‘Less-lethal’ force has darker reality
Donovan Slack, Dennis Wagner, Kevin Mccoy and Jay Hancock
There’s a gap in Scott Olsen’s memory for the night of Oct. 25, 2011.
The Iraq War vet remembers leaving his tech job in the San Francisco Bay Area and taking a BART train to join an Occupy Oakland protest against economic and social inequality.
He remembers standing near protesters who faced off with Oakland police officers bristling with riot gear.
He remembers being carried away by other protesters.
But not the moment when a “bean bag” round fired from an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury that forced him to relearn how to talk.
What happened to Olsen was not unique or isolated. Time and again over the past two decades — from L.A. to D.C., Minneapolis to Miami — peace officers have targeted civilian demonstrators with munitions designed to stun and stop, rather than kill.
As many as 60 protesters suffered head wounds during Black Lives Matter events, including bone fractures, blindness and traumatic brain injuries. Activists and civil libertarians worldwide have urged police to ban less-lethal projectiles from use for crowd control. Law enforcement in the United Kingdom ceased using them that way decades ago.
But an investigation by USA TODAY and Kaiser Health News found little has changed over the years in the United States.
Beyond the Constitution and federal court rulings that require police use of force to be “reasonable,” there are no national rules for discharging bean bags and rubber bullets. Nor are there standards for the weapons’ velocity, accuracy or safety. Congress and state legislatures have done little to offer solutions.
While locations and demonstration types vary, a pattern has emerged: Shooting victims file lawsuits; cities pay out millions of dollars; police departments try to adopt reforms. And, a few years later, it happens again. Law enforcement officers, typically with limited training, are bound only by departmental policies that vary from one agency to the next.
Sometimes referred to as kinetic impact projectiles, less-lethal ammunition includes bean bags (nylon sacks filled with lead shot), so-called rubber bullets that actually are tipped with foam or sponge and paintball-like rounds containing chemical irritants. Velocity and range vary greatly, but they can travel upwards of 200 mph. The rounds were developed to save lives by giving police a knock-down option that can disable threats from a safe distance without killing the target.
But, over decades of use, munitions that originally were touted as safe and nonlethal have proven otherwise:
• In 2000, a protester at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles lost an eye. Seven years later in the same city, scores of migrant-rights demonstrators were wounded amid a fusillade of less-lethal rounds.
• In 2001, when rioting broke out in Tucson after the University of Arizona lost the NCAA men’s basketball championship game, a student lost an eye to a bean bag.
• In 2003, 58 people were injured in Oakland when officers launched a barrage of wooden pellets and other devices during anti-iraq war protests. To settle court claims, the city adopted new crowd-control policies. Eight years later, Olsen was struck down.
• In 2004, a college student in Boston celebrating a Red Sox victory was killed by a projectile filled with pepper-based irritant when it tore through her eye and into her brain.
The past two months have been especially telling, with dozens maimed or hurt amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations: Photographer Linda Tirado, 37, lost an eye after being hit by a foam projectile in Minneapolis. Brandon Saenz, 26, lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. Leslie Furcron, 59, was placed in a medically induced coma after she was shot between the eyes with a “bean bag” round in La Mesa, California. And, in Portland, Oregon, 26-year-old Donavan La Bella suffered facial and skull fractures when he was shot by a federal officer with a less-lethal round.
Attorney Elizabeth Ritter, one of several people shot in the head by an impact munition at a 2003 protest in Miami, said “Nothing has changed. It’s fairly sickening to me. We have a systemic, deeply ingrained problem.”
‘We’re just in a circle’
From a law enforcement perspective, less-lethal weapons are essential tools in a continuum of force. A sponge-tipped round or a pouch full of pellets can stop a violent act without putting the officer in peril — and without killing the suspect.
Police leaders typically condemn the indiscriminate firing into peaceful crowds but characterize such incidents as conduct violations rather than weaponry problems.
Steve Ijames, a retired officer who developed programs for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, blames “boneheaded policemen” and a training gap for the misuse of arms. Law enforcement instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use less-lethal force against individual suspects, Ijames noted, not on crowd-control scenarios that occur only sporadically.
Still, when demonstrations morph into disturbances, less-lethal devices are often dusted off and pressed into duty.
“What is the alternative?” asked Sid Heal, a retired commander from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who has extensively studied the munitions. “We’re stuck with the tools we have. And if you take one away, we’re going to have to go to something else, and it will probably be harsher.”
The National Institute of Justice spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on initiatives to collect data and start developing national standards for less-lethal weapon safety after the Boston student’s death in 2004. Funding dried up after a few years, and the efforts died.
After the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2014, 2015 and 2017 would have banned state and local law enforcement from using key federal grant dollars for less-lethal weapons. The measure never made it out of committee.
In 2017, a coalition of law enforcement groups representing police leaders and unions, which gathered to study use of force, published a consensus policy and discussion paper. The groups advocated a ban on police use of martial arts weapons, but did not extend it to less-lethal munitions.
A White House task force established after the Ferguson protests recommended “annual training” but little more for less-lethal weapons.
In June, 13 Senate Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the alleged misuses of rubber bullets and bean bags against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
“Although intended to only cause minimal harm, such weapons may cause significant injury,” the senators wrote.
The Justice Department’s inspector general has launched an investigation of federal officers’ response to protest activity in Portland and Washington, D.C., the watchdog announced Thursday. Leaders of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight committees this month had asked the office to review federal officers’ “violent tactics” used against protesters in those cities and elsewhere.
And in California, several Democrat legislators introduced a measure in June that would ban the police use of less-lethal munitions to disperse demonstrators. Except in riot conditions, the proposed law says, kinetic energy projectiles “shall not be used by any law enforcement agency against an assembly protected by the First Amendment.”
Charles Mesloh, a former police officer, certified instructor and longtime researcher on less-lethal weapons, said the status quo is “unacceptable,” but he sees little chance that national standards will be imposed for training, weapon safety and use.
“I’ve been doing this long enough, I just — we’re just in a circle,” Mesloh said.
“We’ll have some lip service ... and there’ll be some mandated training, and then we’ll just go right back to where we were.”
LOS ANGELES: Searching for a less-lethal alternative
Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney, keeps an unusual photo on her desk. It shows her with a goose-egg-size wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.
That’s the impact of a police projectile that struck her between the eyes as she stood outside the 2000 Democratic National Convention with a mainly peaceful crowd.
“My head snapped back and it hurt,” she said. “It was inconceivable to me that someone would shoot me in the face.”
Over the past two decades, Los Angeles police have repeatedly used lesslethal firepower on demonstrators, injuring hundreds and generating lawsuits that Sobel helped prosecute.
Los Angeles police turned to bean bags as an alternative to live ammo after 1992 rioting triggered by the acquittal of officers who beat a Black man named Rodney King. As violence swept the city, police at first hunkered down, doing little to maintain order, then launched an aggressive crackdown. Ten people were killed by officers.
In the aftermath, the department was criticized simultaneously for brutality and for failure to defend the community. Bean bag rounds and later 40mm projectiles emerged as options that were supposed to allow officers to protect themselves and the city without deaths or lawsuits.
With the new arsenal, police in 2000 descended on protesters at Macarthur Park during the convention. Witnesses said demonstrators were shot in the back with rubber bullets as they tried to disperse. The city approved $4.1 million in payments to more than 90 people hurt during the melee.
Among the shooting victims was Melissa Schneider, who secured a $1.4 million settlement after being blinded in one eye. Two decades later, Schneider said she still wakes up with excruciating pain where the eye used to be and frequently vomits as a result of migraines.
Schneider said she was shaken watching internet videos of protesters injured in recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations: “I immediately started sobbing — not for me, but for them and the journey they had ahead,” she said. “Things need to change. And it’s really sad. It’s been 20 years, and this is still happening.”
Seven years after Schneider was maimed, Los Angeles police were back in Macarthur Park using batons, horses and less-lethal rounds during a protest for immigrants’ rights. More than 250 people were injured. An internal review determined projectiles were launched into crowds and at peaceful protesters.
This time, city taxpayers forked out $13 million to settle civil complaints. The Police Department agreed to four years of court supervision, with rules banning the use of less-lethal rounds against peaceful protesters.
But in May, when protests erupted after the death of George Floyd, police in Los Angeles unleashed bean bags and sponge rounds.
BOSTON: ‘Everything just kind of went away’
Victoria Snelgrove leaned against a railing of a parking garage at Fenway Park, waiting for the crowd to dissipate so she could drive home from a raucous Red Sox celebration. Then Boston police fired the projectile that tore through her eye and into her brain.
The home team had just defeated the New York Yankees to win the 2004 American League Championship. Sox fans rejoiced in the streets around the stadium. After some set fires and threw bottles, police began launching projectiles.
Snelgrove, a 21-year-old college student and sports enthusiast, slipped into a coma. Her parents made the excruciating decision to remove life support hours later.
The family collected $5 million in damages. Snelgrove’s death spurred Boston police to convene a panel to figure out what went wrong.
Among the commission findings: Boston had acquired its launchers less than a year earlier, without adequate understanding of safety issues. The manufacturer had suggested rounds would not break the skin. But a second protester had had a projectile lodged in his forehead, and a third suffered a gaping wound to the cheek.
The commission said police needed more training, particularly in crowdcontrol situations. It called for the National Institute of Justice to collect and disseminate comprehensive information on a burgeoning array of less-lethal projectiles. And it urged the federal government to develop minimum safety standards with a testing program overseen by an independent agency.
For a variety of reasons, little came of it.
‘Policing has to have a reckoning’
U.S. law enforcement and defense agencies spend about $2.5 billion annually on less-lethal weapons and ammunition, according to Anuj Mishra, an analyst with Marketsandmarkets, a research firm based in India. That’s almost half the global total and includes sales of tear gas and Tasers as well as projectile weapons.
Mishra said less-lethal weapons sales have taken off with a proliferation of new products. More than a half-dozen companies supply U.S. police departments with plastic and rubber bullets, paintball-type rounds, launchers and less-lethal projectiles fired from 12-gauge shotguns.
Sales are driven by personal relationships, Internet advertising and trade shows where police try out the latest models on shooting ranges, industry executives say.
“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology,” said Eugene Paoline, professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida. “They like toys.”
Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, co-authored research in 2017 with Physicians for Human Rights on the damage inflicted by less-lethal rounds. In a study of nearly 2,000 shooting victims, 3% died and 15% were permanently disabled.
Haar’s takeaway: “Policing has to have a reckoning.”
Ed Obayashi, an attorney and deputy chief of California’s Plumas County sheriff ’s office, said videos taken during recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations presented “bad optics” for lesslethal weapons. But a full story can’t be presented from films, he said while asserting that the overall response by U.S. peace officers was “very controlled and did not cause a measurable number of serious injuries.”
“When law enforcement gives an order to disperse, and that doesn’t happen, we don’t have a lot of options,” agreed Wade Carpenter, the police chief in Park City, Utah.
OAKLAND: ‘A series of cascading events’
If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said in a recent interview.
The projectile that struck Olsen’s head in 2011 was launched despite previous, similar incidents that resulted in lawsuits, independent investigations, court orders and police reforms.
The city ultimately agreed to a $4.5 million settlement with Olsen.
But when the George Floyd demonstrations broke out this year, so did the use of less-lethal weapons. According to a federal complaint filed in June by the Anti Police-terror Project, Oakland officers indiscriminately launched projectiles, flashbangs and tear gas into crowds and at individuals.
For Olsen, now tending bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm, his bad memory came flooding back.
“It’s heartbreaking to see other people’s lives affected as mine was,” Olsen said. “Police have shown they do not care about these kinds of controls, so the next step is to take those weapons away from them.”