In Journalism, or what passes for it these days the “lede” of a story is the first paragraph. The way that print stories and to an extent electronic media stories are constructed the most important part of a story is the first paragraph. That’s the lede of the story.

When newspapers were the primary method by which people got the news the practice was to put the most important part of the story first and then with each paragraph less important parts of the story were added. There were two reasons for this. First, readers often had short attention spans or maybe limited time to read articles. Second, if another publication picked up the story they may want to shorten it for various reasons. Since everyone knew how articles were constructed it was easy to just lop off the lower paragraphs.

Those are legitimate uses, but there is another way to use that method to build an article for publication. If you put the most important last, then you can fashion your story so that readers will understand it they way you want them to. If’s a form of lying, but a very subtle one.

Put a minor point, but one that supports your preconceived notion of how the public should understand the story first, then way down near the end put the part that undermines your position. In the news business this is called “Burying the Lede.”

Which brings me to today’s post.

At least 16 people died in California after medics injected sedatives during encounters with police

It was impossible for the AP to determine the exact role injections may have played in many of the 94 deaths involving sedation that reporters found nationally during the investigation’s 2012-2021 timeframe. Few of those deaths were attributed to the sedation and authorities rarely investigated whether injections were appropriate, focusing more often on the use of force by police and the other drugs in people’s systems.

This would be the key information that people should know. Which is that despite the scary headline, the ace reporters at Associated Press are just assuming that they were caused by Midazolam (Versed). Note also that few of the deaths were attributed to drugs. What they don’t tell you is that everyone of the people who died had a complete and in depth autopsy performed. Anyone who dies in police custody gets and autopsy to determine the cause of death.

The AP wants us to believe that Ketamine is a safer drug to use, but Ketamine too has potential adverse effects. Especially if the patient already has drugs in their system. Some of the systems with which I work have withdrawn Ketamine from their medication list. Others have opted not to use it believing that Versed and another medication, Haldol, work better and have less potential to cause harm.

The Eric Jaeger quoted in the article is more than a paramedic. He’s a paramedic and a lawyer who has lectured at many EMS conferences. Knowing that I have to wonder if he was quoted out of context. His statement regards any form of sedation and there is no reason to believe that he thinks that Versed is any more dangerous than any other sedative.

Of course the aggregate data from which AP drew their conclusions was not published.

The articles linked to are no better and just as one sided.

None of the experts quoted addressed how public safety professionals can protect themselves while trying to keep out of control people from harming themselves or the public? If the police had let any of these people go and they subsequently died, we’d be reading about that instead of this.

In the case cited in this article the reporter mentions that Mr. Jackson took Methamphetamine. That’s an illegal drug and one that can make people extremely violent. Having worked most of my career before sedation was used I can attest that having the physically restrain people exposed everyone to the risk of serious injury. One medic I worked with suffered a broken neck and was never able to return to work because of her injury.

Note also that in the linked article AP spends considerable space attacking the very same Ketamine that they seem to laud in the first article. Oh, and the mention the Versed is used as part of the cocktail used to execute people. True, but it’s used to help ensure that the person dies without pain. I won’t go into the other drugs used as part of lethal injection, but they are commonly used for medical reasons and in and of themselves not especially dangerous.

We now know one thing for sure. Reporting by Associated Press is not to be trusted.