by Rory Miller
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I was issued a IIIa, most times.
If the vest doesn't fit quite right you can almost strangle sitting in a car. It really slows down any cross-body reach, like undoing your seat belt.
The current military armor is either horrible or really good. It will stop even rifle bullets if they hit the plates straight on (which could then ricochet of course, maybe up under your helmet. That's life in the big city). But those plates are inch thick ceramic. It's roughly the equivalent of wearing a brick shirt. And it is heavy, over thirty pounds. And hot. Bulky, it is hard to run in and you have to be very careful in placing your pouches on it. My left shoulder has problems and I had to get creative placing my magazine holders so that I could get them out.
The stories are kind of dry, lacking in the detail that would be most useful to an author, but the Kevlar survivor's club might have some hooks you can use.
I have seen bad tactics taught based on the idea the vest would save you. That's gambling, IMO. There is also an element of talisman to a lot of people and officers, both regarding equipment and training. People think that the vest will protect them and then don't think about what it might save them from. People believe that they have earned a black belt and can now survive a fight, without ever once looking at what a real fight is like and whether it matches their skills. People seem to believe that merely owning a gun will somehow, magically, keep them safe.
I'd say most people carry guns and even use them like amulets-- "As long as I have a gun, I'll be okay, I can handle it." Many cannot pull the trigger. That said, a few hours of training with a rifle allows a peasant to defeat a warrior who has trained all his life with a sword. That advance in technology made the concept of equal rights possible.
Recap:
-Guns are nifty machines that throw a rock in a straight line
-Handguns, rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, machine guns, submachine guns
-Actions, sights, calibers and gauges, bullet configurations
-Gunfighting is different than range training
-Geeks exist. They get upset about terminology. Don’t sweat it.
-SBA (Soft Body Armor) is the modern standard for protection
Chapter 12: Less-Lethal Weapons
Less-lethal weapons are a designation that has come to the fore in the last decade or so. In a lot of ways, the holy grail of law enforcement is a tool that would put a violent person down at least as reliably as a handgun, but without permanent injury.
Chemicals: two versions of mace (tear gas) are CN and CS. Users translate that as “Cry Now” and “Cry Sooner”. They are mucous membrane irritants, eye irritants and cause your skin to burn, especially if you are sweaty. It seems to react with water (sweat) and so affects people who fear it more than people who don’t. It is relatively safe, though some people do have breathing problems.
More importantly, most people can fight through it, especially if they have been exposed before. Exposure to tear gas is a staple of army basic training. I assume the other branches do it as well.
CS and CN have a sharp smell and make your eyes really burn. It makes your nose run, too and soldiers leaving the gas house with huge trails of snot hanging down their chest, hunched over and wheezing is a common sight.
The CS and CN are really crystals and if gear worn when exposed isn’t properly washed, it will gas off later when it does get wet. Makes putting on a used gas mask (called a ‘pro-mask’ for protective mask) and then sweating really interesting.
OC, which stands for Oleoresin Capsicum, is what cops call pepper-spray. OC is believed to be safer than the military tear gasses. It is a food by product. It feels about like you would expect crushed hot peppers rubbed in your eyes would feel like. Which means it hurts and your nose runs and the skin it touches feels like a sunburn. It doesn’t affect breathing, but many people feel like they can’t breathe (if someone is screaming that they are suffocating, their air flow is fine.)
Pepper spray comes in different concentrations and what they call Scoville Heat Units or SHU. It is supposed to be a measure of how painful a particular batch is. It’s actually kind of arbitrary. Same with concentration. Usually a 10% spray feels hotter than a 5%, but not always.
What does matter is the delivery system. OC comes in pressurized canisters of different sizes. Most cops carry a 4 oz bottle, but they came in larger “party canisters’. Some canisters are ‘stream’ which squirts liquid OC. Easy to aim, penetrates the eyes quickly.
Aerosols penetrate the fastest and get into the mouth and nose. In my opinion, aerosol OC sucks the worst BUT it is also the one most likely to get blown off course by the wind and always affects everyone in the area, including the person using it.
Foam is an attempt to keep it from gassing off and affecting the officer using it. It hits and looks like creamed carrots. It does gas off and will affect the user as well, but not for a while. Unfortunately, it also tends to take a bit to affect the person it is used on.
Some OC details
OC is an oil and if you use too much it will make everything slippery. Trying to handcuff a guy dosed in OC can be like a greased-pig contest where the grease burns your skin.
Air and water wash it off. It usually takes about a half hour for the burn to get down to a decent level. If you drive with your car windows rolled up, though, the concentration will increase in your car.
It doesn’t affect everybody. I’ve watched inmates wipe the foam from their faces and eat it or try to throw it back at us. Some didn’t even shut their eyes.
Hot water opens your pores and reactivates the residue. In other words, a hot shower after an OC incident, especially when the water flows over your sensitive parts, can be an interesting experience.
The Taser. First of all, the Taser has nothing in common with the hand-held shockers usually called tasers on TV shows. The real taser is a device shaped roughly like a pistol that uses compressed air to shoot two barbs up to thirty-five feet (the civilian version has a range of fifteen feet). The two barbs leave the weapon, one in a straight line and the other at a slight downward angle. Each barb is attached to a thin, plastic coated wire.
When the barbs hit, an electric shock goes down the wires. The shock runs for five seconds in the police model and 30 seconds for the civilian (to give a good head start running away). The shock has a maximum of 50,000 volts, which sounds like a lot, but it is only 2.1 milliamps. That’s about 1/7600 of the amps produced by a wall socket.
Those are just numbers.
Tasers hurt like hell. When I took my hit it completely blanked out my brain. There was nothing but pain. I’d had frostbite before and run on a broken fibula and thought I was pretty good with pain. This was a whole new level. A few seconds into the ‘ride’ I was able to think a little. I was able to lie down by myself and not scream, and that was something to be proud of.
They also tend to freeze the muscles between the two probes. That means that even people who don’t respond to pain are usually frozen while the Taser is cycling.
Cool thing- the only injury in a Taser use are from the two barbs, or possibly from falling.
That brings up an important detail—injury and pain are completely separate issues. You can be grievously injured with almost no pain and in great pain without injury. Officers and people who deal with force on a legal basis are required to distinguish. Pain is preferable to injury, injury is preferable to killing. The huge pain of a taser is preferable to the potential injury of a wristlock or takedown.
Other cool toys:
There are a number of delivery systems that can be pretty versatile. A number of LL (less lethal) rounds have been made for the shotgun, including a self-contained Taser unit. There are rubber bullets designed to hurt a lot and bounce off and “ferret rounds” designed to penetrate a car window or drywall and spray OC on the other side. There are also bean bag rounds--small cloth bags filled with lead shot, intended to act
as a long-distance sap.
There are 40mm and 37mm launchers. These are essentially grenade launchers. 40mm is the same caliber used by the military and so it takes a special license. The 37 cannot use military explosive grenades and do not require the same licensing.
There is the M203 40mm military grenade launcher, a single-shot device that can be put under the M4 or M16 barrel. The 37 and 40mm versions are usually single-shots but there are six shot versions, like big revolvers.
Munitions for them include:
Direct impact rounds, designed to be fired directly at people. Some have a single impact ball that looks like a racquet ball; others are like big shotgun shells, filled with a bunch of .60 cal hard rubber balls (I’ve taken a hit from the .60s. It stung and left a welt but definitely didn’t take me out of the fight.) “Bean bags” are cloth bags filled with small lead shot.
Indirect impact rounds: heavier and larger, they fire thick rubber discs. The discs can do considerable damage if fired directly into a body. They are designed to be fired into the ground and ricochet into the threat’s legs.
Chemical munitions: gas grenades are the classic munition that you see on TV. OC is used more often now than CS or CN. Some are designed to penetrate walls first and then splatter OC. Some on impact ‘pop’ and scatter three smaller canisters that burn and produce CS gas.
The PepperBall and FN303 are weapons designed to fire OC pellets. The FN303 is very accurate and relatively long-ranged. There has been one reported death of a young woman in a crowd struck in the eye.
The PepperBall is a paintball gun, but the balls have been filled with OC powder or water. The water stings a lot, as a kind of impact round.
Distraction Devices are the technical term for ‘flash-bang’ grenades. They make a very loud noise and a very bright light. A flash-bang is a hand grenade with no fragmentation and limited high explosive (HE). It is basically a blasting cap in a container. Loud and bright, but no shrapnel and much less of a pressure wave. The stingball and stingball/OC versions look like a black rubber softball. A regular flash-bang looks like a cylinder, black, about 1.5 inches in diameter and maybe four inches long. They have a spoon and pin like a military grenade but without the extra safety clip.
Technical detail: they make a slight pop first, something to do with the detonation, which draws the eyes for the bang.
Teams use them to make people freeze and, hopefully, prevent more dangerous force.
I’ve been within a meter of a flash-bang (and a stingball, see later) with no ill effect. You could feel the pressure wave and it was loud, but even at near contact, no damage. Throwing one in an enclosed space and trying to close the door, I’ve been knocked back about six inches from the pressure wave. A door has a lot of surface area.
A stingball is a flash-bang with rubber pellets in it. Theoretically it adds pain to the noise and blinding light. I’ve never noticed the pellets hitting, but part of that may be due to adrenaline.
Flash-bangs can also have OC in the mix.
There are lots of other weapons. Always remember to do your due diligence when finding experts on weapons. Some may have a lot of technical knowledge but never used the weapon in combat. Manufacturers make claims based on what their weapons can do in controlled conditions (and what they can get away with.) Weapons don’t always work the way they’re supposed to, and they can break. It makes them difficult, sometimes frustrating, and fun to use (and write about.)
Tasers and Death, Less-Lethal Technology and the Media:
Tasers almost never cause death. The charge is low amperage and doesn't penetrate deeply enough to disrupt, say, the sinoatrial node. If the pain can trigger a cardiac condition, death is possible.
Deaths following use of a taser do happen. They are rare. In this instance following doesn't imply causality. Tasers tend to be used on people in extremely emotionally disturbed states, and a certain percentage of these die anyway. The medical examiner's term is excited delirium. Some--usually activists and attorneys-- dispute that excited delirium exists. ER docs are given lessons on how to deal with it, as are some cops. It is an officially recognized cause of death. In some instances, liver temperature at autopsy has been over 108 degrees. That's not survivable, nor is the temperature related to or caused by any force used. I've written an analysis of one of the scary studies before.
The taser is more incapacitating than wall outlets because the points of contact are spread much farther.
So is the outcry against Tasers (and, about ten years ago, Pepperspray) all television sensationalism? Not all, but that seems to be the driving factor from where I sit. The partial information, misinformation and, in some cases (one that I have a personal stake in-- a major news outlet was reporting American deaths in Baghdad 100m from where I slept that never happened) deliberate lies that make it into the news can really shake up your confidence.
That said, there are bad officers. They are rare because it is not a profession that tolerates stupidity. If you think citizens don't like bad officers, just know that other officers hate bad officers- and there are young, inexperienced, stupid and aggressive officers (who make for a lot of bad press). There are also timid, gullible and overly-sensitive officers who never generate bad press but frequently get themselves and other officers hurt or allow citizens to be unnecessarily hurt by failing to act.
There are also situations with no good answers: You get a 911 call, a family, terrified, saying their son is out of control and he has a knife. You show up and the kid is whacked out on the driveway, stripping off his clothes, howling and screaming threats, waving his knife around.
You try pepperspray (at great risk to yourself, getting that close to a man with a knife) beanbag rounds and the taser. He shrugs them all off. Then he turns and sprints back for the house where his family is hiding. In one second you need to make a decision: do you shoot a disturbed young man in the back and live with those consequences? Or do you let him run into a place where he has access to victims and you can no longer see or do anything about it? Kill him? Or take a chance that he will kill his entire family? The consequences of either decision will be on you. You have, maybe, one second to decide.
How often police do things that citizens think they shouldn't? Almost every day. Not because there is anything wrong, but because people have lived so far away from dangerous people that they forget the danger exists. Any use of force seems shocking to the inexperienced. I'll frequently watch a video and wonder why the officer didn't use decisive force earlier, whereas someone else will wonder why he used force at all.
Many of the Taser incidents that have been filmed and are available on the internet show a level of pain that is shocking to many people, but a professional looking at the same incident sees every other option as having a higher risk of injury.
There are also some gut level things. Ours is supposed to be an egalitarian society. What is wrong for one should be wrong for all. But when an officer puts cuffs on you and throws you in a car it is an arrest, and legal. If a stranger does it, that's kidnapping. This stems largely from having a society that seems to feel that all violence is wrong, and yet knows that only force can stop violent people. So there is a need for people to be assigned a role to use force in the name of and for the benefit of society. Our culture's answer was to make it a profession open to all. Other cultures made it a caste.
In early Christianity, there was no pretense that God was good. He was the boss. God was not an example to live up to but a voice to be obeyed. The infinitely good concept was tacked on much later... and God didn't fare too well. Bad things happen to good people. Exploitive people have happy lives and the exploited die young and hungry. Clearly, nothing in nature is based on human concepts of justice or goodness. God failed at being infinitely good and wise, just and kind, always knowing and punishing the wicked, always protecting the righteous. God failed at that, and yet that is the standard that people try to hold officers to. No mistakes. No accidents. Compassionate and forgiving to gr
oups that I like; harsh and inflexible with groups that I don't like (and, of course, to respect that like/dislike line for everybody at all times equally). It makes me want to laugh or cry, sometimes.
There is no violent solution that will make everyone happy. Not all people respond to words. Not all people respond to beatings or pain or the sound of their own bones breaking. Some people must be stopped.
When an officer swings a baton, he has judged that he needs to stop the threat and either a lower level of force will not work in time or has already failed.
If the baton fails, what then? Switch to the higher level of force, which is the handgun and take the threat’s life? Or keep swinging the baton again…and again…and again…
The Taser seems so ideal- no injury, as safe as it gets but a level of pain that makes the most hardened street-fighter rethink his options. Effective on all but a handful of people. And safe. Those are the exact same factors that could let a sadist vent, the same factors that could turn one of the greatest advances for humane law enforcement in the last fifty years into a device for torture.
In the end, everything always has and always will come down to the judgment and integrity of the people in the crisis. The protagonists. Making, and living with decisions like this is the heart of ‘protagging.’
Recap:
-Less-lethal technologies are an attempt to invent a tool that will take a bad guy down as effectively as a handgun but without injury
-Modern LL chemical weapons are CS, CN and OC
-The Taser is a directed energy weapon that hurts. A lot.
-Impact, chemicals and other specialty munitions can be fired from a 12 gauge, 40mm or 37mm platform
-Distraction devices are “flashbang grenades” and can some configurations have impact pellets and chemical sprays added
