Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz shows several “less lethal” weapons
WARNING: The audio and video in this post contain the sounds of gunfire
RAW VIDEO: Seattle Police display “less lethal” weapons meant to help officers reduce use of potentially-harmful force:
Seattle Police say they’re trying to ‘reduce harm and promote public safety’, so they demonstrated several weapons considered “less lethal”.
After a decade in a federal consent decree, the Seattle Police Department wants to show you it can be effective without seriously hurting people, especially those, says City Council member, Lisa Herbold, in mental health crisis, who raised concern of the police oversight boards, like Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother who was killed by Seattle Police officers. Herbold says, “We still have to find new ways to address challenges with people who are in a behavioral health crisis and are also armed.”
So SPD showed off several of its so-called “less lethal” weapons, designed to incapacitate but not seriously hurt someone, like pepper spray; a new TASER that increases the firing range from 25 to 40 feet and gives officers multiple chances to get the two leads into a suspect so that the shock is effective; a large 40 millimeter foam projectile that can really stun someone when it hits them as hard as a fastball from a Mariners pitcher; and
a test program for a Bola wrap, which fires a cord with weights and hooks on the ends from about 20 feet away that can wrap around someone’s arms or legs and prevent them from hurting anyone around them. The officers demonstrating the Bola wrap say they’ve just started using it, so they couldn’t answer questions about the Los Angeles Police assessment that the weapon is only 17% effective, but they say if it can help keep people from getting hurt when a suspect wants to kick and punch – or keeps the suspect from hurting themselves – they consider that an effective use of the Bola wrap weapon.
Police Chief, Adrian Diaz, tells Northwest Newsradio’s Ryan Harris they’re dealing with a lot more people in crisis or having fentanyl overdoses, so that makes it very easy for them to find themselves using more force, but he says their use of force is down considerably from what it was, so he says they’re in a good trend.
