Law enforcement agencies are struggling to find alternatives to dangerous restraint techniques

Years after Elijah McClain was placed in the fatal prone position by police officers, law enforcement agencies in Colorado are being forced to develop new rules and training to use the prone position in the field – or actively avoid it.

They have one year to do this, but ultimately there is no established practice as to when and for how long this position should be used, which some police chiefs say is used several times a week.

And when it's all over, Colorado will likely be left with a patchwork of rules that vary from city to city and county to county as to when a suspect can be forcibly placed facedown.

“I think it's fair to ask whether this tactic is being abused or misused and whether we can do better,” said Attorney General Phil Weiser. “Without consistent policies, we're more likely to make mistakes.”

Earlier this summer, Governor Jared Polis signed a law requiring police and sheriff departments to develop a policy on and then train officers to use the prone position on suspects.

Lawmakers originally tried to limit the use of prone force strictly to cases where police officers would use deadly force, but police chiefs shied away from doing so, said Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly.

“The reason police put someone in the prone position is to stop the fight,” he said. “When people are on the ground and face down, they lose their ability to fight, but you don't want to leave them in that position and you don't want to be on top of them because then they can't breathe.”

Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

Weekly said law enforcement has become smarter about the use of the prone position and the dangers. At the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, Weekly prohibits his officers from ever sitting or kneeling on a person who is in the prone position, and a person in the prone position must be turned over or placed in a sitting position “as quickly as possible,” he said.

If the person continues to resist the officers, Weekly said, they are allowed to handcuff their legs.

“We are trying to get the situation under control as quickly as possible and get them out of this situation,” he said. “People have died in this situation all over the country.”

One of them was Arthur Roybal.

Grand jury dismisses charges in Adams prison case

On December 24, 2022, Roybal appeared to have a psychotic episode in the Adams County Jail. He was naked, grunting, and screaming incomprehensible things. According to a grand jury report, officers called for nursing staff and they devised a strategy to move Roybal from the jail cell to the Sallyport area where he would receive medical care.

When officers entered his cell, they cuffed his arms and legs and laid him on his back, but then turned him onto his stomach — even though he was handcuffed, the report says. Finally, they laid him facedown on a gurney and strapped him down. They left him lying on his stomach while he waited to be transported to a medical facility. While he was thus cuffed, he stopped breathing and CPR failed.

The Adams County Coroner ruled that his death was due to methamphetamine poisoning, but that “prolonged restraint in the prone position” also contributed to his death.

The coroner also spoke of manslaughter.

Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

This confused Adams County District Attorney Brian Mason, who didn't know if anyone was actually responsible for the man's death. He turned the entire case over to a county grand jury, and in the end, the jury decided that no charges should be filed against any of the responding officers.

Mason said he felt comfortable with the decision, but putting Mr. Roybal in the prone position was “clearly a mistake.”

“It was inconsistent with best practices and to some extent inconsistent with what the deputies and the deputy supervisors should have known about how to handle a situation like this,” he said. “And I think the sheriff … is aware of that and accepts that constructive criticism.”

Not enough research available

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit think tank and research organization on policing, has been studying police practices for decades and working with agencies around the world to improve training.

His organization is beginning to research the prone restraint and the deaths associated with it, with the goal of creating a list of best practices to determine when and how police officers should and should not use the position.

“The education and training we have on this topic is not enough, it is inadequate,” Wexler said.

Wexler's organization has reached out to cardiologists and experts to find out what happens to a person who lies face down for too long. When people die, it's usually because of positional asphyxia.

“What we know now is that you have to recognize when someone is in crisis, treat it as a medical emergency and recognize that if someone is unwilling to cooperate, it may not be because they are resisting police, it may be because they are unable to communicate,” Wexler said. “They are in some sort of medical emergency or psychotic episode. In those situations, more force can sometimes be counterproductive.”

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

In Colorado Between 2012 and 2021, 14 people died after being placed in the prone position by police officers, according to an Associated Press analysis.

McClain, a 23-year-old black man from Aurora, was on his way home from a supermarket in August 2019 when officers stopped him after receiving a call about a suspicious person.

Within a few seconds, they applied a carotid chokehold and laid him on his stomach on the ground.

During months of legal proceedings against police officers and paramedics accused of his death last year, several experts said his condition worsened because he was unable to breathe properly while lying on his stomach while vomiting.

A former police officer and two former paramedics were found guilty in McClain's death after prosecutors managed to convince three juries that emergency responders failed to properly hear McClain's cries for help, that he was unable to breathe, and that they failed to effectively place him in the recovery position in the final minutes of his life.

Hart Van Denburg/CPR News

Putting someone in the prone position is not, in and of itself, a use of force under state law and police officer standards, Weiser said.

While working on the new law earlier this year, Democratic Senator Julie Gonzales made it clear that violating the prone position rules within one's own police department does not automatically equate to excessive use of force.

However, Weiser noted that authorities need to closely monitor these prone restraint cases because in the future a prosecutor could charge an officer with excessive force if he or she deems the circumstances under which the person was placed in the prone position to be excessive or lengthy.

Or whether it contributed to a death.

Wheat Ridge Police Chief Chris Murtha is working on updating his officers' prone position policies. He felt their training needed to be revised because he increasingly found that prone restraints were viewed as controversial.

“We've seen people get injured or lose their lives because of these restraints,” Murtha said. “And we're under the most scrutiny I've had since I joined the police force, and that continues, so we have to be sensitive.”

Murtha said that despite all the new rules, prone restraints are really important in police service.

“We want to have an advantage. We don't always have a size or strength advantage when it comes to the safety of not only the officer but the person we're taking into custody,” he said. “It's important that we know how to use that position, when to use it and how quickly to get out of it.”