Frontline: "Documenting Police Use of Force" (Associated Press, Sony Television, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired April 30, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 30) I watched a PBS Frontline episode called “Documenting Police Use of Force,” an unusual story in that its subject was people dying at the hands of police even though the officers were supposedly only using “less lethal force” (i.e., less lethal than guns). It began with the account of Karen Goodwin, whose son Austin Hunter Turner (who went by “Hunter” as a first name) was killed by police using “less lethal force.” Hunter had a history of seizures and his mom called 911 during one of them. The fire department sent an ambulance crew and things seemed to be under control – until the police arrived. Then they started throwing their weight around; eight to 10 officers, fully armed and clad in riot gear, showed up and threatened to use a Taser on Hunter if he didn’t stop twitching. When he didn’t stop twitching, they tased him and then laid him on his stomach, which apparently is the last thing you should do with someone who’s having trouble breathing. Ultimately Hunter was loaded into an ambulance, and then taken to a hospital where doctors and emergency technicians tried to revive him. His mom recalled that when they were pushing on his right side, he seemed to be made of Jell-O; there was no resistance in his body at all. Then he was pronounced dead.

The show, based on an investigative project involving about 15 reporters from the Associated Press, dealt with several other incidents, in most of which the officers involved were not prosecuted. One particularly grim story was about a 23-year-old veteran named Taylor Ware, whose mother was taking him home to Kansas City when they stopped in Dale, Indiana. Ware was bipolar and was having an episode when local cops in Dale intervened and set a police dog on him – itself a serious escalation in the police response. One expert said that using a dog is considered “one level below deadly force. … Bringing the dog out, in my mind, in a mental health case was not the right action because it's only gonna make it more agitated, more aggravated. It's gonna escalate the event.” Ware reportedly grabbed for the dog, which seems to have set off the officers even more. The officers threatened to tase him and ultimately they took him to a hospital when they noticed he wasn’t breathing. He lapsed into a coma and died three days later.

One of the oddest aspects of Ware’s case was that in order to subdue him, they forcibly injected him with ketamine, an animal tranquilizer also used as a recreational drug under the name “Special-K.” The use of ketamine is itself controversial under circumstances like these (though ironically just after PBS showed this documentary, the local CBS outlet ran a promo for a news story about the use of ketamine as a treatment for mental illness), and the drug is associated with bad reactions, including losing the ability to breathe. Ware died in police custody, and the death certificate listed the cause of his death as “excited delirium,” a diagnosis whose validity has been questioned by several experts as based on old-fashioned notions of mental illness, especially among people of color. (Reports of Black people who supposedly showed “superhuman strength” are a red flag for certain police experts, especially ones who are Black themselves, that the officers involved are consciously or unconsciously expressing racist stereotypes.)

Ultimately the officers in Ware’s case were not prosecuted, and the police expert who’d been interviewed earlier said that was probably appropriate. “I would agree that it's probably not a prosecution case,” he said, noting that before he set the police dog on Ware, “the officer shook his hand. The officer tried to establish a rapport, you see that [in the videos taken by the police and the victim’s mother]. Did the officer make some mistakes? In my mind, yes. But did they rise to the level of criminality? No. What I see is definitely a lack of training on when it's appropriate to do certain things.” The main point of the show is that police are utterly unsuited to deal with mental illness, and yet all too often they’re expected to because we’ve so severely cut back on the other potential resources to treat the mentally ill. It also indicated that so-called “less lethal force” can still be lethal, and often deaths in police custody are blamed on the victim’s recreational drug use – though in some cases “recreational” might be a misnomer because the victims were really self-medicating for undiagnosed (or, in some cases, diagnosed or misdiagnosed) mental illnesses. The upshot is that we as a society are generating a lot of mentally ill people, and when they get out of line we’re treating them as criminals and calling out the police. And though my husband Charles (fortunately, given the show’s subject matter) didn’t get home until a few minutes before the show ended, it’s a personal issue for him because his nephew had serious mental illnesses and died from police violence after his grandmother (Charles’s mom) called 911 for help dealing with him.