Nonlethal weapons draw praise, caution
Sid Heal knows how terrified a police officer can feel in the midst of a riot.
Heal, a commander in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, was driving to work through south-central Los Angeles in 1992 when about 100 rioters enraged by the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case surrounded his pickup. Heal said he was able to get through by drawing two handguns and pointing one at the man pulling his door handle.
''I was scared to death," he recalled yesterday.
Today, the sheriff's department is one of thousands of police forces across the country equipped with a variety of so-called less-than-lethal munitions to prevent protests and rowdy crowds from getting out of control. The weapons include pepper-powder-filled balls and pellets, propelled by compressed air in guns, similar to the one that struck and killed an Emerson College student celebrating the Red Sox pennant early Thursday.
Heal, who lectures around the world about such munitions, called them a godsend for the police and the public. ''Instead of allowing the mob to dictate the terms on which we're going to react, it allows a commander to start intervening at lower stages of the escalation," the 54-year-old officer said. ''And that's usually the best time, because we can succeed with lesser force."
Besides the pepper-spray balls, the weapons include rubber bullets, as well as bean bag rounds that fly at nearly 100 miles an hour.
But while several police officials and criminal justice scholars agree that the less-than-lethal munitions are preferable for quelling riots to billy clubs, police dogs, and guns, they said the new generation of weapons have their own problems.
For instance, a 2001 study of the weapons by Pennsylvania State University's Applied Research Laboratory found that the projectiles did not approach the accuracy demanded of their lethal counterparts.
''We were struck by the general inaccuracy of these munitions," said the study, which was conducted with help from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. ''Some configurations were more accurate than others, but the accuracy decreased significantly as the range increased. There were very few direct-fire munitions that could be used accurately at a range of 75 feet."
The list of cities with less-than-lethal munitions, Heal said, includes New York; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; and St. Louis, which outfits officers on the hostage-response squad with bean bag rounds.
St. Louis, whose Cardinals baseball team clinched the National League pennant Thursday night, had no rioting afterward and made no game-related arrests, other than for ticket scalping, Police Chief Joseph Mokwa said. The force deployed 155 extra officers Thursday night at potential flash points near the stadium. The officers wore helmets with their visors up and carried mace and batons.
Heal characterized the death of 21-year-old Victoria Snelgrove as a fluke, saying she is the 15th fatality from nonlethal munitions of any kind in North America since 1971.
But there have been numerous injuries and lawsuits.
Last month, a Miami filmmaker filed suit against the city of Miami for personal injury and violations of his civil rights after he was shot in the head by police with a beanbag during the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in 2003.
Carl Kesser, 58, said he was shot in the head without provocation by an unidentified officer from 30 to 50 feet away while filming protests from the sidewalk. Kesser said he had to undergo three hours of surgery to remove the projectile, has permanent paralysis on the right side of his forehead, and cannot open his mouth fully.
''I really don't understand why they're nonlethal," he said in a telephone interview. ''They're definitely lethal. An inch to the left, and I would have lost my eye. An inch to the right, and I would have lost my ear. And an inch above, I would have been dead."
Last year, the city of Los Angeles paid three activists more than $261,000 for injuries suffered when police officers fired beanbags and rubber bullets during an antipolice protest in 2000. One activist who shared in the settlement suffered a permanent eye injury.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said police departments have struggled for generations to strike a balance between force and restraint when trying to control unruly crowds. He questioned, however, whether it was necessary for police to use pepper balls during the riotous Red Sox celebrations, although he stressed that he did not know the circumstances of the fatal shooting. 