognizes this condition as factually true. And no cop shop will ever move away from using it as a handy excuse for in-custody killings, at least not until forced to by state legislators.

Excited delirium actually pre-dates its current status as the go-to excuse for cops when they kill someone. Even then, it was questionable. But it really took off when Taser started supplying officers with tasers, which were immediately linked to several in-custody deaths, despite being advertised as a “less-than-lethal” force option. Taser’s lawyers (and supposed medical experts) offered testimony claiming people restrained or electrocuted to death were actually dying of a completely unrelated medical condition.

This was taken as gospel by cops who didn’t want to be held accountable for killing people — especially people who were suffering from mental health issues and, in most cases, were unarmed when multiple officers delivered electric shocks and/or piled on top of their prone bodies until they suffocated.

One of the most infamous murders committed by a cop — the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — had its own “excited delirium” nexus. Officer Thomas Lane, who watched Chauvin kneel on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, put on this performance for his body camera as he did nothing to prevent the killing he was witnessing:

I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.

“Or whatever.” And define “worry,” since it clearly didn’t mean offering any medical assistance whatsoever to the person this cop exoneratively declared might be suffering from a medical condition only cited by cops in the aftermath of an in-custody killing.

Four years ago, documents obtained by a public records requester showed the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD was filling officers’ heads with disinformation — not only claiming “excited delirium” was a legitimate medical condition, but also that people who literally could not breathe due to officers’ restraint tactics were just informing officers of this so-called medical condition when they said they were having difficulty breathing. Listed among the “symptoms” of “excited delirium” were these:

Says “I can’t breathe”, “I’m dying”, “You’re killing me.”

Since then, some things have changed. Officer Chauvin murdered George Floyd and, in an unexpected development, was actually convicted of murder. In a few localities, officials have passed laws forbidding officers or coroners from citing excited delirium as the cause of death.

The last holdouts in the medical profession have finally agreed “excited delirium” is a BS diagnosis, primarily because the only people who ever make this medical conclusion wear badges and have recently killed people, almost all of them unarmed.

But the Rochester, New York Police Department still wants to treat excited delirium as a legitimate medical condition. Of course, that’s only because it gives officers an out when they’ve killed someone and definitely not because anyone on or off the force actually believes it’s anything more than a handy excuse for police brutality.

Training materials obtained by Jenny Wadhwa and uploaded to MuckRock contain the usual excited delirium bullshit, along with a PowerPoint slide [PDF] that says the same thing the Charlotte PD’s training materials say: people saying “I can’t breathe” are just in the (life-threatening) throes of an excited delirium episode:

Also fun to note is that the term “unlimited endurance” is declared a symptom when all it actually means is that the person being restrained managed to tire out some of the out-of-shape cops who responded to the scene. And I’m not just making generalizations about cops, donuts, and the fact that most of them spend most of their hours sitting in cars. It’s a fact: most cops can be worn down by anyone in semi-decent physical shape.

Although the physical requirements of police work suggest the importance of maintaining a healthy weight status, recent research suggests that 40.5% of American police officers are obese³⁾,which is a prevalence rate above the national average of 35.5% for adult men and 35.8% for adult women⁴⁾

In this context, “superhuman strength” and “unlimited endurance” should probably just be read as “regular human strength” and “regular human endurance.”

In fact, the so-called “training” is best read as an exhortation to commit violence while providing officers with an exonerative cover story. The slides say it can be triggered by the use of either illegal or legal drugs.

Death usually follows a bizarre behavior episode and/ or use of illegal drugs or prescription medication

In practice, this means literally any chemical substance found in the body during a coroner’s examination can be used to buttress “excited delirium” claims.

It also claims there are four stages in the “excited delirium” progression, with the end result being apparently inevitable.

1. Elevated body temperature
2. Agitation
3. Respiratory arrest
4. Death

But that does nothing to explain why people only die of “excited delirium” after being tased/restrained/brutalized by cops. No one has ever reported someone just died of “excited delirium” without the application of force by police officers. So, even if we were so careless as to accept the theory of “excited delirium” as a legitimate medical condition, it would be even more careless to immediately discount this outside factor that is present in 100% of excited delirium deaths.

This isn’t training — at least not in the sense those of us in the private sector are used to. What’s being imparted here is a justification for excessive force deployment and a preconceived narrative for in-custody killings. We would be legitimately upset to discover companies are training employees how to dodge regulatory oversight and provide them with immediate plausible deniability for their actions. We should be way more upset that people paid with our tax dollars are literally encouraging police brutality by preemptively providing police officers with a pseudo-scientific explanation for the killings they may decide to commit.