The Burlington Fire Department plans to begin recording the race of all patients administered ketamine, a powerful sedative, Chief Steven Locke told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Thursday night.
The policy change came after the city’s citizen oversight Police Commission learned of an incident in May during which a 14-year-old Black male was given the anesthetic drug to address what police described as a “behavioral emergency.”
That prompted Locke to investigate how often his department recorded the race of those administered ketamine, he told committee members Thursday. He found that it rarely does.
According to records first obtained by Seven Days and later provided to VTDigger, fire department paramedics tracked the race of ketamine recipients only five of 86 times since 2016. The documented cases all involved white patients.
Locke explained that his department uses a state-run patient care system that did not require providers to note the race of patients. He told committee members that his request to mandate such data collection in Burlington resulted in a change at the state level that would prompt other fire departments that use the system to do so as well.
“Once we brought it to the state’s attention and started asking the ‘why’ behind it, they were very quickly receptive to say, ‘Yes, we do want to add to this data, and yes, we do understand there are health care disparities,’” Locke said.
He said his staff was undergoing training on the new reporting protocol, which is scheduled to become mandatory Sept. 6.
The incident that prompted the policy change came in May, when police responded to a report that a teenager armed with a mallet and a knife had stolen a large quantity of vape pens from a convenience store. The teen’s mother also called the police, leading officers to his home.
There, officers found the stolen vapes in a drawer and attempted to remove one from his hand, according to a use of force report the Burlington Police Department provided the Police Commission. Once the officers backed away, the teen assaulted them “with his fists,” according to the report, prompting them to handcuff him. A “behavioral incident” ensued, involving “screaming, biting, spitting, and violently struggling.”
After two community members attempted to de-escalate the situation, the Burlington Fire Department was called. Paramedics consulted with the teen’s mother and a doctor, and then administered a 250-milligram dose of ketamine. He was then taken to the University of Vermont Medical Center’s emergency department.
According to Police Commissioner Stephanie Seguino, the city should know if sedation methods are disproportionately used against people of color. Black residents are disproportionately subjected to use of force in Burlington, and Black drivers are stopped at a higher rate than white drivers.
“The use of ketamine for agitation control, if you will, is an important category,” Seguino told VTDigger. “We want to know if there are racial differences in who is sedated using that mechanism.”
