Dear American Medical Association House of Delegates and Board of Trustees; American Psychiatric Association Assembly and Board of Trustees; American College of Emergency Physicians Board of Directors: 

On May 25, 2020 George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by a white police officer Derek Chauvin, setting off international protests against racialized police brutality. In the following days and months the American Medical Association, American College of Emergency Physicians and American Psychiatric Association all made bold and vitally important statements opposing racism and specifically denouncing police brutality and all forms of racially motivated violence.

Like you, we embrace those commitments and write to you as medical professionals to express our grave concern about a racially unjust practice—the continued use of the controversial concept of “excited delirium” to justify and defend police brutality, inequitably perpetrated against Black people.

This scientifically spurious concept rooted in racist pseudoscience, is now shamefully being raised to defend ex-police officer Derek Chauvin in his murder trial which is now underway. 

The AMA, ACEP and APA should formally denounce the diagnostic validity and use of excited delirium to justify excessive police force, which disproportionately harms Black people.

These groups must also call for medical and behavioral health specialists, not police, to serve as first responders and decision makers in medical and mental health emergencies in the community. Treatment should be rendered equitably, in an evidence-based, stigma-free fashion. These critical steps are among the many that organized medicine must collectively take to live up to the promise articulated by the AMA to “dismantle racist and discriminatory policies and practices across all of health care.”

As the voice of medicine, your silence renders us all complicit.