A Filipino American's death inspires police reform in California

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Angelo Quinto's death spurred calls for police reform in responding to mental health crisis.

A Filipino American's death has prompted new laws that reforms police arrest procedures and mental health treatment.

Gov. Gavin Newsom made California the first state to ban the citation of “excited delirium” as a cause of death.

It was very empowering knowing that what we have done is making a real major impact,” Bella Collins, the sister of the late Angelo Quinto, told NBC Asian America. “But we also remember why we’re there. We remember that my brother is not coming back to life.”

Navy veteran Angelo Quinto’s death has been compared to the death of George FLoyd, the Black man who died while being arrested, and spurred nationwide calls for police reform. Quinto's death motivated Assemblymember Mike Gipson (D-Carson, Watts) to author AB 360, banning the controversial term “excited delirium.”

“This issue was brought to my attention through very tragic circumstances," said Gipson. In 2020, Angelo Quinto, who during a mental health crisis, stopped breathing while two Antioch police officers knelt on his back and neck.

Before he lost consciousness, his mother recalled, he pleaded for his life: “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

As emergency med-techs transferred him to an amublance, it was noticed that Quinto had turned purple. The ambulance team tried to revive him using CPR. Three days later, the local hopital pronounced him dead.

"Mr. Quinto’s official cause of death was determined to be excited delirium,” Gipson said. “That is absolutely absurd.”

As a new law, California’s coroners can no longer use "excited delierium," a catch-all term as a cause of death in autopsy reports, and law enforcement agencies cannot utilize it in incident reports to explain why a suspect died.

The Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges against Antioch Police Department officers who restrained Quinto and held him facedown. His family had called police because the 30-year-old man was suffering a mental health crisis and needed help. A county pathologist concluded that Quinto died from “excited delirium.”

Quinto’s family later requested a private independent autopsy, and that autopsy concluded Quinto died from suffocation caused by restraint.

For years, the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association has opposed using the term as a legitimate diagnosis.

“Excited delirium is not a reliable, independent medical or psychiatric diagnosis. There are no diagnostic guidelines, and it is not recognized in the DSM-5, which is the main diagnosis guide for mental health providers. The only place where this term is continuously used is to describe deaths that occur in police custody,” Gipson’s office wrote.

AB 360 defined “excited delirium” as a term used to describe “a person’s state of agitation, excitability, paranoia, extreme aggression, physical violence, and apparent immunity to pain that is not listed in the most current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

It took a month after Quinto's death before the Antioch police issued an official report of the incident and only after it was pressed by local media.

After a prolonged investigation, the Contra Costa County District Attorney cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing. The DA's findings provided motivation for the family and their growing number of supporters to continue their fight for accountability and police reform.

On Sept. 30, 2021, Newsom also signed into law the Gipson-sponsored Angelo Quinto Act, which bans all police restraint techniques that cause positional asphyxia, including the techniques used to restrain Quinto.

In May, 2023, the City of Antioch unveiled the Angelo Quinto Community Response Team, who in place of police, will respond to mental health incidents The Community Response Team is trained to calm chaotic situations like Quinto's, rather than suppress them by force.

“They’ve been there at every step of the legislative process,” Gipson said. “Even though the law won’t bring back Angelo, we want to make sure no family has to go through what his family has.”

For Collins, her brother's death also brings to light the need for the Asian American community to combat the cultural stigma mental illnesses. The AANHPI communities have been found less prone to employ mental health services or even to discuss it because of the public shame attached to the condition.

“My brother struggled with his mental health a lot and felt that he couldn’t express it because that might be a weakness,” she said. “As a society, we need to talk about it to normalize it and, in turn, decriminalize it.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow me at Threads.net/eduardodiok, @DioknoEd on Twitter or at the  blog Views From the Edge.

Hmong American ex-police officer convicted in allowing George Floyd to die

Former officer Tou Thao was found guilty in the death of George Floyd.

The Hmong American ex-police officer involved with the murder of George Floyd was found guilty Thursday.

Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao ignored bystanders who pleaded for someone to help George Floyd as Derek Chauvin knelt on him, according to prosecutors.

Thao, along with former officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane were convicted of violating George Floyd’s civil rights after they failed to get medical attention for him as Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd's neck, ending his life.

"Today's guilty verdicts should serve as the guiding example of why police departments across America should expand and prioritize instruction on an officer's duty to intervene and recognize when a fellow officer is using excessive force," wrote the George Floyd legal team in a statement Thursday. 

"With that being said, the existing policies were not on trial; rather, on trial were the human beings present when the breath was taken from an unarmed man right in front of them," continued the statement.

In closing arguments on Tuesday — part of a month-long federal trial — prosecutors concluded that Thao, and the other two former police officers, “chose to do nothing” in the during Floyd’s plight, which eventually led to his death on May 25, 2020.

All three former officers were charged with “depriving Floyd of his right to medical care,” according to the Associated Press. Additionally, Thao and Kueng were charged with “failing to intervene to stop Derek Chauvin,” who was convicted of Floyd’s murder last April.

While Thao did not physically restrain the 46-year old Floyd, he kept bystanders away and ignonred their pleas to allow Floyd to get off the ground. Thao watched as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, prosecutors said. Chauvin, who was a more senior officer, was sentenced to 22 years and six months last June.

Floyd's nine-minute ordeal leading to his death was captured by a bystander's video spurring protests around the world calling for justice and police reform .

Sentencing on the civil rights convictions for Kueng, Lane and Thao will take place at a later date.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AAPI perspective, follow me on Twitter @DioknoEd.

Angelo Quinto's death spurs City Council to approve police reform measures

Angelo Quinto was handcuffed and not resisting police before police placed a knee on his neck.

Police reform measures were introduced during a marathon 7.5-hour special meeting of the Antioch City Council Friday, Feb. 27.

“It’s been a pretty turbulent week in the city of Antioch,” Mayor Lamar Thorope said to open the meeting, referring to several police-involved shootings that occurred last week.

Most of the Friday meeting was occupied hearing the hundreds of public comments submitted by residents, minority civil rights advocates, police supporters and family members of Angelo Quinto, the Filipino American who died Dec. 26 after police officers restrained him with a knee-to-the-neck, the same police technique that resulted in the death of George Floyd last Spring.

Thorpe offered seven proposals for police reform to the council including: Mental health crisis response, officer training, demilitarization of police, bodycams and dashcams, independent review of complaints, hiring and screening and public notification for major incidents.

All the proposals passed and were referred to staff for further study, basically to find the funding for the reform.

The first agenda item was hearing a presentation about an alternative to police responding to mental health episodes that has successfully been adopted in several cities. CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) involves sending out a mental health specialist and an EMT to deescalate those situations.

In their regularly scheduled city council meeting Tuesday, Police Chief Tammany Brooks said, “I do recognize that as devastated as we may feel, it does not compare to the pain felt by the family of the deceased,” Brooks said in part, stressing his interest in a transparent and trustworthy process.

“Should there be any violation of Antioch Police Department policies, I can assure the community I will hold these officers accountable for their actions. Regardless of the outcome, these investigations will be available for public review. Once completed, it is important that our community understand and have the opportunity to review the facts and circumstances surrounding this incident.”

The City Council, Quinto's famly and supporters are awaiting a coroner's report on the actual cause of Angelo Quinto's death.

On December 23, 2020, Quinto's sister Isabella Collins called Antioch police to their home, because he was acting erratically. When police arrived, Quinto was on the floor in his mother Maria Quinto-Collins's arms, and "he had already started to calm down." 

However, the two APD officers reportedly made no attempt to understand the situation and instead, immediately grabbed Quinto from his mother's arms, handcuffed him, and proceeded to "subdue" him by placing a knee on Quinto's neck for five minutes, according to his mother and sister.

By the time EMTs arrived, Quinto was already unconcious and bleeding from the mouth. He died in the hospital three days later.

The family is suing the Antioch Police Department for using excessive force  during a nonviolent incident.

Sunday Read: White extremists have infiltrated police ranks

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Louisiana police officer Raymond Mott (left) was fired after this photo of him surfaced doing a Nazi salute with a KKK member during an anti-immigration rally.

One of the ominous aspects of the racial awareness brought about in the aftermath of George Floyd's death is the apparent friendliness between the police and counter-protestors who show up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

In 2015, a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide, obtained by The Intercept, stated that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”

Not all police officers are racists! Let me repeat: Not all police officers are racists.

Despite the lofty words of law enforcement leaders promising to institute reforms and weed ou the bad cops, the rank-and-file Blue Line just doesn't get why the reforms are necessary.

Just before police teams tear-gassed and forced demonstrators away from the White House just prior to Donald Trump's photo op at St. John's Episocopal Church, white police officers warned armed white counter-protesters to go inside because of the pending police action. 

• During protests in New York City, a New that has been linked to white supremacist groups, basically the thumb and forefinger forming an "O" and the other three fingers extended.

• The Albuquerque police department in communicating with each other on their walkie-talkies referred to one militia group at another protest as “heavily armed friendlies,” according to KUNM radio station.

• Around 100 young, white men wandered around Philadelphia wielding baseball bats, tire irons and golf clubs, unchallenged by the white police officers. They were allegedly protecting their neighborhoods. They "beat the shit" out of one bystander recording them. Witnesses said officers "high-fived" some of the vigilantes.

• In Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed, the leader of the police union of the Minneapolis Police Department, Lt. Bob Kroll, was a defendant in a discrimination lawsuit brought by four black police officers against the MPD. In their complaint, the plaintiffs allege that the Lieutenant openly wore a “White Power badge” on his a motorcycle jacket.

The vast majority police officers mean to do well in their service to their communities. Most never shoot their guns during their entire career.

Unfortunately, those good men and women are having their profession sullied by a few bad officers who abuse the power given to them by the public.

The recent incidents that have occurred since the anti-racist demonstrations began occurring every day since Floyd's death but earlier studies have warned about the infiltration of police departments by white supremacists and the recruitment of current police officers by the same radical white organizations.

As early as 2006, an FBI assessment, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” warned of white supremacist plans of “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.” The report said that skinhead groups were encouraging members to become “ghost skins” within law enforcement agencies, a term the report said white supremacists use to describe members who “avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”

One of the cases cited in this report about an 18-year-old Chinese student in Nashville, Indiana, who was attacked by a white supremacist with a hatchet.

In 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security looked into right-wing extremism and its relationship to “violent radicalization” in the United States. 

“Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups,” said principle researcher Daryl Johnson told The Intercept.

The reports were so strongly denounced by Republicans that nothing came of them during the Obama administration. Obama's DOJ did enter into consent decrees with over a dozen police departments needing reform. However, Donald Trump's first Attorney General Jeff Sessions stopped enforcing the decrees and no new consent decrees have been signed by Trump's DOJ. 

Despite these reports' warnings, there have been an alarming number of reports of officers exposing racist beliefs and tendencies from -- Facebook photos of an officer giving a Nazi salute or wearing a Klan hood to discovery of actual membership in hate groups such as the KKK, the League of the South or the Oathkeepers. 

When discovered, these racist officers are usually fired, but the good intentions of higher-ups don't do anything to prevent the rise in white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement or falling prey to racist ideology.

Police departments must do more to root out the bad officers and they need to employ more sophisticated personality and bias tests to discover the racist beliefs held by the men and women trying to enter law enforcement.

What makes the matter worse, it appears that the police officers have adopted the "no snitch" rule when fellow officers commit unlawful acts or use excessive force against a suspect. If law enforcement hopes to regain the trust of the people they are supposed to serve, the majority of police officers need to speak out when they see one of their peers doing something wrong.

Although the First Amendment’s freedoms of association and expression mean it’s perfectly legal for anyone to join a hate group and still be a member of law enforcement, modern screening tests can uncover aggressive behavior, flawed decision-making and racial biases that might affect the way they perform their duties thus should disqualify police recruits' eligibility. According to the FBI memo, the government can limit employment opportunities of members “when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”

“Many people in these communities of color feel they have been the subject of police violence for decades,” said Samuel Jones, professor of law at the John Marshall School of Law in Chicago. “And when an officer engages in conduct that adds or enhances that divide," says Jones,  "they are ultimately jeopardizing the integrity of their agencies and putting their fellow officers in danger.”

Now that George Floyd's killing by a police officer allowed people to see what Blacks have been saying for years -- the unequal justice meted out to their community.

Pete Simi, a sociologist who spent decades studying the proliferation of white supremacists in the U.S. military, agreed. “The report underscores the problem of even discussing this issue. It underscores how difficult this issue is to get any traction on, because a lot of people don’t want to discuss this, let alone actually do something about it.”

It took Floyd's death to get a serious police reform bill introduced in Congress. The House of Representatives voted June 25 to pass H.R. 7120, the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020." 

The bill languishes unheard in the Mitch McConnell-controlled Senate.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news sprinkled with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.

Over 400 religious, civil rights organizations call for police reformSCREEN

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Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and over 400 other civil rights organizations Monday called on congressional leadership to swiftly rectify the legacy of white supremacy and anti-black racism that has led to police violence against Black people across the United States.

“People in Minnesota and around the country are rightfully angered and devastated by the police killing of George Floyd. The problem of state violence against communities of color, particularly Black people, has a long history in this country that we have not fully confronted or addressed," said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

In the Obama administration, Gupta headed up civil rights enforcement for the Department of Justice.

The list of supporting groups included almost two dozen AAPI organization: the Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest AAPI civil rights group,Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO, OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) and the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center

"Federal statutory reforms are urgently needed on a range of policing issues, including use of force, police accountability, racial profiling, militarization, data collection, and training," said the letter's signers.

“Now is the time for Congress to pass meaningful police reform legislation. While we appreciate hearings and resolutions, we need comprehensive measures to happen. We need Congress to truly step up to the plate and protect Black communities from the systemic perils of over policing, police brutality, misconduct, and harassment, and end the impunity in which officers operate in taking the lives of Black people. It is your moral and ethical duty to ensure Black people and communities are free from the harm and threats from law enforcement and to curtail state sanctioned police violence and militarized police responses,” the groups said in the letter.

The signers requested a meeting with congressional leadership to discuss urgently needed reforms that ensure police officers live up to their oath to protect and serve all people in the United States.

The federal reforms addressed in the letter include: 

• Require a federal standard that use of force be reserved for only when necessary as a last resort after exhausting reasonable options, and incentivize states to implement this standard; require the use of de-escalation techniques, and the duty to intervene; ban the use of force as a punitive measure or means of retaliation against individuals who only verbally confront officers, or against individuals who pose a danger only to themselves; and require all officers to accurately report all uses of force;
• Prohibit all maneuvers that restrict the flow of blood or oxygen to the brain, including neck holds, chokeholds, and similar excessive force, deeming the use of such force a federal civil rights violation;
• Prohibit racial profiling with robust data collection on police-community encounters and law enforcement activities. Data should capture all demographic categories and be disaggregated;
• Eliminate federal programs that provide military equipment to law enforcement;
• Prohibit the use of no-knock warrants, especially for drug searches;
• Change the 18 U.S.C. Sec. 242 mens rea requirement from willfulness to recklessness, permitting prosecutors to successfully hold law enforcement accountable for the deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties;
• Develop a national public database that would cover all police agencies in the United States and its territories; and,
• End the qualified immunity doctrine that prevents police from being held legally accountable when they break the law.

The complete letter and list of signatories are available here.