By Rosie Knight
If you have attended a city council meeting, or port police session, or watched the news of late you will likely have heard someone talking about less-lethal means of force that the police can use instead of firearms. They’re often touted as a safer, more humane way for law enforcement to take down people suspected of a crime. Still, in the wake of the police killing of 50-year-old Alejandro Campos Rios outside of a McDonald’s in Fullerton, the question of how safe these less-lethal weapons are comes to the fore once again.
As recently released body camera footage shows, Rios was approached by the police, who claimed he was “acting erratically” outside of a McDonalds, the video shows him swinging his belt and singing in Spanish. When Rios refused to lower the belt, the police responded by tasing him twice before shooting him with four bean bag rounds also known as “kinetic impact projectiles” or KIPs one of which pierced his chest cavity and killed him.
Though Rios’ killing happened in Orange County, the use of so-called less-lethal weapons is an issue that affects all of us. In the recent port police budget that was shared thanks to AB 481, a large amount of the military spending that the port police reported was on “less-lethal” weapons. In the 22/23 period, they bought 2,500 12 Gauge Kinetic Energy Projectiles and requested the same amount for the 23/24 period. They also requested hundreds of other KIPs including 100 40mm Kinetic Energy Projectiles at $18.50 per unit and 500 40mm Kinetic Energy Projectiles (foam-tipped) at the same cost. These are military weapons that are being utilized in our communities and can be just as dangerous as live ammunition and firearms.
While the concept of “less-lethal” weapons is well known, what often isn’t talked about is that the “safer” weapons are military-grade equipment that the U.S. Military first developed for use in Hong Kong in the ’50s to deal with protestors, and that mindset of using KIPs as a tool of repressing free speech has continued throughout the decades. Over the years the technology has evolved with the introduction of rubber bullets, tasers, and bean bag projectiles which have caused injuries at protests across the globe as well as being taken up by local police forces as an apparently “safer” way of apprehending suspects.
In the 2023 Amnesty International and Omega report The Global Abuse Of Kinetic Impact Projectiles, the organization highlighted the danger and impact of KIPs during the period of the Black Lives Matter protests across America in 2020. “Physicians for Human Rights found that police forces had shot at least 115 people in the head and neck with KIPs across the USA in the first two months of protests after the killing of George Floyd, at least 30 of whom had suffered permanent eye damage.”
In that same report, we learn that “A systematic review of medical literature published between 1990 and June 2017 on deaths and injuries resulting from the use of KIPs, found that at least 53 people had died as a result of injuries sustained by KIPs, with 300 people suffering permanent disability.” Though the reality is the number is much higher in the U.S., seeing as reporting on the use of “less-lethal” force is relatively new at the federal and state level.
The Office of Government Accountability recently released a report called “Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Review of Less-Lethal Force,” which shows that reporting on the use of less-lethal rounds is still deeply flawed. While some of the suggestions from the report have been taken on by some departments, many are still open. For example, one of the suggestions that has not been taken on: “The Attorney General should develop standards for its component agencies on the types of less-lethal force that should be reported when used.”
When it comes to Los Angeles specifically, a 2024 report revealed that less-lethal force is relatively ineffective in subduing suspects with less than a 38% success rate. The report states that “In eight of the 133 instances where the less-lethal projectiles were deployed last year, they failed to stop their targets and officers then shot the individuals with firearms.”
That’s especially relevant here as the report was commissioned after the police killing of 36-year-old Jason Lee Maccani in a Skid-Row building, where he was found holding a plastic fork during a mental health crisis and “acting erratically” and after the attending officers deployed three bean bag rounds to no avail, Maccani was then was shot and killed by the police.
All of this begs the question: Why are the police — and specifically in our case, the port police — spending so much money on dangerous munitions rather than training their officers in de-escalation tactics? It should be noted that when the port police were asked how much they spent on de-escalation training for their officers at their recent AB 481 meeting about military spending they declined to answer, claiming that wasn’t under the bill’s purview.