FOAM THEM

LAPD investing in new non-lethal tool to subdue belligerent suspects: ‘foam batons’ fired from launchers

By Josh Cain

Los Angeles Daily News
August 17, 2018

After seeing cases in which bean-bag shotguns and stun-guns failed to end confrontations with belligerent suspects, Los Angeles police leaders have begun to invest in a new non-lethal tool that has more firepower and which they believe will be more effective.

Last year, the Los Angeles Police Department bought hundreds of launchers that shoot small “foam batons” after a trial period during which patrol officers tested them.

In July, Chief Michel Moore publicly touted the launchers, which shoot foam batons with enough force to make a suspect fall over in pain. He did so immediately after presenting footage of a police shooting in Van Nuys a month earlier, in which three officers fired 18 handgun rounds at both a knife-wielding man and the woman he was holding hostage. Both died.

One officer had tried to get the suspect to comply by twice firing a bean-bag shotgun. One struck Guillermo Perez, 32, directly in the torso. He deflected the second round with a folding chair.

“The effectiveness of our less-lethal tools allowing officers to avoid the use of deadly force appears to have declined,” Moore told reporters that day.

So the LAPD is trying the launcher, hoping it can help bring down a stubbornly high number of deadly police shootings in the city.

Bean-bag rounds were used 62 to 97 times over the last five years, while officers deployed stun guns from 398 to 577 times.

“Initially we saw a reduction in the number of officer-involved shootings,” Moore said. “And we believe that was a direct result of those added tools.”

Like other police departments around Southern California, LAPD has found its new “40-millimeter Tactical Single Launcher” to be a significant upgrade in stopping power.

“Like the beanbag round, this foam round strikes the person’s body causing pain, bruising, or other injury, but does not penetrate the skin,” according to an overview of the weapon by the LAPD Office of Inspector General.

Like a grenade launcher in a war movie, the device is cracked open to load a single, spongy, dome-shaped foam round. More of the blue-colored rounds can be stored on the weapon’s stock.

The launcher fires the round at around 325 feet per second — at that velocity, the rounds hit hard enough to be sufficiently painful on impact even from 100 feet away, according to the OIG and the manufacturer’s flyer.

Sgt. Andy Alvarez is an equipment coordinator for the Santa Ana Police Department, which recently bought 87 of the same type of launchers LAPD uses. While Santa Ana police used the launcher for years, since 2016 the department has tried out deploying the weapon to every black-and-white cruiser on patrol.

So far, he’s been impressed with the results.

“It’s going to leave a mark,” he said of being struck by one of the sponge rounds. “From the ones the deployments that I’ve seen, there’s an immediate reaction of doubling over or dropping down to your knees.”

Since 2017, he said Santa Ana officers have fired the launchers at suspects in nine different incidents, and each time the suspects gave up.

“”Once we deployed the 40mm, officers found the suspect was more apt to listen to commands,” Alvarez said.

LAPD has used similar weapons for years. Los Angeles first approved the use of sponge rounds in the 1990s for crowd control and standoff situations.

By 2016, the department began to look at the device as a more powerful less-lethal option for its regular patrol units. That year, LAPD launched a three-month pilot program to deploy the launchers in five patrol divisions.

In one incident in those months, a shot from one of the launchers that struck a man in the face sent him to the hospital. Police said he was one of two men seen walking around an Inglewood neighborhood with assault rifles — both were taken into custody after police fired the launcher at them.

LAPD did not provide a report detailing the trial period for the launchers. Neither OIG officials nor LAPD equipment officials responded to a request for comment for this story.

But according to the LAPD’s 2017 use-of-force year-end review, officers fired the weapon six times in 2016. In 2017, they fired the launchers 11 times. It’s not clear how many of those uses of the launcher were effective.

The department apparently liked the guns enough that in April 2017, LAPD purchased 215 more launchers and re-extended their trial run “indefinitely.”

Civil rights activists previously have noted that drawing a weapon on an already violent person often does not help de-escalate a situation.

“They should consider alternative tactics before they use any force,” said Adrienna Wong, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, in 2016 after the announcement of the trial period for the launchers. “Just talking to people, if that’s something that’s available.”

A 40-millimeter launcher used in a violent confrontation in Pacoima in May did not appear to have any effect on a stabbing suspect. The encounter, which ended with an officer fatally shooting the man, 29-year-old Bryan Rodriguez, was shown in an LAPD video released last month.

When officers arrived at the home, they found Rodriguez leaning against one of the cars parked in the driveway. Believing he had a knife, the officers demanded multiple times for him to drop his weapon and get on the ground. But what followed was a nearly half-hour standoff in which Rodriguez threw chairs and bricks at police who shot him more than a dozen times with bean-bag rounds and at least twice with the 40-millimeter sponge rounds.

The footage did not show what kind of effect the sponge rounds had on Rodriguez, but he continued to resist the officers. He later picked up a pick-ax, then approached a line of officers standing in the street. Another officer standing behind a cruiser shot him with a handgun once.

Rodriguez died at the scene.

Police spokesman Josh Rubenstein said the circumstances of the incident, including the distance between the officers and Rodriguez, prevented the launcher from being effective.