By Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
Less lethal weapons, law enforcement officers say, are designed to gain what they call “pain compliance” – they’re meant to cause a level of pain that’s enough to compel someone committing a crime to comply with orders, but not so much that they are incapacitated or seriously injured. Weapons, such as the foam rounds and flash-bangs being used by law enforcement in Los Angeles against anti-ICE protesters, are meant to be deployed from a distance in order to keep both the officer and the individual safer. They’re meant to cap the level of violence at “less than lethal”, at even less than devastating, life-altering injury.
That’s what they’re meant to do. But that’s not often how they’re used.
We know this because we’ve seen it before, when the police killing of George Floyd launched a wave of protests across America during the summer of 2020. Law enforcement agencies across the country moved to contain those protests with less lethal weapons, resulting in dozens of people suffering horrific injuries – traumatic brain injuries, exploded eyeballs, burst testicles, shattered cheekbones. Cities around the country paid out millions and millions of dollars in settlements to the victims of less lethal weapons, and at least some of the law enforcement agencies involved promised to reform, to do better.
After that summer and as those lawsuits unfolded, I spent two years researching and writing The People vs. Rubber Bullets, a nearly 40,000-word investigation into the history and modern context of police use of less lethal weapons. What I found was a story about authority and about the steady erosion of the right to challenge that authority, about what we’re willing to accept in the name of safety and protection, about how easily promises of reform are forgotten when the news cycle moves on.
It was also a story about the unimaginably difficult position law enforcement is often placed in. American law enforcement is too often tasked with responding to situations arising from complex social problems – immigration reform, racial and economic inequality, the dire state of mental health care – but with no ability to actually fix any of those problems. Instead, they’re given a weapon they’re told won’t kill people and the authority to use it virtually however they see fit.
Much of the story of less lethal weapons, however, is hidden – even the words we use to describe these weapons do much to obfuscate the real harm they do: “sponge”, “bean-bag”, “pepper-ball”, “foam-tipped”. Less lethal weapons are designed, manufactured, sold, and deployed with little to no oversight or regulation from any national or international body. There are no national or international policy or guidelines dictating how and when law enforcement agencies should use less lethal munitions, and there is very little reporting when they do. That leaves a lot of questions remain unanswered – not least of which is whether the fault lies in the tool or the user.
Less lethal weapons may have a legitimate place in law enforcement, but experience has demonstrated that protests, even unruly ones, are often not that place. In these contexts, less lethal munitions can quickly transform from tools of order to tools of intimidation, threat, punishment. And the impact of a less lethal munition here isn’t contained to the discrete moment it hits a body, or even the person it may leave broken for life. The fractures spread, like cracks in glass, touching that person’s friends and family, their community. It ruptures the already fragile trust between law enforcement and the people they’re meant to protect, widens fault lines within societies, and threatens the Constitutional right to free speech and assembly.
These weapons may be less lethal, but they can be no less devastating.
About the author:
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie is an award-winning American journalist, author, and podcaster living in England. Her written work regularly appears in the Boston Globe Ideas section, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, and others. In 2023, she worked with independent journalism studio Long Lead to report and write the multiple award-winning People vs. Rubber Bullets, a six-part interactive series on the devastating effects of the use of kinetic impact projectiles, popularly known as rubber bullets.