See my topic of "Freak Out" and that is one instance for using prone. When it takes seven police and fire personnel to just get him to stop digging his finger nails into the asphalt, trying to kill anyone in his arm reach, and feeling no pain, yes, it's time to put him prone. Try getting all those people into the rig, along with yourself and your partner. In that case he was prone for all of 7-10 minutes. We had a high incident rate of such cases for a town of a little less than 20,000. I've seen guys that have already been given 100mg. of Thorazine and massive amounts of Valium and keep right going. How do you restrain someone that had just been tazered six times and still go on to break a police officer's nose? Shoot 'em. I've seen that before too.
I'm not trying to get anyone to change the way do it. If you're against it, then don't do it. But for those of us that have had to do it, don't put it down. Nobody died from it in our care. We had safeguards for both us and the patient. I've heard of instances where someone had died while being prone, but how much of it was from other influences, OD, alcohol toxicity, whatever was making them violent in the first place? That's what should be looked at first.