A history of rubber bullets and other crowd control projectiles

Protesters who have participated in demonstrations in Portland are familiar with rubber bullets, pepper balls, teargas canisters, and other kinetic impact projectiles (KIPs). Just last week, the city agreed to a $75,000 settlement with a protester who says he was hit multiple times with ‘FN 303 less-lethal’ projectiles during the 2020 protests. Freelance journalist Linda Rodriguez McRobbie has been looking into the history of the use of these devices by law enforcement. She joins us to talk about what she found.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Many protesters who have participated in demonstrations in Portland are familiar with rubber bullets, pepper balls, tear gas canisters and other so-called less-lethal crowd control weapons. Just last week, the City of Portland agreed to a $75,000 settlement with a protester who says he was hit multiple times with projectiles during the 2020 protests. Freelance journalist Linda Rodriguez McRobbie has been writing about the history and the use of these so-called less-lethal weapons in a series for “Long Lead.” She recently released the sixth article in her series and she joins us now. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, welcome.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie: Thank you so much for having me.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the variety of projectiles that all fall in the category of less-lethal weapons?

McRobbie: Absolutely. So when we usually say rubber bullets we’re really meaning a wide category of kinetic impact projectiles. And this can include things like the pepper balls, like sponge or foam rounds, which are sort of large plug shaped objects with a tip of hardened foam that goes across the top. We’re talking about balls that can be filled with things like OC (oleoresin capsicum) spray or pepper spray. We’re talking about beanbag rounds which were used fairly widely during the 2020 protests. These are flexible cloth bags that are typically filled with lead shot. So there’s a lot of different shapes and a lot of different structures that are being used as kinetic impact projectiles.

Miller: Rubber bullets were developed, as you note, by the British army during the troubles in Northern Ireland. How were they used there?

McRobbie: The British army needed a weapon that they could use on people that would hurt but not kill. Now, obviously they were using these items in tandem with things that did kill with guns and also with things like water cannons and other potentially less-lethal munitions, including tear gas. Again, the idea was that these were munitions that were meant to not kill people. They were meant to hurt people and discourage them from coming out and voicing dissent or protest. Typically, they were used during riot situations or situations that the police or the British military described as riot situations. This could have been any conflict really, that was happening in the street. There were a wide variety of conflicts in which these were used, including the situation that we talked about in the series where a little boy was running home from school. He, among some of the children, were playing around a British military outpost and he was shot in the face with a rubber bullet.

Miller: When did rubber bullets or other kinetic impact projectiles, KIPs, become commonly used in the US? When were they, in a sense, imported from the UK?

McRobbie: To back up a little bit, we first started seeing rubber bullets being used in Northern Ireland from around 1970. This was concurrent with the time in the US where there was a ton of civil unrest. We had the Vietnam war riots and protests, we had protests for civil rights and things like that. So this was a similar period of unrest where police in the United States were looking for weapons that they could use that would hurt people, would gain their compliance but would not necessarily kill them.

So they were also looking into what was happening in Northern Ireland and they were inspired by developments in other parts of the world, including in Hong Kong, where protests have been put down using wooden dowels and things like that. So from about the 1970′s, like really early 1970′s, you had police officers and police departments and military research and weapons research facilities looking into less-lethal options. Some of the really interesting early developments were things like a gun that could shoot water-filled balls. There was one that was just a very novel, interesting system that basically shot golf balls, on the wisdom that thousands of people have been hit with golf balls and have been more or less fine.

So, you see the development of these things in response to the social context of the time. And again, it was to have a weapon that could hurt people, gain their compliance, but without seriously injuring them. Now questioning the wisdom of using weapons or any sort of violence at all against people who were protesting wasn’t really what people were engaging with, right then. It was more about stopping the protests. So from the early ‘70s, you see the use of alternatives to bullets basically. And they’re starting to get some traction in places like California on the West Coast. You also see them being used in Miami, but really they weren’t very popular. Part of that had to do with the fact that they did cause considerable injuries.

At the same time, police officers who were using them were worried that this was expanding the circumstances around which they would be inclined to use violence. So if they were only armed with a gun, they might not be as likely to pull that out and use that on someone who was fleeing or a suspect. Whereas if they had a weapon that they believed was less lethal, they might and then still cause very serious injury or even death. In 1973, a boy in New Mexico was killed by a sort of proto bean bag that was called a stun bag. And it was very similar to the bean bags that are used now, but it hit him in the chest and he was killed. So after that, you really saw a decline in these kinds of experiments. Police departments and law enforcement agencies were less likely to use them, in part, because of their perceived dangerousness and their perceived unpredictability as a weapon.

That really changed by the end of the ‘90s. And there were some interesting developments on the national arena that sort of set the ground for the use of these weapons. One of them was one that the American military was using increasingly. They were being developed for use in peacekeeping missions in the early 1990′s. So you see, like the Marines for example, going off to Mogadishu or to Bosnia, armed with these less-lethal kinetic impact munitions. At the same time, there was another really big development happening domestically in the country. And that was deinstitutionalization.

The closing down of state run mental health facilities meant that a lot of people who are in the grips of mental health crises were out on the streets and this frequently put them in conflict with police. Police wanted something that they could use at a distance to essentially stop people. And when they were increasingly having these interactions with people, the need for a weapon that they could use and enact that pain compliance from a distance was increasingly clear. So by about the early 1990′s, you see law enforcement agencies increasingly adopting these and coming back around to the idea that even though they were dangerous and unpredictable, they were still better than a bullet.

Miller: I wonder if you could tell us a story of what happened to a Portland man named Andre Miller in July of 2020?

McRobbie: Absolutely, Andre was protesting. He had been out almost every single night protesting. And while he was filming a Facebook live video, retreating from federal agents who were, at that point, firing tear gas canisters on this group of people who were moving away from them, he is hit in the head with one of these tear gas canisters. And to picture this is not a small item. Typically these are pyro kinetically powered, meaning that they are very hot when they’re fired. So what hit him also burned him and he was struck on the head. It knocked his face mask off, it basically knocked him out. And he was very, very seriously hurt. He vomited several times before he was even in the ambulance. He had a serious traumatic brain injury resulting from it and it was about three months of recovery from being hit in the head with a tear gas canister.

Now, he was certainly not the only person who was hit with a tear gas canister during the 2020 protests. There was a man in Indiana who lost his eye. There was another man in Washington D. C. who was a photojournalist who was, at the time, covering the protests and was hit in the eye and detached the retina. He’s lost 75% of the vision in his eye. These canisters aren’t intended to be used as impact munitions. They are not intended to be used to hit people. However, protesters, witnesses, physicians, many, many people say that this is how they are being used.

Miller: And you in fact note that in a perverse sense, this is your line that he was lucky to have suffered, quote “only a traumatic brain injury after being hit by the tear gas canister, given those other injuries that happened at about the same time by other police departments or other law enforcement agencies at about the same time.”

A lot of police departments all over the country, including in Oregon have been ordered to pay out millions of dollars in dozens of civil cases after injuring people with these weapons. Has that led to wholesale changes in the use of these weapons?

McRobbie: It has not. It has led to some changes in some jurisdictions in some areas. But the thing that’s really important to remember about policing in America is that it is incredibly diverse and incredibly fractured. There are upwards of 17,000 different law enforcement agencies and police departments that are at work in the country. And each of those agencies can really define what they want to do. They can set their own policies and their own guidelines. So when there is perhaps a change in a city like Austin, that’s not going to affect what’s happening in Oakland for example. It seemed like, after the summer of 2020, we saw so many devastating injuries. I mean the Shot-in-the-Head report that was put out by the Physicians for Human Rights found 115 different cases, just over a period of two months, of people just being shot in the head. That didn’t even include people who suffered ruptured testicles or internal injuries below the neck.

So, we saw a lot of very, very serious injuries and the changes that have happened as a result of that have been very uneven. You have cities like Boston, for example, which passed a city ordinance outlawing the use of tear gas and kinetic impact projectiles for crowd control. And they were promptly challenged by two police unions who came together to sue them on the claim that they have no right, the city council has no right, to infringe on police procedure and tactics. There’s a similar situation in Minneapolis where the city council is prevented from making these kinds of changes. So across the board, it’s very uneven. On a federal level, you had Senator Ed Markey and Senator Bernie Sanders who brought a bill to outlaw the use of tear gas and kinetic impact projectiles and that bill died before it even got a hearing.

Miller: So I want to turn back to the biggest question of how these tools are being used and what might be used if these weren’t available? Because the key selling point of these weapons is that they are less deadly than some alternatives. And even that language has changed. They used to be called non-lethal weapons, but that had to be dropped because it turned out they could be lethal depending on how they were used. But is there data to show that these projectiles are only used in cases when more dangerous weapons would otherwise be used?

McRobbie: I think there’s two things here. One is that there isn’t a lot of data. And that was one of the things that I found probably most consistently surprising during the reporting for this piece, that there’s no national mechanism for collecting data on use of force. There’s no obligation for individual police departments to report the circumstances around their use of force. So, in one light, it’s very possible that they are, in fact, reducing lethal interactions between police and civilians. But we don’t have the data to prove that because we don’t know the circumstances around these incidents and whether or not their use was justified.

Anecdotally, and based on what I’m hearing from academics, observers, physicians, and victims, these weapons are being used in an expanded set of circumstances. So, where police might not have used violence at all to attain any kind of obedience, they are now using them. And some of that may have to do with the psychological effect of being told that this weapon that you’re using is less lethal. It won’t hurt, it’s fine. And it seems like the sort of easiest option to get to where you need to get in terms of achieving that obedience.

So it’s a difficult question to answer in some cases because we don’t have the data. But again, anecdotally, and from what I’m hearing from all of the people who I talked to for this piece, the idea that you have a weapon in your hand that is less lethal, that should be fine. That’s more or less benign. The way we talk about it, it sounds like it’s foam bullet or rubber bullet or sponge round things like that. It can influence the person wielding that weapon to think that you can use it in an expanded number of circumstances.

Miller: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, thanks very much.

McRobbie: Thank you.

Miller: The freelance journalist, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie has been writing about the history and use of so-called less-lethal weapons in a series for “Long Lead.” You can find a link to the series on our website.

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