A LETHAL MINDSET

The death this week of Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove while she was in a crowd of young people celebrating the Red Sox victory over the Yankees will bring into sharp focus a trend not followed by many people outside the law enforcement community. That is the use of so-called non-lethal weapons, primarily designed to deal with crowd control. At this time local authorities are investigating the incident, but local media reports indicate that she was killed after being struck in the eye by a plastic pepper spray dispenser, a marble-sized ball designed to be fired at a person's chest, shatter on impact, and dispense the spray to disable the target. As the son of a police officer, and the brother of another, I have a great deal of sympathy for the officer who fired the projectile that killed the young woman. He will be haunted by it for the rest of his life. I also understand that the situation must have been chaotic, with thousands of fans in the streets, some climbing lamposts, others setting fires and overturning cars. Witnesses say the officer fired in the direction where he thought a bottle had been thrown from, which landed at the feet of his horse. But what I think we must understand is that these so-called non-lethal weapons are still projectile weapons and, in that sense, are of the same character as the firearms we all know are deadly. When a projectile is fired at soft tissue faster than a human being could throw it, then common sense says bad things can happen. In fact, baseball fans know that a certain kind of projectile (a baseball) thrown by a certain kind of person (a major league pitcher) hitting just the right spot can kill a man. Police officers know that when they fire their weapon they may kill someone. They are trained extensively in the appropriate use of that weapon. Are they trained as extensively with the relatively new non-lethal weapons? Are they told that when they fire the weapon someone could die? Perhaps not. I suspect the manufacturers of these weapons vigorously market their supposed non-lethality. My guess is that when they demonstrate the weapons they emphasize how cool it is that you can now fire at someone and disable him without permanent injury or risk of death. Hopefully, this tragic incident will cause law enforcement officials to re-examine these new weapons. Certainly they have value. But, in my view, police officers may need to be trained to regard these weapons more in the way they look at their traditional sidearms, with a lethal mindset.