Leadership Lessons from the Elijah McClain Verdict

0:02 Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yeats, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously. Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with me today and I hope you caught our last episode with Stan Partlow, the author of the book Leading Relentlessly. I've talked to a lot of people around the country and I do a lot of these podcasts and every so often I find an absolute diamond in the rough and I had not known Stan before that interview. His book caught my attention. I thought it was excellent, very unique, very needed, and just had an incredible conversation with him.

0:46 I mean, our podcast was just shy of 45 minutes but we talked long after that and I'm really encouraged by Stan and I think you're going to hear some more with him and myself in 2024. He has a great message that coincides directly with what we're trying to do here, with Courageous Leadership, and there's going to be a lot coming. We'll be talking a lot in January to you what we have in store, but I'll give you a hint. We've been giving you a lot of foundational stuff this year over 40 podcasts, close to 50 articles, content through LEO Roundtable, a lot of other content. If you follow us, follow us on LinkedIn, just go Travis Yates, dr Travis Yates or Travis Yates 1744.

1:30 You can catch all that on the website. Just make it easy for you TravisYatesorg. But LinkedIn I'm on there daily and if you go to the website, you can branch off into our articles, get notified when those get written. Just dive into that if you would, and I hope it can help some of you. But we're in this sort of period where information that comes out it doesn't catch a lot of attention, and a story came out this week I wanted to discuss with you because I think it's going to have further ramifications in the first responder world when it comes to leadership, and that's the case of Elijah McClain. Now, most of you have probably heard that name. I want to give you a backstory on this. Aurora police officers received a call not a one call in 2019 in August of a man walking down the street wearing a full face ski mask this was in August and acting erratically.

2:21 He specifically the number one caller said he was waving his hands pretty wildly in the air. So pretty suspicious. Police respond and they encounter Mr McClain, who's a young African American man, and he suddenly starts resisting, starts fighting. The officers describe his power much more than what they would imagine. They immediately start recognizing yes, you've heard this before that there's probably some sort of substance in Elijah's body. It's created into sort of out of control conduct. So they, they, they end up having to struggle with him. At one point they put him in a vascular neck restraint the carotid artery hold and they called paramedics.

3:01 Paramedics get there and they do the only thing you're trained to do, the only resource and tool they have in these situations to try to calm people down. They gave Elijah a sedative called ketamine and, tragically, a few hours later Elijah dies in the hospital. Now this happens in 2019. Quite frankly, you know, unfortunately these things do occur. You know it's sort of big national news now, but law enforcement and paramedics we run across a segment of society oftentimes that they. You know there's a myriad of reasons why they may pass away after they come in contact with us or don't come in contact with us. A lot of that is. You know you've heard of a lot of this controversy on excited delirium.

3:43 They've changed the name of it, but you know that's a real concept. It's been around for a hundred years. There's documented cases of medical journals of people dying in this fashion. So law enforcement has been trained pretty well through the years to try to recognize this and then try to get the person help, which is calling our only resource, which is called medics, called paramedics, and then they use their only resource, which is to administer ketamine. So this happens in 2019, the autopsy comes out from the corner and says that he could not determine a cause of death, and I sort of agree with that. Right, you got a lot of things going on here. You got the autopsy ability. He had a heart defect, a bad heart, I think. A vitricle was too small. He had a history of asthma. Just a few years earlier he was hospitalized for LSD overdose and manic behavior.

4:29 So this is, this happened in the past. The officers had to struggle with him. At one point they put a vascular neck restraint on him, but these things occur right. If Elijah McClain would have complied with officers, we wouldn't be talking about this. He may have had some sort of medical condition they didn't know about. They may have had a colomitic anyway. But the non-compliance creates this event where you know people are using the resources they have at their disposal, the policy and training they have, and then the subject dies and then any police officer, especially in the zip code, is going to get blamed for that death. We're sort of used to that. What we're not used to is what happened in this case. So in 2021, a year after George Floyd's death, and right after George Floyd's death, a lot of protest in the Denver area starts popping up using Elijah McClain's name.

5:16 It was sort of the most recent high-profile in custody death, so to speak, in that area, and there was lots of pressure placed on prosecutors and coroners and you name it to bring this case back up to charge the police officers we're going to say police officers, because this was what this was designed to do. The paramedics were also charged. I'm going to tell you how this turns out, because the jury decision just came back on that. But so this case comes back up and the paramedic world welcomed to the law enforcement world, because this is what's been happening to law enforcement. Law enforcement goes out on a scene. They follow policy, they follow training, somebody dies and they're getting blamed for it. We're used to the civil suits.

5:56 What we're not used to is being prosecuted for doing our job, okay. So this is where leading courageously comes in play, because in 2019, it was perfectly fine to not file charges on the officer. Then, all of a sudden, two years later, with public pressure, they file the charges on the officer. So it's easy to make a leadership decision when there's nothing at risk, right. But when you're risking yourself, possibly risking your own job, risking your own pension or benefits by not going along with the narrative, then there's a risk. So they went along with the narrative. Too many folks in play here that were cowards I can even mention, but that's where we are. So I say this was originally about the police and that's because after George Floyd who did not die from a vascular neck restraint, did not die from a chokehold you can read the autopsy the world became on fire that if you touch someone's neck you're trying to kill them, even though we've been using vascular neck restraints for 50 years and nobody has died with us using vascular neck restraints.

6:58 You can go up to Kansas City, the place where it's trained, and they have all that data. We've talked about this in our articles. Okay, but because of that hot topic and nobody being willing to speak to that topic, nobody in this profession that I know of of a big statuary, said this is kind of silly. This is a safe maneuver. We've been training this for years. It's not even deadly force. Right, they use it in jujitsu gyms and martial arts gyms daily. You watch it every weekend in UFC, but all of a sudden, when a cop does it, it's like a pro. Somehow it's a murder charge. So that was the sort of environment on why this occurred. So what happened to it? Well, in 2021, to enable them to file charges because you've got a problem.

7:38 You've got an autopsy from 2019 that says they don't know how Elijah McLean died. So how do you file charges, especially when people are following policy and training, when the autopsy says that? So, as cowards do, there's pressure placed on the coroner to amend the coroner's report. And he did amend that report. And here's the statement he added in that amended report Cause of death complications of ketamine administration following forcible arrest. Those words enabled the prosecutors to file charges against police officers and paramedics for doing their job. I guess with a straight face I don't know how they sleep at night, but those words enabled them to do it.

8:18 I don't think for one second they thought they could convict anybody for doing their job. But welcome to 2023. And if you've seen the Fall of Minneapolis thefallofminiapoliscom you know exactly what I'm talking about. But the difference here is the paramedics right? This is I've sort of warned this for years. When we were saying it's okay to hate on cops, it's okay to fight cops, it's okay to spit in cops food, it's okay to treat cops this way, I said you got to be careful, because you permit it with law enforcement. It's going to trip over into other professions and here paramedics are caught in the middle of this. So that leadership has an opportunity to do what law enforcement did not do, which is to stand up and defend their officers when they do their job.

9:01 So the coroner also did not help the prosecutor completely. I think the I mean I haven't spoken to the coroner, but I can only imagine the thoughts in his head is man, these cops didn't do anything wrong. And and they're going to try to say this vasculinectomy, necro strength was somehow the cause of it. But clearly it's not, because in the autopsy report it says there was no asphyxiation. Okay, this is feeling awfully familiar on, or did another case we've talked a lot about and and it also, you know, described other health problems. So what the coroner wrote in the report was this a carotid control hold was administered Quote I cannot determine whether this contributed to death. Now I could help him with that.

9:43 It didn't contribute to his death because this maneuver doesn't kill anybody. But he goes on to say but quote the literature, suggests it is unlikely. Well, show me the literature that says it's likely. Or show me the literature says it's ever happened. But yeah, that's a, that's a nice way of saying, yeah, this is not what killed him, right? He cites the literature and he also cites that this is commonly used in the martial art community. So he brings that up as well. So he's sort of trying to tell everybody don't look here, this is not what did it. Even though I'm not going to take a stance and say it didn't happen, which which is crazy to me, right, I'm going to have one foot on both sides here. Everyone's out for the, you know, follow the money. Everyone's out to keep their jobs, not to make anybody unhappy. No one wants to do the right thing, except, oftentimes, jurors.

10:24 So do the jurors get it right? I just described to you the police department followed policy and training. There was nothing out of bounds there. The paramedics the paramedics on the stands said they followed policy and training, and the Aurora Fire Rescue Chief said they followed policy and training. This was not in dispute with the jury say. The police officers were cleared, probably because of what was put in that autopsy where he cleared them away from the vascular neck restraint. But they convicted two paramedics, not on the manslaughter charges they arrested for Imagine that arrested on manslaughter Right they? They convicted them on a lesser manslaughter charge. I don't have a name of it, still a felony charge, but it's a.

11:04 It's a lesser charge. So you have like first degree murder, you have manslaughter and then there's some other ones in all the states are different. They were convicted on that third charge. Now this is pretty insane. No one's really talking about this. We sort of left this go and don't say anything. But let me just be very clear here. We cannot live in a society that permits first responders to be arrested thus convicted when they do their job. We have plenty of examples where we don't do our job and we probably should we will be arrested, we will be convicted. Those happen a few times every year, but they're so desperate for this. Whatever's going on here, we are now arresting cops and first responders and out paramedics for doing their job.

11:45 There's no dispute there. Let me tell you the quote from the Aurora fire rescue chief, alec Houghton, who said this right after the conviction. I am discouraged that these paramedics have received felony punishment for following their training and protocols in place at the time and for making discretionary decisions while taking split second action in a dynamic environment. So he's acknowledging that they did their job and they were convicted of a felony crime. Now here's the kicker. What they tried to tell the jury and tried to prove was is they made them they? They gave him a higher doses of ketamine than was required. Now, if you're in a hospital and they know your exact weight, doctors have this little chart right.

12:29 They can tell you how much drugs they put in you. But if you're a paramedic rolling up on a scene and someone's fighting and out of control and you know the quicker you can put this ketamine in, the quicker to calm them down, the better chance you have to save their life. Because, remember, how people die in this fashion is as they exert themselves at such a high level they don't feel pain oftentimes and the only way to sort of slow that that oncoming death down is to try to calm them down and get their heart rate to come down. Okadamine will do that through the synthetic drugs that they're using and that's the only option they had. Well, so they administered and I don't have the exact dosage, but I know this that kids weight. I read this in public documents the kids weight is called for up to 425 something.

13:13 I don't know what it is. Well, the paramedics seem to take a quick assessment of his size, but they see his out of control behavior and they pop 500 in him and that's what they claim killed him. Now, anyone with the brain knows this. They barely went over the recommended dosage. That's not. You're not going to take five aspirin instead of three and die. You know. You're not going to take a little bit more of whatever you're taking. Everybody knows this. But, just like in other cases, we sort of aren't thinking logically here. How'd he die? I have no idea. I think the first autopsy was right. You put all those things together. Who knows right. But this is where we are. And here is the kicker In the autopsy they have the level of ketamine in his system in the autopsy.

13:58 This is amazing to me. These guys were convicted, but this is where we are today. We'll talk about how to try to keep that from happening in a minute. The autopsy report shows that Elijah McClain's ketamine levels ketamine serum, it called it, emplasma levels were measured at 1.4 milligrams slash leaders, I believe that's what that stands for. So 1.4, and this is well within therapeutic range. So the paramedics not only may have to make a split second decision, as the rescue fire chief said, they made the right decision. The range on therapeutic is 1.0 to 1.63. He was at 1.4. So in his system he had a therapeutic range of ketamine and they have convicted two paramedics that administered that.

14:47 So how did this happen? Well, if you're in law enforcement, you know how it happened. When this case came back up in 2021, it was filled of lies, filled of half truths and everything in between. Nobody stopped it, nobody told them they were wrong. It came out that the police had no reason to stop him. Really, a number one call, even if it's not one call, nothing. You got to respond to the number one call. But I would think a full face ski mask in middle of August would be enough to chat with somebody, despite the number one call. But of course, that's a lie. They said, oh, the police had no reason to stop him. So that's the whole reason. It happened right there, and and then, and then they brought race into it once again.

15:27 This is what we see all the time. He was only stopped because he was black. He was only killed because he was black. Well, there's a kind of a problem with a ski mask. You know what that problem is? Yeah, you guessed it very difficult to see someone's race, but I'll back it up. It was a number one call. There wasn't anybody picking anybody out of a street to try to pick a fight with them or none of this stuff. And it all really says this really all stops with Elijah McClain. If, if people don't fight, they don't struggle, they don't, they don't take in just drugs, or was drugs in a system through the autopsy, this, this stuff doesn't happen. But nobody's talking about that. It's always the cops or someone else trying to do their job, trying to help. So nobody stopped those lies early on and they just built and they built and they built until the public pressure became enough to where Prosecutors prosecuted.

16:13 Nobody shamed them, nobody said they were wrong. And I have to really applaud the Aurora fire rescue chief because in the law enforcement side I've never heard this. Maybe it's happened, but I've never heard a law enforcement leader come out and defend their officers even after a conviction, and this guy did that, so I applaud him. We need more of that, so, but the very first thing we have to do is we go into 2024 and beyond. You cannot let lies keep going. You can't control someone telling lies, but you certainly have platforms to correct the lies, and that must be done rather quickly. Folks, I'm afraid this is going to keep happening. I think the principles we talk about here in courageous leadership are even more important because of that.

16:54 We and despite the officers being acquitted, make no mistake about it their lives are ruined, folks. Their names are blasted everywhere for years to see what was their crime. That day he tried to save a kid's life by subduing him and calling a paramedic. Try to save his life, and you know I can't answer why he died. Neither could the coroner when it first happened. So I'm not gonna bash myself for that. He didn't know either, and I think it's okay to say sometimes you don't know, but you try to place a narrative inside an autopsy. The way we've been seeing lately. Pretty dangerous, pretty horrific, and we have lots of work to do. I'm gonna be announcing in a few weeks some of the things we're gonna be doing. But I'll give you a hint we're gonna just stop talking about this stuff.

17:38 We're gonna start doing this stuff. We're not gonna people get away with the things are getting away with. It's doing way too much damage all over the place and, as we see this, go from paramedics, everybody will be on guard. What's the end result of this? Well, I'll tell you the end result. Good luck finding someone to respond to a medical call right. Good luck finding someone that wants to try to help people in the future. So we have to be very, very careful about this, go about it in the right direction and Make some changes that matter. Thank you for listening and just remember lead on and stay courageous. Thank you for listening to courageous leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at www.

18:19 Travis Yates. org.