Excited Delirium

It appears I've never mentioned excited delirium in all my years of blogging, despite its role in the police killings of George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Manny Ellis, and many other Black men. Maybe I haven't talked about it because it just seems to be such obvious white supremacist b.s., like drapetomania, though it has all too real effects.

Today I learned from Radley Balko about the man responsible for it.

He was a medical examiner named Charles Wetli, and Balko wrote today about Wetli's 2020 obituary in the New York Times:

[Wetli] claimed a series of deaths of black sex workers were caused by a condition unique to black women in which they just drop dead after mixing sex and cocaine. They were actually murdered by a serial killer.

Wetli would later expand the condition to include black men, whom he theorized might have a genetic condition that causes them to (a) assume superhuman strength and imperviousness to pain, and (b) spontaneously die while in police custody.

Wetli's new diagnosis both gave cops a reason to be especially aggressive with black men, and provided an excuse when that aggression led to unnecessary death. He became a consultant for Axon (Taser) and a frequent expert defense witness for cops accused of abuse.

It's remarkable that none of this made his obituary. It's an incredibly destructive legacy.

As people pointed out in the comments, the police claims of excited delirium continue to this day, though it is mostly medically discredited. Older cops say they were trained to believe in it, if nothing else, so how can they be blamed if they act as if it's real? That was part of what happened in the Manny Ellis and Elijah McCain cases.

Other commenters noted that if police are aware that Black people supposedly are particularly susceptible to harm in a certain set of circumstances, then police should have an extra responsibility of care, not less of one. 

But that's not how things work in white supremacy, of course.