A new memo from former Acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates raises fresh questions about how closely Minneapolis police officers urged paramedics to sedate members of the public.
The preliminary report found 10 instances in which officers showed "a high degree of familiarity" with the powerful sedative ketamine, many of them expecting that simply calling paramedics would result in a person being sedated. Officers then took a "concerning level of participation in conversations with EMS regarding" injecting people with ketamine during emergency calls.
In the memo and other communications with city officials, Yates lamented that the City Council cut her firm's investigation short last summer after determining the $195,000 fee was too expensive. The city paid the firm $50,000 for the preliminary findings.
The memo is dated Feb. 1. It was given to City Council members Wednesday.
"We respect the City Council's discretion to disapprove the contract," wrote Yates in an October e-mail to city attorney Susan Segal. "We nonetheless are disappointed that our engagement will terminate without resolution and that so many of these important questions will remain unanswered."
The report also offers eight recommendations for how to answer some of these questions and improve practices, including interviewing officers on their motivations for asking for ketamine, analyzing ketamine use in Minneapolis police encounters compared to other cities and providing training to officers.
From July to September, the Atlanta-based firm where Yates works, King & Spalding, spent about 427 hours examining materials from 132 police encounters, including 122 hours of video, that took place from 2016 to 2018 and included the term "ketamine" in police reports, according to a letter from Yates. Some of the videos show people being uncooperative or aggressive toward the officers, many with signs of severe mental illness. In the majority of cases, the report said, officers acted professionally, even when dealing with difficult people.
Yet in a significant number of cases involving ketamine, the officers also diagnosed patients with "excited delirium syndrome," according to the report. Excited delirium is a controversial term among medical authorities that describes a form of potentially fatal severe agitation, and its prevalence and even its existence are a matter of debate. The Yates report says that some patients did not always show obvious signs of such a high level of agitation, and investigators found no evidence that police were trained to identify the condition.
