Depending on who you ask, excited delirium syndrome (ExDS) is either a group of symptoms that warn of a life-threatening medical condition or it is a diagnosis invented by racist and abusive police to excuse murder.1,2 Among those that use the term ExDS, the medical consensus is that ExDS is not a unique disease but...Read More
When it comes to suspects who die in law enforcement settings, street cops, investigators, administrators, police lawyers, and medical examiners can probably all agree on one thing: investigating such events, in the words of one research team, is a “perilous and a slippery slope.” An excellent new book—Guidelines for Investigating Officer-Involved Shootings, Arrest-Related Deaths, and...Read More
Most of Dr. Kroll’s presentation at the use-of-force conference (see: previous FSN) dealt with persistent myths about the alleged electrical dangers of CEWs, particularly claims that these control weapons can cause electrocution and fatal heart disruptions. The world’s most prolific inventor of cardiac-related medical devices, Kroll is renowned as one of the top international authorities...Read More
When police defense attorney Mildred O’Linn teaches a course on Critical Legal Issues in Law Enforcement, she urges her audiences to adopt a risk-management concept she calls the Custody and Care Timeline. It’s a method for officers to capture and document critical information when dealing with combative suspects who may be especially vulnerable to arrest-related...Read More
For the first time, a research study of a “very large sample size of real-world subjects” who actually underwent police use of force has determined with precision how often deaths occur in conjunction with forceful encounters. The frequency, in contrast to the impression often conveyed by the media and activist “watchdog” organizations, is extremely minimal,...Read More
With the symptoms and dangers of excited delirium now well-publicized and solidly confirmed by numerous research studies, agencies that fail to have a response protocol in place are inviting needless liability problems, according to a day-long presentation recently at a training seminar sponsored by the Illinois Tactical Officers Assn. “Usually administrators start to take notice...Read More
An exaggeration of the sudden in-custody death problem is generating “persecution and prosecution” of LEOs and their agencies and is resulting in “reactionary changes in policy and procedure that may well be based in conjecture rather than fact,” according to new findings by a Canadian research team. In particular the study group challenges the widely...Read More
DIRECTOR’S NOTE: One of the missions of the Force Science Research Center is to bring the latest research (ours and others) to the law enforcement community. Excited Delirium is a very high profile, significant social problem that although rare in occurrence has been very costly to the LE in terms of the health and safety...Read More
