- Spit hoods are used by
police or correctional officers to prevent suspects and inmates from contaminating them with their bodily fluids, like spit or blood. - The mesh bags are placed over a suspect's head.
- In March, officers in Rochester, New York, used a
spit hood onDaniel Prude until he stopped breathing. Prude died seven days later. - Prude's death isn't the only one that has been associated with the controversial piece of police equipment.
"Spit hoods" are mesh bags used by police and correctional workers in the US and abroad to protect officers from a suspect's bodily fluids.
The equipment, which tends to be used when there is a risk of infectious disease, is controversial and has been used during several in-custody deaths.
In March, in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York, police put one of the hoods on a Black man experiencing a mental health crisis in Rochester after he claimed to have the coronavirus.
After placing the hood over Daniel Prude's head, police pressed his head into the pavement for two minutes, and he stopped breathing.
He was taken to the hospital, where he died seven days later.
Joseph L. Giacalone, a retired NYPD Detective Sergeant and John Jay College professor, said that the devices were commonly used during the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s and '90s.
At the time, they weren't hoods, but rather plastic shields that were wrapped around the person's head by a member of emergency services or a hospital technician.
Typically they were only applied if someone was actively spitting or trying to bite responding police or emergency technicians, he said.
"What we had when I was a young cop, we used to call them the Hannibal Lecter shield," he said. "It's something for the protection of not only the cops, but also the medical personnel who come into contact with this person."
The devices are often used inside jails during conflicts with inmates.
During the coronavirus pandemic, some police departments have begun using them on the streets more often, in fear that the suspect might spread contaminated respiratory droplets during an arrest.
In April, police union officials in the UK called for all officers working during the pandemic to be equipped with the devices.
The UK-based human rights organization, Liberty, called the hoods "dangerous and degrading" and opposed their use on the streets, Sky News reported at the time.
In 2016, when London's largest police agency announced it was equipping officers with spit hoods, Amnesty International's issued a similar statement, calling the devices "cruel and dangerous."
Giacalone said that when there is a mental health issue at play, responding to a crisis can be especially challenging because you never know what the trigger could be.
When someone is having a crisis, officers don't want to make it worse, but also need to think about protecting themselves and others biting or spitting, he said.
The goal is to get the person in crisis to a hospital as quickly as possible, where they can be evaluated and cared for, he said.
While the hoods are designed to breathe through, it's harder for officers to observe whether someone is breathing freely — or has vomited — while the mask is hiding their face.
In 2015, an inmate at a Denver, Colorado, jail choked on his own vomit and died when deputies restrained him with a spit hood while he was facedown on his stomach, The Guardian reported at the time.
In 2013, correctional officers placed a hood on an inmate in Nashville, Tennessee, after he threatened to spit at them.
The man, Michael Jones, told the officers he couldn't breathe, and they adjusted the hood and left him to calm down. Eight minutes later, when they removed the hood, "vomit spilled out," and the inmate had died, The Tennessean reported.
There is no blanket national policing policy on spit hoods. In many cases, police departments don't have specific guidelines about how and when to use spit hoods, and it's left up to individual departments to regulate use.
Giacalone said police are often not aware of the potential harm of spit hoods.
"I think if you're claustrophobic or you have asthma, that could all come into play," he said. "But cops don't know that, and if you're going to be biting and spitting at people, you need to know better too."
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