A Potentially Unjustified Complaint Against the Ferguson Police

So, in general, I'm on board with the complaint that this whole series of events demonstrates a police culture in need of reform and defanging, if not outright neutering.

Still, there are limits. We must be fair to the officers involved as far as we can. The most outrageous charge against them today is that they refused a nurse the right to perform CPR on the shot body of Michael Brown.

Mr. Stone ran outside and saw two police officers, both white men, standing near Mr. Brown, who was lying on his stomach, his arms at his sides, blood seeping from his head. Another neighbor, a woman who identified herself as a nurse, was begging the officers to let her perform CPR.

They refused, Mr. Stone said, adding, “They didn’t even check to see if he was breathing.”

So here's the thing about CPR. The way it works is by artificially pumping the heart. In the case of a heart attack, that's a good idea. What will occur is that you will move blood -- still filled with oxygen -- to cells that will shortly begin to die without oxygen. These include brain cells, without which there isn't much point in reviving the body. Almost everyone who receives CPR is not going to survive, it's interesting to note: the success rate is somewhere under one-fifth, and perhaps as low as two percent. Still, in the case of a heart attack, you have nothing to lose by trying!

The case is very different if the life-threatening issue is a gunshot wound. Now, artificially pumping the heart is pumping blood right out onto the ground. As anyone who has taken a combat lifesaver course knows, the #1 most important issue in cases like these is to prevent blood loss. Blood loss is the fastest killer in a gunshot victim who was not killed immediately by the gunshot itself.

So you should not attempt CPR on a gunshot victim. You should focus on stopping the bleeding.

Of course, my defense depends on the police knowing any of that; given their generally horrid training in crowd control, escalation of force and firearms safety, one may doubt that they understood the medical issues. It also depends on them having done everything they could to stop the bleeding.

Still, of itself, refusing a self-identified nurse the power to conduct CPR on a gunshot victim is not alarming. It's not necessarily a good idea, except perhaps in a hospital where blood supplies are immediately available to replace what is going to be lost.

I wish Doc Russia were still around to comment on this with greater expertise.