Less-lethal force requires plenty more from an officer
One of the more intriguing items in the newspaper last week was printed Wednesday, when The New Mexican reported on a tense situation involving Santa Fe police that went incredibly … right.
Prologue: On Tuesday, cops responded to the 800 block of Alarid Street in the Railyard district, where a suspect, Miguel Montoya, was accused of stabbing a man, causing serious injuries.
Police said Montoya did not comply with their orders to drop his weapon. But instead of employing deadly force in an incident that had already caused significant harm, officers used, in cop-speak, “less-lethal impact munitions.”
In other words, they fired a beanbag, rather than bullets, to bring down the suspect.
At a time when every move cops make will be parsed, pounded and possibly prosecuted, such a resolution — on the surface, at least — looks successful. But as with all things involving police and police work, it’s much more complex than that.
And the men and women in blue know it.
“It’s called ‘less lethal,’ ” cautioned Santa Fe Police Department Deputy Chief Ben Valdez, referring to the tools sometimes used in such situations. “It’s not nonlethal.”
I was curious about where lines are drawn between less lethal, nonlethal and lethal, so Valdez and Lt. Lawrence Barnett showed me.
Arrayed at the far end of a table were several devices, ranging from pepper spray to a pair of yellow Tasers to a beanbag-firing shotgun to a 40 mm launcher that propels a Nerf-like projectile that doesn’t feel so spongy when it hits the skin.
All have their place in Santa Fe cops’ arsenal, all depend on significant training, and all are situational in a job where every situation is different.
Valdez noted he’s proud of the work that’s gone into making sure officers have access to these weapons. But he doesn’t kid himself or anyone else; the tool is only as good as the training of the person who uses it.
“People say, ‘I’ll just rise to the occasion,’ ” he said. “You never rise to the occasion. What you do is fall to your level of training. So if you have never been there in that situation, your mind has nowhere to go but to say, ‘Hey, I’ve been here before and here’s what will work or here’s what may work in the situation.’ ”
Evidently, training worked well in the Railyard incident.
Valdez said he was listening to the call as it unfolded, knowing even from miles away it had the potential to turn ugly: A violent suspect, a badly injured victim, a populated backdrop with homes, businesses and tourist-heavy shops nearby.
Santa Fe officers, working in teams so those using less-lethal munitions had backup by officers who could use lethal force if necessary, “made a decision and executed perfectly,” Valdez said.
The result: An officer-involved shooting that, in essence, may have saved a life.
Valdez said less-lethal munitions are not a guarantee for either police firing such devices or the person on the receiving end. In Santa Fe, there’s a five-page policy that governs their use, but he notes if a recipient were to be hit
with a less-lethal device and to fall from an elevated position, they could hit their head on the ground and be seriously injured or die.
Beanbags can be problematic as well: They sound harmless enough, but at a recent rally in Austin, Texas, a beanbag fired by police caused a brain injury to one of the protesters. Noting the injuries less-lethal devices have caused through the years, some question their efficacy.
In police work, there are no panaceas. Even something as relatively benign as pepper spray (admittedly, it’s only benign if you’re not the one getting it) requires extreme caution in the land of COVID-19.
“As we’ve learned, as they try to get it out, they start coughing; that puts particles out there,” Valdez said.
And so it goes. The contradictions are dizzying: suspects on the run, suspects with weapons, suspects who are high. The decisions — what kind of weapon to use, whether to use a weapon at all — must be made in seconds.
Sitting quietly at the other side of the table, Barnett quietly recalls an incident about a year ago at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in which a troubled man, perhaps trying to commit suicide in an outdoor corridor, reached for and pulled out a firearm. A less-lethal round fired by Barnett took him down. The man was taken into custody.
“There’s a lot of factors that you think about,” said Barnett, a nearly 14-year veteran of the force.
Yes, there are. Which brings us to this: The line between good news and bad news, lethal and nonlethal, is thin.
As thin as a thin blue line.