Seattle police rebuked for use of ‘ blast balls’
SEATTLE — A federal judge has found the Seattle Police Department in contempt of court for the indiscriminate use of pepperfilled “blast balls” and pepper spray during Black Lives Matter protests in recent months.
U. S. District Judge Richard Jones issued a 27page order this week in response to a motion by Black Lives Matter SeattleKing County to find the police department in contempt of his earlier injunction barring police from using force against peaceful protesters.
Jones found four “clear violations” of his order: one involving the use of pepper spray and the other three involving blast balls, a grenadelike device that explodes and spews pepper gas, The Seattle Times reported.
“Of the less lethal weapons, the Court is most concerned about SPD’s use of blast balls, the most indiscriminate of the four” crowdcontrol weapons he examined. “SPD has often hurled blast balls into crowds of protesters” when no immediate threat to the officers’ safety or public property could be identified, the judge found.
Jones also highlighted four instances where officers’ use of force complied with his order. All the other instances cited in voluminous briefs filed by BLM and the city’s attorneys were too close to call one way or another, he said, which Jones said was not a good thing for the police department.
“Some might say that four clear violations — out of four days of protests and countless uses of lesslethal weapons — must surely be insufficient to ‘ vitiate’ ( spoil) the City’s otherwise substantial compliance,” Jones wrote. “But this is misguided.”
The violations Jones found were more than mere technical violations of the injunction, he said. The injunction was issued after Jones found that SPD’s use of tear gas, pepper spray and other crowdcontrol weapons were unconstitutional and that the department had violated the rights of thousands of Seattle protesters in large, early protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
The police department agreed to restrictions intended to prevent further violations in an initial injunction, and then agreed to refinements — including not targeting reporters and medics — after mass protests in June and July, including the abandonment by police of their East Precinct and the temporary formation of a policefree Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP, zone.
The protests Jones reviewed for this week’s findings were held on Capitol Hill on Aug. 26 during a memorial for BLM demonstrator Summer Taylor, who had been hit and killed by a car during a freeway protest on July 4; a protest at the Seattle Police Officers Guild headquarters on Sept. 7; and protests held Sept. 22 and 23 on Capitol Hill, one in response to a decision by a Kentucky grand jury not to indict the officers who killed Breonna Taylor in March.
Detective Patrick Michaud, a spokesman for the Seattle Police Department, would not comment on Jones’ ruling because the litigation is pending.