Category: Police

A man who is dying from positional asphyxiation will not speak at a normal, conversational pace.

He will speak in short, repetitive statements that fade and trail off at the end, in an obvious rhythm matching their short breaths; this is because they are unable to breathe deeply enough to construct a longer sentence.

Typically, they panic and start pleading, their voice cracks and changes pitch, display acute fear and become less coherent over time.

They may make nonsensical statements, begin asking for help from people who are not there, ask for their mother and so on as panic increases and consciousness starts to fade.

When sudden tranquility follows vigorous resistance, there is a high risk of death.

These things emerge consistently during positional asphyxiation, but they are often disregarded or not recognised by police and other workers.

This can happen despite education and training on the matter. Over a career, a police officer may personally come across dozens of instances where an offender starts to panic as they begin to asphyxiate, but there is no long-term negative outcome.

Death from positional asphyxiation is actually quite rare compared to total arrests, but there are many more near misses and a large number of people who are actually struggling to breathe, but are not believed by police. And there are also plenty of instances where offenders are lying, and use it as a tactic to escape custody.

There will also be instances where people suddenly die due to medical or drug issues – this has happened when no force is used at all, and may coincidentally occur during arrest.

This all leads to reinforcement in the mind of the officer that positional asphyxiation either doesn’t exist or is due purely to medical issues and drug abuse. Pleas and saying “I can’t breathe” are ignored, because some believe that “if you can talk, you can breathe”.

You can run your entire career and avoid serious repercussions with this attitude… or one day you might be recorded on video, telling a pleading prisoner “if you can talk, you can breathe”, while you sit on them until they die.

Better to simply change position just in case, is it not?

In any case, the signs are easy to identify once you’ve observed the pattern across multiple incidents in real time and heard it for yourself.

For training and education purposes, this video depicts several instances where men have died in custody after being restrained. Viewers will hopefully notice a pattern emerging in each instance.

https://keato.info/the-audible-signs-of-positional-asphyxiation/