The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 Read online

  Alec Wilkinson

  NON-LETHAL FORCE

  FROM The New Yorker

  A JUDGMENT SOMETIMES APPLIED by professionals to a non-lethal weapon is that if the weapon is any good—if it reliably protects someone from being attacked or subdues a person without causing harm—criminals will use it. Absent a small number of robberies committed with pepper spray, though, they haven’t really taken to any. According to Charles Heal, an expert in non-lethal weapons, the problem is that the field is nascent, and “the options are primitive. The whole state of the art is only a shade over a decade old.”

  “Non-lethal” is an imperfect term. “Lethal weapons are defined by their capability,” Heal says. “Non-lethal are defined by their intent.” In the hands of the police, non-lethal weapons are meant to resolve a crisis (say, a Hells Angel in a bar who has broken a chair over someone’s head and is overturning tables, and who, when asked to leave, draws a knife) without anyone getting badly hurt or being killed. They are also sometimes called less than lethal, less lethal, controlled force, soft kill, mission kill, and minimal force. There is no established lexicon for non-lethal weapons, but there are accepted categories and concepts, including impact or kinetic weapons—things that strike, such as batons, billy clubs, saps, and projectiles fired from shotguns (including bean bags and stun bags, which usually have sand in them instead of lead pellets), and “vivi,” meaning animals. “Dog is the only non-lethal weapon I can change my mind about after I deploy it,” Heal says. “The suspect sees me and puts his hands up, I can call it back. If I launch a bean bag, it’s downrange. Dog’s also the only one with target-acquisition radar: suspect moves, dog does, too.” In addition, there are irritants, such as tear gas, which was first used on a crowd in Paris, in 1912; malodorants (stink bombs); obscurants, which interfere with seeing, either by means of lasers or smoke or other substances; electrical, such as Tasers; physiological, which includes noises that are too loud and lights that are too bright, sometimes combined in devices called flashbangs; reactants, which include activities such as cloud seeding (conducted in Vietnam above the Ho Chi Minh Trail); and soporifics, which are also called calmatives, sedatives, and hypnotics. “What they used in the Moscow Theatre,” Heal says, referring to the occasion, in 2002, when Chechen terrorists took over a theatre, with nearly eight hundred people in it, and were subdued with a chemical delivered through the ventilation system. More than a hundred of the hostages died, some of them as a result of the chemical. Still, Heal says, they are the only weapons that “allow you to intervene in a lethal situation without having to resort immediately to lethal force.”

  Heal was among the first Americans to use modern non-lethal weapons, as a marine in Somalia in 1995. One was a foam called sticky foam, which was shot from a hose and designed to fix a person’s feet to the ground. The problem was that people could move their feet faster than the sticky foam could be applied, although, Heal says, if you hit a person’s thighs his legs sometimes stuck together. Heal’s orders were to provide a twenty-minute window between the withdrawal of American soldiers and the arrival of “the people with crude weapons and guns on the backs of old trucks who’d rush in to take over.” He had his troops scatter caltrops, ancient devices made of spiked rods welded together in such a way that, however they land, a spike faces upward, like a child’s jack. The Somalis cast the caltrops aside. Heal had his soldiers lay down more caltrops and cover them with sticky foam; the Somalis picked these up, too, and threw them away, although it took longer. Heal’s soldiers then put down sheets of plywood, laid concertina wire over the plywood, laid caltrops on the plywood, and covered everything with sticky foam, which held up the Somalis for about five minutes, sufficient for the troops to retreat. Heal and others think that sticky foam might work in an embassy or at a missile base or a nuclear plant, where the floors could be flooded if someone broke in.

  For more than thirty years, Heal, who is fifty-eight, and is known as Sid, divided his career between the Marine reserves and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. (The Sheriff’s Department acts as the police in parts of Los Angeles County that are not incorporated, and in cities such as Compton, where its services are retained by contract.) He is probably the most knowledgeable figure in America on the civil uses of non-lethal weapons. According to Nicholas C. Nicholas, the lead scientist at the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies, at Penn State, “There’s nobody close to him. I saw him interviewed on TV the other night, and I said to my wife, ‘That’s Mr. Non-Lethal Weapons as far as the police are concerned.’ Heal has served on the front in four wars—Vietnam, Somalia, Kuwait, and Iraq. When he returned from Somalia, he says, he “ended up on the lecture tour for the Marines in lessons learned.” The Los Angeles undersheriff called him into his office and said that if he could specialize in non-lethal weapons for the Marines he could do it for the Sheriff’s Department. Heal became the only municipal-law-enforcement figure in America then devoted to non-lethal weapons.

  Manufacturers typically produce non-lethal weapons for soldiers, because the military market is larger and the military has more money. To sell weapons to the police, the manufacturers tend to modify, rather than redesign, the military versions. In addition, manufacturers often take advice from retired military officers, who, Heal says, have “no insight into law enforcement.” Heal began urging inventors and manufacturers to design non-lethal weapons for policemen rather than soldiers, and whenever they made something he tested it. He assumed that manufacturers would be responsive, because the L.A.S.D. is so big—“Sixteen thousand employees, five thousand vehicles, and I don’t know how many boats and planes”—that he thought it could be a market in itself. As an incentive, Heal was willing to provide for free the expertise for which manufacturers paid consultants hundreds of dollars an hour.

  Heal had a talent for describing to a manufacturer precisely what a policeman needed and whether or not its product worked well. Over the years, about twenty-five ideas that inventors and manufacturers have approached him with have become products, including a portable robot called a Throwbot, which has wheels and a camera and can go into rooms where someone might be hiding with a gun; the SkySeer, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a camera; the Pepper-Ball, a projectile like a paintball that disperses an irritating powder; and a few repulsive malodorants. Among those that haven’t worked out are the Bola Ball, which a policeman would carry on his belt and fling at running suspects (it was too difficult to master), and a device shaped like a pistol which used ultrasound to detect concealed weapons (it worked well on cotton and wool but less reliably on leather or synthetic fabrics). Recently, Heal has attended tests of the Active Denial System, or A.D.S., made for the military by Raytheon, which sends a beam of energy that heats a person’s skin to a hundred and thirty degrees within a matter of seconds. It is sometimes called the pain ray. Heal says that being beamed with it is like stepping into a scalding shower. “It’s the first non-lethal device in history to provide protection against lethal force, because its range exceeds rifle fire,” he says. The military hopes to use the A.D.S. in Iraq to disperse crowds or stop people at check-points who keep coming after being told to stop. It currently has little use in law enforcement, though. “If they gave it to us for free, we probably couldn’t use it,” Heal told me. The first police chief to use the pain ray on Americans would become famous overnight.

  It isn’t so much that the police are uncomfortable about using violence when they feel that their safety is jeopardized; it is that often when they kill people they end up in lawsuits. When a non-lethal weapon is being tested, Heal says, the critical standard is whether it creates a “save”—that is, whether a person who would have been killed was instead apprehended, because the manufacturer can then cite the dollars saved from a lawsuit. The standing of any non-lethal weapon that creates a save advances from speculative to favorable. According to Nicholas, the non-lethal weapon that everyone desires is “the phaser where you can put it on stun.”

  No
n-lethal weapons can force a suspect to declare his intentions, and that sometimes leads to a save. Heal once took part in a gun battle with a man who was shooting at him and his fellow-deputies from behind a barricade. “He had a Winchester .458 calibre,” Heal says. “An elephant gun—the bullets are as big as your thumb. He’s shooting through cinderblock walls, and we’re using the holes to look back at him. Finally, he comes out with his hands in his pockets. We’re all yelling, ‘Get your hands out of your pockets.’ All around me, I can hear the slack coming out of the triggers—they’re about to shoot. It’s pretty clear he’s trying to commit suicide by cop, but what if there’s a weapon in his pockets? What gets us killed isn’t the ability to apply lethal force; it’s the reluctance to use it, and the reason we’re reluctant is that we can’t make informed decisions. The rules of engagement that allow us to use lethal force mean that we have to tolerate a lot more abuse and risk. With a non-lethal-weapon option, you don’t have to accept the conditions offered. What happened was, someone threw a flashbang at this guy, and his hands came out of his pockets, and we jumped him and wrestled him down. The flashbang enabled us to determine his intentions. That’s a save.”

  HEAL IS ABOUT SIX FEET TALL. His carriage is erect. He has a large nose and sharp, elemental features—he looks a little as if a child had drawn him. He is exceptionally fit—he runs every morning before dawn, and sometimes he rides his bicycle a hundred miles in a day. His manner is emphatic, and his eyes sometimes widen when he speaks. He has blue eyes and brown hair cut short on the sides and a little longer on top. Several times a day, he plants his feet, takes a black comb from his back pocket, and draws it slowly across the front of his head, smoothing his hair with his following hand so that it stands up like a hedge. Commanders in the L.A.S.D. (there are twenty-eight of them) can wear their own clothes, but Heal would always wear a uniform. He was the only commander who did. “I have color-coördination issues,” he says. Heal grew up on a farm in Michigan. The trip he made at the age of eighteen, to San Diego, to join the Marines, was the first time he had ever taken a bus or a taxi or a plane. While he was there, he saw his first movie. His hearing was damaged during training, when a soldier stepped on a trip wire that set off a booby trap about a foot from his head.

  Heal has been injured more often at work than he was at war. Between 1979 and 1982, he was a deputy sheriff assigned to South Central L.A., where, he says, he couldn’t drive down the street without seeing a crime. One year, he drew his gun so many times that the bluing on the barrel wore off. He has surgical pins in his hand from a fight with a glue sniffer. Another drug suspect broke his nose, leaving a scar between his eyes that looks like the flippers on a pinball game. (“It’s not pretty,” Heal says, “but it’s better than what I had.”) He was also hurt repeatedly in fights with suspects intoxicated with PCP, which is a dissociative anesthetic. “They’d take off their clothes, because their body temperature was so hot,” Heal says. “They’d be slimy hot, and they’d jump into swimming pools and showers, and, for whatever reason, they’d climb onto roofs. If you got a call for a naked man on a roof, that was PCP.”

  PCP made even small men feel unnaturally strong, and a strong man was nearly impossible to subdue. “The only way to overwhelm them was with weight,” Heal told me. “We tried nets, we tried poles, ladders, fire extinguishers.” For a while, they tried throwing blankets over them and binding them with ropes. One man, a Samoan, required four officers to bend his arms into handcuffs. “Non-lethal’ was hardly a term in those days,” Heal says. “The non-lethal options were a baton, which all it did was get the guy mad, or tear gas, which they didn’t feel and tended to work better on us.”

  Heal’s field trials of new weapons last several weeks or months and involve sometimes just a few deputies and sometimes as many as five hundred. In 2000, he tested the TigerLight, a flashlight that also dispersed pepper spray. Deputies carried pepper spray and flashlights on their tool belts; the problem was that fights broke out too quickly for them to get to their pepper spray, whereas they usually had their flashlights in hand. “When a deputy gets in trouble, he’s going to hit with his flashlight, and you’re going to get stitches, which almost always result in lawsuits,” Heal says.

  Initially, Heal distributed twenty TigerLights. The deputies didn’t like that when the lights were upside down the pepper spray leaked on them. The manufacturer fixed the problem, and in 2005 Heal gave out five hundred TigerLights. “We figured if the option to use the spray in the TigerLight could reduce head strikes by even two or three per cent we’re going to recover the money the TigerLights cost,” Heal says. The difference was closer to thirty per cent. “It was a real sleeper.” He says that at the end of a trial the endorsement he looks for is that deputies complain when he takes the weapon away.

  MANUFACTURERS WHO HAVE A PRODUCT that they want Heal to consider tend to bring it to him, but he also travels a lot. He answers anyone who contacts him, and he has spent a good deal of time driving around Southern California visiting inventors. Recently, I went with him to see David McGill, a retired member of the L.A.P.D., who had written a letter describing a device he calls the Carpoon. McGill and his wife live in Temecula, about seventy miles southeast of L.A. The Carpoon is designed to stop cars that are fleeing the police.

  “People have thought of all kinds of harpoon devices,” Heal told me on the way to McGill’s. “Some shoot out the tires, some lock onto the car, then you drag them to a stop by slamming on the brakes. What we’re going to see here is called a running gear-entanglement system. His idea is he fires a probe that hits a tire then rolls a cable around the axle and kills the ability to drive the wheel. It’s the release part that’s a good idea—being entangled is not attractive. Nobody likes entanglement. You’re entangled, he spins out, which makes us spin out; it’s like a boa. There’s so much civil liability with that. Even if a bad guy’s breaking the law, he was safely breaking the law until we spun him out.”

  Recalling other inventions, Heal mentioned a man who had built a remote-control machine gun. “You looked at a little TV screen that has a crosshair on it, and you fired with a toggle switch,” he said. “I put eight rounds through a target, but it had no application in law enforcement that I could think of. Another lab had a sniper-detection system that would locate a sniper by a combination of acoustics and light. They were taking it to the Balkans—this was ’97 or ’98. I tried to get them to let us borrow one for South Central L.A., but it was classified.”

  Heal took an exit off the freeway. “One device I really liked was a camera that fit on a dog’s head,” he continued. “It was just like a little hat, and when the dog searches for a crook you see what the dog sees. There was also a little speaker that fit in the dog’s ear. You could talk quietly and the dog would follow your commands. That one, I think, still has potential. The dog handlers were willing to try it; I just wasn’t able to get the canine to buy into it. The problem is, it takes about three weeks for the dogs to tolerate it, and until they do they’ll scratch their heads and pull at their ears. The guy only wanted to give it to me for a month.”

  By now, we had arrived in a neighborhood of single-story houses. Heal had brought McGill’s letter with him and, reading the address on the back of the envelope, he parked in front of a house where a tall, thin man in a red sweatshirt and jeans waved to us from the lawn—McGill himself. We went into the house and met his wife, Cheryl, then we sat in the living room.

  “I might mention that my first pursuit was in 1957,” McGill said. “Kid running for nothing, and he ended up hitting a train off Alameda. Knocked the train off the track and didn’t do him any good, either.” He went on for a while, then said, “Let’s change gears and talk about Carpoon.”

  “How do you envision this?” Heal asked. “It shoots a probe?”

  “Powerful mini-barrel air gun mounted on the front bumper of a police car,” McGill said. He leaned toward Heal. “The air gun is slaved to a dash-mounted computerized video camera
that will project the image of the road in front of the police car. As soon as the officer goes into pursuit mode, the other car’s rear tires appear on his computer screen. The officer touches a tire on the screen, crosshairs immediately appear. Another touch on the screen moves the crosshair to any quadrant of the tire he wants, and when he’s satisfied he gets an aural tone, like a sidewinder missile. As long as he hears that tone, that crosshair is on the tire, no matter where the guy goes.”

  McGill waved a hand. “From here on out, everything is automatic,” he said. “All the time the officer’s driving, he hears the tone. At a predetermined distance, the gun is going to fire. He’s just driving.”

  Heal’s BlackBerry began buzzing, and he took it out and read a message. Then he said, “Sorry.”

  “Air gun shoots a tethered dart into the tire,” McGill went on. “Now the bad guy’s got a quarter-inch hole in his tire. In addition, the computer will give him some cable that will wrap around his wheel and cause real havoc. I’m hoping we can engineer something that will break an axle, break a tire shaft.”

  McGill turned to me. “These guys, Sid and I know, will lose a tire and keep going, but we’ve taken the hundred-mile-an-hour thing out of it.”

  “You have no idea on price, though, because you don’t have a developer, right?” Heal asked.

  “I don’t have anything,” McGill said. “I need a money partner.”

  Heal leaned back slightly. “All this stuff is feasible,” he said. “Military uses it all the time.” He asked if McGill had consulted the National Institute of Justice Office of Science and Technology.

  “I haven’t looked at anything,” McGill said. “I just got the patent.”

  “You’re going to need a working prototype before you have much of a chance,” Heal said. “They got to see it, touch it, smell it, watch it work.”