What happened next that evening in May 2021 is the basis for a lawsuit by the mother alleging that Burlington police used excessive force and discriminated against her unarmed son, who is Black and has behavioral and intellectual disabilities.
After he failed to hand over the last of the stolen e-cigarettes, two officers physically forced him to do so, then Cathy Austrian’s son was handcuffed and pinned to the ground as he screamed and struggled, according to a civil lawsuit filed Tuesday and police body-camera video shared with The Associated Press by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.
The teen eventually was injected with a ketamine, a sedative, then taken to a hospital, according to the lawsuit and video.
Police are trained to ‘keep the peace’ in a lot of situations. Like, in a bad traffic accident, the cops are there to direct traffic while the EMTs and Firefighters take the lead.
We just need to teach them to do the same with mental health workers and make that the standard for anything that’s not a criminal complaint. They already do this with stuff like CPS calls in a lot of jurisdictions.
But yeah, a lot of cops are drawn to the job because they love power and authority. And it will take decades of restructuring of US policing to change that cultural tendency.