Emergency room doctors say police use too much force

December 29, 11:12 AMCivil Liberties ExaminerJ.D. Tuccille

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Excessively tight handcuffs are among the types
of excessive force reported by ER doctors

Almost all emergency room physicians surveyed in a recently published paper say they've managed cases resulting from police brutality against the public. The emergency room incidents involve everything from beatings with fists and feet to excessively tight handcuffs to bludgeoning with nightsticks and flashlights.The paper raises the possibility that official figures understate the prevalence of violent behavior by law enforcement officers, since, despite their familiarity with such cases, most of the surveyed physicians say they do not report the incidents.

An astonishing 97.8% of 315 emergency room doctors who responded to the survey reported in "Excessive use of force by police: a survey of academic emergency physicians" (PDF), published in the January 2009 Emergency Medicine Journal, reported managing cases "that they suspected or that the patient stated had involved excessive use of force by law enforcement officers." Almost two-thirds of the docs said they saw two or more cases that they suspected involved excessive use of force per year among their patients.

The most common injuries resulting from the excessive use of force by police officers against suspects involved blunt trauma of the sort you get from a punch or a beating. "Fists and feet were cited as the instrument used by 95.2% (95% CI 92.0% to 97.3%) of respondents, handcuffs that were too tight by 73.1% (95% CI 67.6% to 78.1%), night sticks by 48.6% (95% CI 42.7% to 54.5%) and flashlights by 26.9%..."

But many of the incidents that make up the physicians' experiences never make it into the official record. That's because the majority of the doctors surveyed don't report the use of excessive force, and they work at institutions that have no policy instructing doctors what to do when they come across cases of police officers abusing members of the public.

Of the respondents, 71.2% (95% CI 65.6% to 76.4%) reported that, in cases where they suspected excessive use of force by law enforcement officers, they did not report the incidents. A large majority (96.5% (95% CI 93.8% to 98.2%)) of respondents reported that the ED in which they worked either did not have a policy or they did not know of a policy to guide the management of cases suspected of involving use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.

This lack of reliable reporting is part of a long-standing hurdle to efforts to track uses of excessive violence by law enforcement officers. A 1996 U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justic Statistics paper (PDF) discussed the difficulty encountered in compiling data on the use of excessive force by police. People looking for reliable information on the use of excessive force, it said, "are likely frustrated by their inability to obtain complete and reliable information on incidents of police use of force. Even the number of major incidents of use of excessive force is unknown, and our knowledge of the overall incidence of use of force is gained only by occasional, expensive studies that provide 'snapshots' of incidents and patterns during fixed periods."

Emergency rooms weren't even mentioned in that paper as a source of data, and the results of the current survey indicate that whatever information is being gleaned about police violence from emergency room physicians at the moment certainly understates the size of the problem.

The authors of the paper call for national guidelines instructing emergency room physicians on what to do when they encounter incidents involving police use of excessive force, including reporting such attacks and ways to advocate for the patients who were on the receiving end of the abuse.

Contact J.D.: civilliberties (at) tuccille.com