Serginho Roosblad: The investigation began shortly after the death of George Floyd. And it was started by my colleague, Mitch Weiss, who is one of the reporters on the project. And he has a big rolodex. He's been an investigative journalist for quite a while, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist. And he received a tip from one of his sources saying that this is something that happens more often. And I think you need to look at the use of non-lethal force or less lethal force, because quite often what happens is when an officer shoots someone, there is a whole process of investigations afterwards. When someone dies after law enforcement used less lethal force, the injuries are quite often slightly different and there is no clear path to investigating those types of incidents. So, he started looking into those cases and soon he found out that there is an entire universe of when police uses less lethal force that needed to have more scrutiny. And so, he started digging and started talking to some editors at the Associated Press who found it interesting and decided like, okay, let's look more closely into these incidents resulting into eventually a three year investigation where the Associated Press found 1,036 deaths following an interaction where police use less lethal force.
Patrick Center: As a baseline, how many on average do we see each year of these types of confrontations?
Serginho Roosblad: At one hand, you could say that these deaths are pretty rare when you look at the number of interactions between citizens and law enforcement. But what the Associated Press has found is that they still happen twice a week on average. And so that could be where an officer made clear mistakes or it could be an incident where someone had a lot of drugs in their system and preexisting health conditions, which eventually led to the death of this person, but these interactions, they vary greatly and they are quite often pretty complex.
Patrick Center: These interactions, are there some relations that we see that are pretty common or are these incidents where it has something to do with police training?
Serginho Roosblad: It's a combination of those. Like, one of the things is that they do happen across the country. It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural, whether it's in a red state or a blue state, it happens across. But the one thing that does come out of the data is that quite often officers are dealing with people who are having a mental illness or are high on stimulant drugs or sit at the intersection of those. So, people who are self-medicating with drugs. And what we've seen is that when officers are approaching this population, in some cases they have something that the officer does to trigger them. So, for example, this could be an officer, you know, is trained to have control over the situation. And so, for example, this could be that an officer grabs someone by the shoulder to show like, hey, I am in control in this situation and you need to start listening and start cooperating with me. This could set off someone who's dealing with a mental health illness. It could be that it just physically makes this person not feel uncomfortable, or it could be that this person is hearing voices and could interpret the voice of the officer as something dangerous and start running or start not cooperating. And the officer on the other hand, then starts interpreting this behavior as non-compliant. And that can set off a cascade of force that eventually can lead to the death of someone. So, when it comes to training, one of the things that we've heard from experts is that it would be good if officers would be trained more in dealing with mental health crises.
Patrick Center: And as you were investigating, how valuable or what did you learn or what was revealed having access to the autopsy reports and body cam footage?
Serginho Roosblad: The fact that we had access to so many documents, both written documents, as well as body camera and dash cam footage, and in certain cases also cell phone footage from bystanders, it gave us a very clear picture of what happens in these incidents, what leads to these incidents, and also in the moment when officers use force, what actually happens. For example, one of the things that we've seen is that in certain cases, what police offers write in their report and which is then taken over quite often by the medical examiner does not match necessarily what we see in the body camera footage. So, for example, in the film, Documenting Police Use of Force, we look at one particular case, that's the case of Hunter Turner, who was a 23-year-old man who died in August, 2017 in Bristol, Tennessee. The original call that went out by his girlfriend was that he was suffering a medical emergency. He was having a seizure. He was foaming from the mouth and she didn't know what to do. As soon as EMT arrived and then they couldn't really restrain him and so they called law enforcement, police officers, to help them restrain Hunter. In this process of restraining Hunter, they used significant force like a taser, for example, and they tried to also administer chemical sedation and eventually he passed away. In the police report, it was said that Hunter continued to fight even as he was put into an ambulance. However, once we received the body camera footage from the incident, we saw that already in the apartment, Hunter was completely strapped down. He was handcuffed. His ankles were shackled as well. He was strapped by the arms, by his thighs. He was put face down on a gurney and they put what's called a spit hood over his face, which normally prevents someone from biting or spitting at officers. That was put over his head. And once he was in the ambulance, not long after they found that he was not breathing and they administered CPR to him. However, like I mentioned, in the police report, it was said that he would continue to fight in the ambulance. And that was a discrepancy, one of the discrepancies that we have found in this investigation. Policing is very different across the country. So, you have certain police departments that have certain units with them when they are responding to, for example, mental health crisis, which you also have what we've seen in the investigation and where we talk to experts on the ground, and for example, when we had a body camera footage where. For example, people are complaining that they can't breathe and they are being dismissed by the officers. So, there is a culture and there is this idea that when people complain about not being able to breathe, that they are faking it. And so, they are being mocked or their complaints are being dismissed. And not long after we find that the person is unconscious and eventually never regains consciousness. So, when it comes to culture, I think it's that part, for example, the idea of, and I think that's also something that what we found and what we, some of the reporters have heard as well, that officers are sometimes kind of in between this idea of a warrior versus guardian. Like, do they need to go in hard in order to deal with the threat or are they a guardian? Do they need to take their time to talk someone down, calm someone down? So, this varies across the country.
Patrick Center: Policing is difficult. In that moment, police have to react and they have to rely on training and instincts.
Serginho Roosblad: Very much, yeah. They are very much on training as well. Then it also comes to what kind of culture and what kind of ideas do these trainers have. We spoke to a trainer for our film, a trainer based here in California, and it's a veteran trainer. He's been training police officers and those who then go out also to their own departments to train other officers. And he believes and has believed for years that putting people in the prone restraint, meaning on their stomach, on the ground, and handcuffing them is not dangerous. But what we found in our investigation that for certain members of the population, whether it's people who have pre-existing health conditions or people who have drugs into their system, prone restraint can be dangerous. Also, prone restraint could be dangerous if people are being left in that position for a prolonged period of time. We have found a case, for example, where someone was left in that position for 22 minutes. Now that is dangerous, and that could lead to someone's death or at least contribute to someone's death. So, the idea is, or what we've heard from other officers and from other trainers and experts, is that as soon as an officer handcuffs someone, they need to roll them over in what's called the recovery position. So, they could either be on their side, so they continue to breathe without any obstruction or sit them even up. And quite often what we've seen is that officers don't do that immediately and that can lead to someone's death.
Patrick Center: Tonight (Tuesday, April 30, 2024) at 10 o'clock on WGVU Public Television, PBS Frontline presents Documenting Police Use of Force. Director, writer, producer Serginio Roseblatt. Thank you so much.
Serginho Roosblad: Thank you.