Moreover, prone positioning came to be regarded “without scientific evidence” as “particularly dangerous” to restrained suspects who are “under the influence of intoxicants such as alcohol and/or stimulants, experiencing mental distress, or in the agitated, incoherent state known as excited delirium,” as well as those who have been TASERed. Nonetheless, the debate about suspect positioning “gradually translated into the unsupported idea that any and all prone positioning for any length of time is immediately dangerous.” Hall points out that the medical examiner’s original work on the effects of positioning was shown to be “fraught with methodological errors,” and that other, more sophisticated studies disputed alleged adverse findings. More articles warning about “positional asphyxia” and “restraint asphyxia” followed in medical journals and law enforcement publications and positioning became a widespread training and policy issue. Origin of Controversy Concern about the relationship between suspect positioning and death first arose in the early 1980s after a medical examiner in Washington State analyzed three cases in which prisoners were transported while hogtied and concluded that such positioning was associated with sudden in-custody death because of the suffocating effect on breathing and the inability of the subjects to shift to a different position.
An internationally recognized expert on excited delirium syndrome, Hall is also on the faculty for the certification course in Force Science Analysis conducted by the Force Science Institute. Christine Hall, an emergency room physician and a medical faculty member at the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary. “Rather than focusing solely on one type of force or another, the goal of the study is to evaluate all use-of-force events to better understand which subjects and situations may represent particular risk.” “The true understanding of use-of-force events will come from comprehensive, scientific protocols such as this one, which was carried out under the rigorous conditions of a scientific medical study and supervised by the Institutional Review Boards of the universities involved,” Hall told Force Science News. Even among suspects supposed to be at high risk-the drug and alcohol intoxicated and those with mental illness-there appears to be no scientific basis for believing that prone positioning is as dangerous as its reputation suggests, the researchers report.įindings from a Force Science Institute study reveal that even before the object coming into view can be recognized as a gun, a shot is off. “udden in-custody death,” the study concludes, “has more to do with the features of the individual” than with his or her positioning. In fact, the only subject who died in more than 1,200 consecutive force encounters that the team meticulously analyzed was lying on his side, a position commonly advocated for its presumed safety. In particular, the study group challenges the widely held belief that simply placing a subject face-down in a prone position after a use of force creates a substantial threat to life. An exaggeration of the sudden in-custody death problem is generating “persecution and prosecution” of LEOs and their agencies and is resulting in “reactionary changes in policy and procedure that may well be based in conjecture rather than fact,” according to new findings by a Canadian research team.
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