A spit hood is a lightweight mesh bag placed over the head of a person in custody to stop them from spitting on or biting the officers, guards, or medics around them. The fabric is woven loosely enough to let the wearer breathe and see out, but tightly enough to catch saliva and other fluids. Police departments, jails, and sometimes ambulance crews use them. They also sit at the center of a running dispute: agencies call them basic protective gear, while civil rights groups and medical examiners have tied them to a growing list of in-custody deaths.
How a Spit Hood Is Built
The typical spit hood is a disposable bag made of breathable mesh, usually polypropylene or nylon. An elastic band at the bottom cinches around the neck to hold it in place without choking the wearer. Some versions add a reinforced panel over the mouth and nose for extra fluid containment. There are no rigid parts, no straps, no hardware. It is cloth and elastic, nothing more.
At bulk pricing a single hood runs roughly $3 to $10, cheap enough that agencies throw them out after one use. The simplicity cuts both ways. Nothing can mechanically fail, but nothing stops the fabric from saturating and sealing against the airway if the person vomits or bleeds inside it.
When Officers Use One
The common trigger is the same across every setting: someone restrained or in custody is spitting, biting, or credibly threatening to do so.
Most applications happen during law enforcement encounters. Officers put hoods on people during arrests, in the back of patrol cars, during transport, and at booking. A person who spits during a traffic stop might wear one for the rest of the ride to the station.
Jails and prisons are the other main setting. Inmates who spit through cell doors or during transfers get hooded until staff can secure them. Some facilities use spit hoods during cell extractions when staff expect spitting or biting.
Paramedics also use them, particularly during ambulance transport of combative patients. In the back of an ambulance there is no room to back away from someone who is intoxicated, in psychiatric crisis, or otherwise agitated, so the hood goes on the patient instead.
Hospitals and psychiatric facilities use them as well, but the rules there get more complicated. If a patient can take the hood off themselves, it may not count as a restraint under federal healthcare rules. If they can’t, it probably does, which triggers requirements like a physician’s order, time limits, and continuous monitoring.1The Joint Commission. Is a Spit Guard or Hood a Restraint?
Why Agencies Say They Need Them
The main justification is infection control. Officers, correctional staff, and medics who get spit on face some risk of exposure to HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. The risk is not zero, but it is lower than the rationale implies.
The CDC has noted that saliva contains compounds that inhibit HIV, that the virus is rarely isolated from saliva even in infected people, and that of the hundreds of thousands of AIDS cases the agency has recorded, none has been attributed to saliva exposure alone.2Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Transmission of HIV Possibly Associated with Exposure of Mucous Membrane The picture shifts when blood is visibly mixed in, which is why protocols separate plain spitting from situations involving facial bleeding.
OSHA’s Bloodborne Pathogens Standard does treat saliva as potentially infectious in some contexts, particularly dental work where blood contamination is expected, and that regulation gives agencies a legal basis for issuing protective equipment to workers.3Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Classification of Saliva in Dental Procedures Under the Bloodborne Pathogens Standard The standard was written with healthcare workers in mind, not street arrests. The space between the regulatory justification and the actual medical risk is part of what drives the policy debate.
How Spit Hoods Are Supposed to Be Applied
Applying a spit hood is a use of force. It has to meet constitutional reasonableness standards and get documented like any other force application. Specific procedures vary by agency, but a core set of rules shows up almost everywhere.
- Only officers who have completed agency competency training may apply one.
- When circumstances allow, two officers should be present during application.
- The person wearing the hood has to be watched and listened to continuously for signs of breathing trouble.
- Officers have to write a report describing the behavior that prompted the hood, how it was applied, and any deviations from procedure.
- When practical, the application should be recorded on audio or video.
The situations where a hood should never go on matter just as much. A spit hood should not be used on anyone who is vomiting, bleeding heavily from the mouth or nose, complaining of breathing difficulty, or unconscious. If any of those conditions develop after the hood is on, it has to come off right away. Agencies also prohibit using the hood as punishment and spraying chemical agents through the fabric. Federal investigations have documented violations of both rules.
The hood is meant to be temporary. Once the spitting stops or the person is somewhere distance can replace the hood, it is supposed to come off. Most policies warn against leaving it on for “unreasonable” periods without defining a maximum, which leaves a lot of discretion to the officer on scene.
Why They Can Be Dangerous
The central safety concern is suffocation. If the mesh gets saturated with saliva, blood, vomit, or mucus, it can seal against the mouth and nose and cut off airflow. The danger multiplies when the hooded person is held face-down, intoxicated, in a state of excited delirium, or otherwise unable to clear their own airway. A hood combined with prone restraint is the setup for positional asphyxia.
Controlled research on healthy adults wearing spit hoods has found no clinically significant changes in breathing or circulation. The same research acknowledged that asphyxiation concerns are grounded in real incidents and that vomiting through the mask could obstruct airflow.4ScienceDirect. Further Study on the Physiological Effects of an Alternative Spit Mask The people who get hooded in the field are rarely calm or healthy. They are often intoxicated, hyperventilating, restrained, or in psychiatric crisis.
Investigative reporting has identified at least 31 people who died in police custody wearing spit hoods between 2013 and 2023. Coroners named the hood as a possible cause or contributing factor in at least five of those cases. In most of the rest, medical examiners either could not determine a cause of death or attributed it to drug intoxication or other factors. That ambiguity is itself a problem. When someone dies restrained, intoxicated, and hooded, separating out what each factor contributed is genuinely difficult, and the hood’s role is probably underreported.
One widely reported 2020 case involved a man in mental health crisis who was handcuffed, placed face-down on pavement, and hooded after he spat toward officers. He suffocated. In another case, jail staff placed a second hood over the first after the original became soaked with saliva and blood; the person died, and the medical examiner noted the hoods but ruled the cause of death undetermined. The pattern that keeps repeating is that the hood alone may not kill, but added to prone restraint, physical exhaustion, and an underlying condition, it can push the situation past recovery.
The Legal Rules Around Spit Hoods
No federal law specifically authorizes or bans spit hoods. Their legality runs through the same constitutional rules that govern any use of force. For arrests, the Fourth Amendment requires that force be objectively reasonable given the threat and the level of resistance. For people already in custody, the Eighth Amendment prohibits conditions that pose a substantial risk of serious harm.
When those standards are violated, the main legal avenue for the person hooded, or their family, is a federal civil rights lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which lets individuals sue government officials who deprive them of constitutional rights.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 US Code 1983 – Civil Action for Deprivation of Rights Families of people who died hooded have brought wrongful death and excessive force claims under that statute, and some have ended in multimillion-dollar settlements.
The Department of Justice has also weighed in through investigations of individual police departments. A 2014 DOJ civil rights investigation of one major city’s police division flagged an incident where officers put a spit hood on a person and then pepper-sprayed through the mask, calling the action “cruel” and “unnecessary punishment” that went unquestioned by supervisors. Those consent-decree investigations have sometimes produced reforms in how departments use restraint devices, but there is no DOJ-wide policy banning spit hoods.
A small but growing number of jurisdictions have moved to ban or restrict spit hood use by statute, with momentum building after high-profile deaths. Some bills prohibit any device that completely covers a person’s face and require updated training and alternative equipment. Most jurisdictions still allow spit hoods under general use-of-force policies with no specific statutory limits.
Where agencies have restricted spit hoods, they have generally replaced them with a combination of officer-worn face shields, surgical masks placed over the detained person’s mouth and nose, and plexiglass partitions in transport vehicles and booking areas. Each option has limits. Face shields protect the officer but do not contain fluids at the source. Surgical masks can also saturate. Plexiglass works in fixed settings but not during arrests.
If a Spit Hood Was Used on You or a Relative
If you are placed in a spit hood and have any trouble breathing, say so clearly and keep saying it. Most agency policies require officers to remove the hood immediately when the wearer reports a breathing problem. Whether they actually do is a different question, which is why the record of what happened matters.
After the incident, request copies of any body camera footage, booking records, and use-of-force reports. Those documents establish timing and sequence. If you believe the hood was applied without justification, left on too long, or combined with other force that put health at risk, that paper trail is the foundation of a complaint or legal claim. Internal affairs complaints go to the agency itself. Federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 are available when a constitutional violation occurred.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 US Code 1983 – Civil Action for Deprivation of Rights Talk to an attorney with police misconduct experience early. These claims carry strict filing deadlines.