Yesterday, the City Council voted six to three to reinstate the Seattle Police Department’s ability to use blast balls, a controversial “less lethal” form of crowd control, on protestors. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office introduced the bill in October 2024.

Councilmembers Cathy Moore, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Joy Hollingsworth opposed it, while Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmembers Maritza Rivera, Rob Saka, Mark Solomon, Dan Strauss, and Bob Kettle voted in favor. The use of blast balls was banned by their predecessors in June 2020, in response to the brutal consequences of their use on protestors against police brutality that same summer. However, that ban was never really upheld. 

Instead, it was put on hold by U.S. District Judge James Robart, who oversees the federal consent decree that the Seattle Police Department has been operating under since 2012. At the time, the Department of Justice and then-SPD Chief Carmen Best argued that not having “less lethal” options would force police to use, uh, more lethal options.

“Christina Fogg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued on Friday that without blast balls, pepper spray and other weapons banned by the Council, police would have only ‘batons, tasers and handguns,’” wrote the Seattle Times’ David Gutman, in an article on Robart’s order to block the ban.

Robart’s basically said, “Yeah, totally,” instead of what a normal person would say, which is: “Why the fuck would you shoot someone who is unarmed and exercising their First Amendment right to protest, even if they were about to smash a window or sock a cop? Why would you even suggest that!?” And perhaps even: “With that attitude, why the hell do we allow you absolute psychopaths to carry deadly weapons?”

A quite frankly upsetting number of sitting councilmembers were also in the, “Yeah, totally,” camp yesterday, but I suppose that’s to be expected these days. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the wonky details, but basically the ban got trapped in legal limbo and never actually took effect. All this time, we’ve been operating under SPD’s existing interim crowd control policies.

Indeed, the vote yesterday had a lot to do with getting out from under the consent decree, as nailing down a permanent crowd control policy was one of Robart’s last asks. Given that Mayor Bruce Harrell has made it abundantly clear that he wants to see the consent decree lifted during his time in office, and given the close political alignment he enjoys with the majority of the council, this was pretty much always going to pass.

Weirdly, Councilmember Cathy Moore, who shares plenty of politics with Harrell, joined with Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck —who shares politics with precisely none of her colleagues or the mayor— to oppose the bill in its current form. Both spoke to its flaws, and both offered amendments attempting to soften the blow.

“I understand the need to move us out of the consent decree, I absolutely support the need to get out of the consent decree, but as I said the first time, we have to get it right,” Moore said. “And I don’t know that the court is necessarily going to believe or find that this is an adequate policy. It’s deeply flawed.”

Be that as it may,  it’s just that SPD hasn’t had the opportunity, motivation, or explicit permission from the council to use them. Now they do. The important question is, will they?

Based on a close read of the new ordinance, there’s no way of knowing. The big takeaway here is that this new “regulation” does very little to actually regulate the behavior of cops when it comes to blast balls, tear gas, pepper spray, and so on.

While the bill is packed with very serious-sounding regulations— including a rock-solid, totally enforceable pinky promise, “police use of force for crowd control shall be objectively reasonable, necessary, and proportional to the threat presented” — at the end of the day, when and how to use these incredibly dangerous “less lethal” weapons is left almost entirely up to SPD. Better yet, a lot of it has to do with what an officer thinks is happening from moment to moment.

Generally, an SPD Incident Commander or supervisor may still approve anything besides blast balls and tear gas. Once approved, officers must not deploy said tools “unless specific facts and circumstances are occurring or about to occur that create an imminent risk of physical injury to any person or significant property damage.” Nothing further on what those specific facts and circumstances are is included in the bill.

For tear gas specifically, the new crowd control bill prohibits it except in situations essentially amounting to a riot (the definition of which is a whole nebula of its own) or a hostage scenario and requires a Mayoral proclamation of civil emergency. As for blast balls, they also carry the same Mayoral proclamation requirement, though they can be used for regular old crowd control, provided, of course, that “specific facts and circumstances establish an imminent threat of violence against persons or significant property damage.”

Cops are already supposed to reserve force, and especially deadly force for only situations where it is absolutely necessary, typically in response to immediate threats to their own or a victim’s life. Sounds great, but if their colleagues in Minnesota did that, SPD wouldn’t have had a reason to deploy all the blast balls they deployed in 2020 in the first place. God’s green internet wouldn’t be riddled with videos of innocent people getting shot in the back, beaten to death while they scream for their mother, or lit up while crawling along the ground on their stomach, hands clearly in view.

The issue with so much of our regulation around policing is that we’re trusting people who have demonstrated incredibly poor judgment to make important, life-or-death judgment calls.

During public comment, Matt Offenbacher, who described himself as a Capitol Hill resident and SODO business owner, brought up the cautionary tale of Captain Steve Strand.

“Among other things, he drove his unmarked police car into a crowd of nonviolent climate protestors,” Offenbacher said. “I was one of those protestors, so I can tell you firsthand how shockingly unhinged Captain Strand’s behavior seemed. From the moment he arrived on the scene, his rage led him to escalate his response, greatly increasing the potential for harm and injury.”

Noting that his final words from above were not his own opinion, but the actual findings of the Office of Police Accountability, Offenbacher concluded by saying, “I bring Captain Strand to your attention today as a warning that no matter what policies and safeguards you write, councilmembers, if you reauthorize the SPD’s use of less lethal weapons, they will use them and there will be a certain number of officers who, in the heat of the moment, will let their own feelings, their politics, their rage dictate their actions.” 

Kettle, the bill’s sponsor, later said that “training, training, training” would be key to reincorporating less lethal weaponry in a way that doesn’t harm innocent Seattleites — a handwave if I’ve ever heard one. We have yet to train our way out of what I consider to be the root cause of the rage Offenbacher highlighted, which is that too many police officers see the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving during protests — the protestors, to be clear, along with everyone else in the vicinity — as the enemy. 

While I realize this echoes a popular protest slogan, it’s also concerning that so many of the statutes in this “less lethal” weapons policy use imminent property damage as a trigger for the deployment of pretty serious levels of force. Sure, if someone is visibly attempting to maim or kill someone else, and you can prevent it by tossing a blast ball under their feet, I can see an argument for that. But for fuck’s sake, if you’re debating the merits of whether cops should be allowed to cause severe harm and long-term psychological damage to a person — plus all the people around that person — over a plate glass window, what are you even doing on that dias?

Perhaps the one thing in this ordinance that could have provided a hard consequence for making the wrong judgment call was Rinck’s Amendment I, which would have created a private right of action to the tune of $10,000 in the event of injury resulting from improper use of blast balls. That right would be denied to anyone who “in the judgment of a reasonable officer, commits a criminal offense at or immediately prior to the use of less lethal force.” Kettle, the bill’s sponsor, was not sold on the idea.

“One of the things on this is that there’s already processes available to individuals who felt that they’ve been injured by anybody in the city, nevermind the Seattle Police Department,” he said, “Those processes get the job done, and we should not add to that with this private right of action.”

He’s partially right. The city already had to pay $10 million to people injured by less lethal weapons during the 2020 protests. Not that that did anything to steer cops away from such tools. At a Feb. 8 anti-Trump protest on Alki Beach, officers threatened to tear gas and pepper spray protestors who had blocked Alki Ave.

Whether or not you believe additional financial penalties would put cops on their best behavior, the amendment went down in flames, with only Rinck and Moore voting in favor.

Moore did secure a couple of small concessions. Amendment E added a new recital basically putting down on record that blast balls have a “demonstrated track record” of hurting people who were doing nothing wrong. Amendment D ended up being the only specific, tangible restriction on the use of blast balls, mandating that they only be thrown underhand and away from people, even if it did still include a carveout allowing officers to “deploy blast balls overhand and near a person” so long as they deemed it “reasonable, necessary, and proportional to address immediate threats to life safety.”

Silver linings aside, what we are left with is a bill that gives our extremely cop-friendly mayor control over when and how cops are allowed to quell unrest. But once he’s decided a protest is fair game and declared a state of emergency, it’s entirely up to the cops to decide when it’s appropriate to employ “less lethal” weapons. Do not be fooled, nothing in this bill prevents them from doing what they did last time around: shooting first and covering ass later. All they have to do is say that someone was about to do something very bad, an excuse cops have definitely never used to get away with bullshit before.

As has become so common under the current Mayor and Council, we have endured yet another situation where people in power quibble on and on and on about something that is ultimately symbolic, with the resulting vote giving SPOG and/or the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce something damn close to whatever they asked for in the beginning.

Or, as Saka put it in his closing remarks, “legislative sausage-making at its finest.”

I think I’m full.