![]() ![]() ACT-UP posters and gay and lesbian “kiss-ins” were specifically designed to push back against the notion that homosexual people were inherently diseased. Scientists knew by 1987 that touching a person with AIDS, or even kissing, would not transmit HIV. ![]() These activists were mocking police power, but also homophobic ignorance. police put on yellow rubber gloves to “protect” themselves from catching the virus from demonstrators. Protesters retaliated, chanting, “Your gloves don’t match your shoes!” during an international AIDS conference in 1987, D.C. In the late eighties, many police officers in the United States, like much of the general public, tended to wrongly view all gay men as dangerous disease carriers. When the queer activist group ACT-UP protested in Washington, D.C. At demonstrations, police officers donned rubber gloves to protect themselves from what some saw as a primarily “homosexual disease” that, if contracted, was reasonably seen as a death sentence.īut these gloves were also a sign of bigotry. The idea that police need protection from citizens’ “bodily fluids” arose at another highly politicized moment: the gay rights and AIDS street activism of the 1980s. The phrase “bodily fluids” entered the popular lexicon as a euphemism for how HIV spread via semen, blood, or vaginal secretions. The “spit hood”-also known as a “spit sock” or “spit guard”-is a relatively new piece of equipment used by police and prison guards to protect themselves from those in their custody, but they are also often used to punish people who do not quickly submit to an arrest. The spit hood does something else remarkable: it turns police into the potential victims, rather than the perpetrators, of violence. The very premise of a spit hood-a device to protect police from a “dangerous person”-is part of a larger process of transforming police officers into potential victims of the mentally ill, bystanders, potential suspects, and even children.Īt a time when police departments around the country have been identified as centers of systematic abuse, racial profiling, and repeated shooting and killings ( over 1,000 people were killed by police in 2020, half of them Black), identifying police officers as potential targets of harm from citizens justifies maintaining or increasing the use of force. Even as calls to dismantle, defund, and rethink policing entirely have increased, exaggerating the dangers faced by police now serves as a rallying cry for the so-called “Blue Lives Matter” movement. ![]() While police shootings and chokeholds have come under increasing scrutiny, our national review of police use-of-force policies has paid little attention to spit hoods. Spit hoods are used on the grounds that they protect police from infectious disease and biting.īut they are inhumane, often deadly, and should be banned. Like Eric Garner, George Floyd, and others before him, Garcia cried out “I can’t breathe” before he suffocated to death. In November 2019, Black military veteran Gregory Edwards died alone in a Florida jail cell after being pepper sprayed, hooded, and strapped to a restraining chair.Īnd on February 4, 2021, Jose Albert Lizarraga Garcia died in a grocery store parking lot after being wrestled to the ground and put in a spit hood by police in Indio, California. ![]() His death, the medical examiner declared, was homicide due to “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” In September, the world saw a video of Rochester, New York, police putting a spit hood over Daniel Prude’s head and face as he sat naked and handcuffed on a cold, wintry street. The mentally ill man was dead a week later. Photo credit: Sandra Sanders/Shutterstock ![]()
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