Across the U.S., the hoods have been cited for wrongful death or serious injury during arrests or in detention settings.
Standing in his Seattle law office Friday, attorney Edwin Budge read the warning label printed in all capital letters on the package of a TranZport Hood, the brand name of a kind of “spit hood” police and corrections officers place on detainees to prevent them from transferring body fluids or biting. “Warning: improper use of TranZport Hood can cause injury or death,” Budge said, reading into the phone. “Improper use may cause asphyxiation, suffocation, or drawing in one’s own fluid.” Spit hoods like the one Budge described are under fresh scrutiny after body camera footage released Wednesday showed police in Rochester, N. Y., place a hood over 41-year-old Daniel Prude during a March arrest. Across the United States, the hoods have been cited for wrongful death or serious injury during arrests or in detention settings. Prude was handcuffed, hooded and forced to the ground before an officer put his knee to his back for at least two minutes. Video shows Prude – whose family said he was in the midst of a mental health crisis – eventually fall silent and go limp. He was taken to a hospital and was removed from life support a week later. “The hoods boil my blood more than any other type of police force used because of the inevitability of harm again someone who is mentally ill, vomiting or on drugs. [Hoods] induce panic: it’s like something out of Abu Ghraib,” said Budge, whose practice focuses on custodial deaths and excessive police force. He has litigated and settled multiple cases where spit hoods were a factor in someone’s injury or death, including a case that led to a 2015 settlement that was reported at the time to be among the largest ever for a Seattle police use-of-force complaint. Spit hoods, sometimes called spit socks or spit masks, are most often used in prison environments and on suspects in police custody, said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina. He said hoods have been used for decades – including “in prisons and torture chambers” – but grew more common in legitimate use during the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Alpert likened the negative outcomes with hoods in recent decades to the way car crashes are often described as ‘accidents’: “They’re not really ‘accidents’ – there’s human error and mechanical error. With spit masks, it’s the same.” There is no apparent national or industry standard for manufacturing of hoods; Alpert said is unaware of any national training best practices for instructing police on how to use them and the extend to which any policies exist, they’re specific to individual departments.
