Elijah McClain is Dead Because of Implicit Bias and Junk Science
“I’m just different.” -Elijah McClain
White people calling the police on their Black neighbors for mundane activities is nothing new. These calls are oftentimes motivated by implicit racial bias that the caller is unaware of. If the police respond to the call, they could be engaging in “profiling by proxy.” (Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, policing practitioner and researcher with the Darien Police Department in Connecticut).
Following a viral incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia in 2018 where the police were called on two Black men for literally just sitting and waiting for a friend, over 150 police departments across the country were polled by CBS News and only 69 percent answered that they had implicit bias training. Infamously, a police officer from Arizona was quoted as saying (of implicit bias training) “It’s reinforcing the minority of society that has that blanket opinion about Caucasian males.” So, a white officer took implicit bias training as an attack on his whiteness, even though the training was meant to educate him on his unconscious thoughts. That officer would likely answer “no,” if you asked him if he was racist. He ended the interview by saying that implicit bias training “kills morale.”
This is a multi-layered system of bias at work here. The first biased actor is the unreasonably scared white person calling 9–1–1 (remember, this is meant for emergencies) on a Black person for enjoying the daily activities of life. The next, and most unspoken of, layer of bias is the 9–1–1 dispatcher. Dispatchers give vital information to officers and Johnson writes that dispatchers must be able to parse out when bias is motivating a call and that “reports of suspicious activity should not typically be actionable unless a complainant can articulate something wrongful or reasonably suspicious about a person’s behavior.” The last layer is the police officer. Remember Dr. Eberhardt’s directive to Oakland police officers before pulling someone over? “Is this stop intelligence-based?”
Joe Shults, former chief of police in Colorado, wrote similarly on August 14, 2019, in regards to responding to suspicious persons calls that, “Lacking any other articulable facts to justify an investigatory stop, the officer will either make a consent contact or clear from the call…[and] the citizen must be allowed to walk away and refuse to answer any questions if the contact lacks a factual basis.”
Only 10 days after Shults’ writings, the Aurora Police Department received a call about a suspicious person, Elijah McClain, who was wearing a ski mask and “waving” his hands” at the caller. 3 officers were dispatched to the scene (so the first two layers of bias had failed here). One officer admitted that McClain had done nothing illegal prior to arrest, meaning the stop was NOT intelligence-based. However, unsurprisingly, the officers physically detained Elijah, placed him in a choke-hold, handcuffed him, the paramedics injected him with ketamine, and he eventually died due to cardiac arrest.
Why would 3 officers feel emboldened to murder Elijah McClain, an autistic 23 year-old massage therapist with a slight build who loved to play the violin, in such a fashion? The officers said that Elijah was exhibiting signs of “excited delirium.” Police officers across the country are taught that excited delirium is “a condition characterized by the abrupt onset of aggression and distress” and that subjects exhibiting excited delirium can exhibit “superhuman strength.”
The phrase “excited delirium” was first used by Charles V. Wetli, a forensic pathologist, in 1985 to explain the sudden death of cocaine users in police custody. Wetli stated that “the male species becomes pyschotic” during excited delirium. There’s just one issue with “excited delirium”: it’s not a concept recognized by the American Medical Association or the American Psychiatric Association. It’s junk science. And it’s used by police departments to justify their murders (this will undoubtedly be used as a defense to the murder of George Floyd) and deaths in policy custody across the country (See: Sandra Bland).
Wetli’s excited delirium “diagnosis” evoked a former junk science diagnosis used to justify the prohibition of cocaine. Prior to 1914, cocaine was legal and readily accessible in this country. But, Dr. Christopher Koch from Pennsylvania warned, “Most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of the cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” The fear of the cocaine-crazed Negro with superhuman strength, hell-bent on raping white women led the police to begin using higher caliber guns. Similarly, excited delirium has led present-day police departments to use higher caliber tasers and inject powerful sedatives like ketamine.
Unsurprisingly, excited delirium is disproportionately “diagnosed” among young Black men. -Méabh O’Hare
The system failed Elijah McClain. A biased white person called 9–1–1 to report that Elijah was acting “suspicious.” A biased 9–1–1 dispatcher failed to recognize that the call was motivated by bias. The police officers failed because there was no intelligence to justify the stop. And once the stop became physical, the entire system of policing in this country failed because the junk science of excited delirium is still adhered to by police departments.
We are not helpless in this predicament. We can start by recognizing our own implicit biases and begin the process of de-biasing. I just wish that person who called 9–1–1 on Elijah had checked theirs.
