One detail that had been mised on me was the fact that while I see depictions of cops stuffing handcuffed suspects into the back of police cruisers, I never see the suspects getting seatbelted. Now with their hands shackled behind their back I’m not assuming they are doing it themselves.
Are the cops belting them in? Wouldn’t it be a liability for them to be unbelted back there?
The one time I rode in the back, I didn’t have a seat belt. I don’t think there was one- the seat itself was like a single piece molded from plastic. I assume that the wire mesh in between me and the driver would have protected him from me in the event of a crash- I would hate to fly up there and brain him… 
The back of a police car is generally reinforced when they add in the cage. You aren’t going anywhere. Worst case scenario, you fly about 6 inches forward. Your momentum wouldn’t be enough to break through the glass.
Would that still be enough for someone to make a claim against the police department concerned?
No belts in the back seats of police cars in California.
I would expect that if an accident were bad enough, a too-tightly-handcuffed-behind-the-back helpless individual trapped inside a single piece of rigid molded plastic could get hurt badly enough to sue.
They don’t secure you in the back of a paddy wagon either. You wind up sliding all over the place.
The policy must, then, differ from agency to agency and from state to state. The sheriff’s office (in metro Florida) from which I retired, required that detainees be seat belted in the back seat of patrol cars. I do not know how one would get around the liability of not seat belting a detainee. Also, mandatory seat belt laws don’t necessarily only apply to the front seat.
Is there a significant counter-risk of being handcuffed and belted into a burning or submerged vehicle that makes seatbelts less of a clear benefit to otherwise restrained backseat passengers?
When I was arrested, I was put in the back of a “police wagon” (aka paddy wagon, black maria, divvy van)
This is like a ute/pickup with an enclosed rear section with two longitudinal stainless steel seats. No belts. I was alone in the back, I was arrested by calm, professional officers who drove sedately -and I wasn’t cuffed - but it was all I could do to brace myself any way I could against sliding all over the place on my way to the station. I have heard reports of angry cops giving arrestees “the sudden lane changing treatment”. So if I’d been arrested for hitting a cop, thrown in the back cuffed with five other guys, all bets are off. We’d probably be banging each other’s skulls together all the way.
From watching almost two decades of “Cops” episodes, I can tell you that most of the time the detained/arrested person is not belted in. Only once in a while you will see an officer reaching in awkwardly to buckle in the alleged perp. I always thought is was potentially dangerous to reach across the perp in a prone position. Even if the guy/gal is cuffed, it still looks like the officer is absorbing some amount of risk.
Wow, I’ve never thought of this…
I would have thought that by now there would have been a ton of multi-million dollar law suits resulting from injured perps (the simple law of averages says that police cars carrying arrested suspects have to crash pretty regularly), and that would force police forces to buckle up their suspects.
Actually, I think that there would be much more lawsuits by families of drunks that managed to strangle themselves with seat belts.
One of us doesn’t understand basic physics.
As I understand it, your momentum is based on how fast the car is going, and how fast it decelerates, not on how far you have to travel. If the police car hits something solid, it might well decelerate very quickly.
Do you really think that people wouldn’t need seatbelts if we just made the front windshield closer?
We have seatbelts in the backs of our cars. I have never used them. I do not wish to climb in the back with someone I just arrested and put myself in such a vunerable position. Although they are cuffed they still have mouths and most of them have teeth. In our van that is designed for prisoner transport they have a strap to hold on to behind their backs while wearing cuffs. No seatbelts.
Seatbelt would be the least of your problems in this situation. Back doors of police cruisers ordinarily have the inside handles disabled–the doors can only be opened from the outside. So seatbelt or not, you’re staying in the car until somebody lets you out.
The Calaveras County Sheriff’s Department has (and uses) seat belts in their back seats.
My department’s policy requires that all prisoners be properly belted in. It is a liability issue, in case of accidents.
In practice, however, things are different. When I first arrest someone and take them to the station for processing, I almost never seat belt them. Of course, it only takes about five minutes from anywhere in town and speeds are less than 40mph.
When I transport someone to the county jail (45 minutes away), I ALWAYS secure the seatbelt. If they are combative, I will have another officer assist me. I pin the suspect’s head against the back screen and hand the seatbelt to the other officer who leans in from the opposite door to secure it. In addition, I tie a hobble restraint around their ankles so that they can’t raise their feet off the floor to kick.
So if I am in your jurisdiction will you promise not to cite me for a seat belt violation if I’m only going somewhere 5 minutes away and travelling under 40mph?
As hinted above. seat belts themselves can be dangerous and used as weapons especially if someone else has to seat belt someone else in. School buses generally don’t have seat belts and that is one of the big reasons. The risk of a school bus crash isn’t that great compared to the risk of junior high students beating each other with the buckles or tying up and strangling a poor looser in the back with the strap.
I am happy to see that several people have $$$$$$$$ dancing in their heads over a theoretical issue such as this. This mentality is what allows personal injury lawyers masturbate into piles of $100 bills every night. God bless them but only because they are smart enough to exploit general stupidity for their own good.