‘We must demand that they stop.’ KC police use of force at protests draws outrage
After tear gas, bean bag rounds and other projectiles seriously injured protesters in recent days, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said Thursday that the police department will make changes.
Police officials will review the department’s use of less lethal ammunition, Lucas said, and determine how to restrict it. The Board of Police Commissioners also will provide a policy update proposal on less lethal ammunition at its next meeting later this month.
The change in direction comes after several reports of protesters struck by what they described as “rubber bullets” and treated for exposure to tear gas and pepper spray. One man told The Star that he could end up losing his left eye after he said he was hit with a police-fired rubber bullet.
Community leaders and activists say it’s about time the department took action.
“We must demand that they stop,” said the Rev. Vernon Howard, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City. “It’s totally unnecessary. … We see before our eyes the same police brutality that has caused us to protest in the first place.”
The less lethal ammunition used at recent protests — from tear gas and pepper spray to bean bag and baton rounds — is meant to injure, not protect, he said.
“They’re akin to the dogs, to the water hoses and akin to the billy clubs of the 1950s and ’60s,” said Howard, who has been protesting police brutality in Kansas City since 2013. “If they are calling for peaceful protests, they should abide by that same standard.”
Protests have been held in Kansas City every day for the past week. From last Friday until Monday night, officers often deployed less lethal ammunition on several occasions and have used it to disperse the crowd.
But police said officers did not deploy any on Tuesday or Wednesday nights.
“The need for those are based on strategic decisions based on response to the crowds’ actions,” said Kansas City Police spokesman Sgt. Jacob Becchina on Thursday. “Crowds’ actions dictate our response.”
The use of these weapons has drawn criticism across the country, with similar calls for change.
Protesters from coast to coast have been treated for minor to serious injuries caused by less lethal weapons used to disperse crowds for what police term “unlawful assembly.”
In Washington, D.C., the National Guard allegedly fired rubber bullets to disperse a crowd of protesters Monday.
In Austin, Texas, less lethal ammunition critically injured one man.
And a California woman was hospitalized and treated in the ICU after she was hit with a bean bag round between her eyes.
Leslie Furcron was streaming a Saturday protest near the police department in La Mesa, California, live on Facebook when police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and bean bag rounds after some protesters reportedly threw water bottles and rocks at officers.
In Kansas City, Sean Stearns said he was crouched down in Mill Creek Park when all of a sudden he was hit like “just a bat out of hell” by what he called a rubber bullet. After a lengthy surgery Sunday, doctors told Stearns he may never again have vision in his left eye.
Howard called what happened to Stearns “absolutely abhorrent.”
“There is not a sense of KCPD taking responsibility, acknowledging its wrongdoing,” Howard said. “It never should have happened.”
Michael Kuckelman, an Overland Park attorney who represented the wife of an unarmed man killed by a bean bag in Barber County, Kansas, three years ago, said the terminology “less lethal” can be confusing.
“Less lethal encompasses a lot of things — bean bags, rubber bullets, batons, tasers,” he said. “Sometimes you hear them called ‘less than lethal’ or ‘non-lethal,’ and that’s a critical mistake. Because all of these items can be lethal.”
Before deploying such weapons, Kuckelman said, a law enforcement agency must have policies and procedures in place on their use as well as extensive training. And while it may sound like a no-brainer, he said, the agency also must provide the munitions to the officers.
In the Barber County case, he said, the bean bag was purchased from a man in Michigan “who was literally sitting in his basement loading these shells and his mother was upstairs sewing the bean bags.”
“And they were not tested, and they were absolutely lethal.”
The victim’s wife filed a federal civil lawsuit against the county that this year resulted in a $3.5 million settlement.
Officers can’t use less lethal rounds just because it’s convenient, Kuckelman said, but because it’s necessary.
Why use them if they can cause death?
“Sometimes, if someone will not comply, a taser, for example, might be warranted in order to take someone into custody who’s resisting being taken into custody,” Kuckelman said. “But each case, you have to evaluate, and you have to look at their policies and procedures.”
But using them in a large crowd can have bad outcomes, he said.
“If you need to maintain crowd control, at times, tear gas, things like that, could be appropriate,” he said. “But rubber bullets, bean bags, things like that, on the continuum, those things can be quite dangerous.
“You shoot a projectile that’s supposed to be slower and hit somebody in the head or a vital organ, you can seriously injure them or maybe even kill them.”
Steve Ijames, a retired major with the Springfield Police Department, has trained police agencies in the U.S. and around the world on the use of less lethal weapons. He often serves as a consultant in lawsuits when the use of such tools is called into question.
When used properly, Ijames said, less lethal ammunition can be a vital tool for law enforcement.
“They accomplish a lawful police objective,” he said.
For crowd control, if everyone is breaking the law “my preferred method is to move them out with gas. It’s very common and appropriate in crowd scenarios, but it doesn’t come without some rough edges.”
Using other less lethal weapons such as rubber bullets for crowd control isn’t common in the U.S., Ijames said.
“Thousands of rounds that have been shot in the U.S. have almost always been on an individual person — a suicidal guy with a knife or something like that,” he said.
There is a time, though, to use them for crowd control, Ijames said.
“They allow us from a relatively safe distance to engage criminal activity, rock throwers, people breaking windows, and you don’t have to get close enough to where you end up in a fist fight with them.”
He acknowledged, however, that sometimes rounds including bean bags and rubber bullets can hit the wrong target, even though deaths have been rare. Ijames said there have been about 20 deaths in the U.S. since 1971.
“I’ve done training there for them,” Ijames said of the Kansas City department. “I know they’re generally well trained. I hate it that you’ve had some injuries, but it’s not uncommon in big events that some of those rounds go sideways. It does happen.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2020 at 7:07 PM.
