April 16, 2003

By A.C. Thompson

Oakland cops who fired wooden and rubber bullets, beanbags, and "Stinger" grenades at antiwar protesters last week apparently failed to follow both the Oakland Police Department's own guidelines for using force and those of the company that manufactures the so-called less-lethal munitions.

OPD General Order K-3 (entitled "The Use of Force") instructs officers not to fire rubber bullets or beanbags at a person's "head, neck, spleen, liver, kidneys, throat, spine or groin."

Judging from the gory photos and video footage all over the news, and from interviews with eyewitnesses, that order went unheeded when the department broke up the early-morning April 7 picket at the Port of Oakland (see "Peaceful Protest, Violent Response," 4/9/03).

The OPD's violent clampdown sent at least six protesters to the hospital, landed roughly 31 others in jail, and has already sparked civil litigation and calls by city council members for an independent probe of the incident.

Anyone who ends up investigating the matter should talk to Oaklander Scott Fleming, who was tagged five times with some sort of less-lethal ammunition during the incident – four rounds struck him in the back, and one smacked into his shoulder.

"The majority of the injuries I have seen were on the torso, neck, and head," said Fleming, adding that he'd seen about a dozen people with welts and lacerations from the projectiles. "I don't believe that would have happened if they were using these weapons the way they're supposed to be used."

According to documents obtained by the Bay Guardian, the weapons are generally supposed to be aimed at the thighs and buttocks, or "skipped" off the pavement at an angle so they ricochet toward the legs of the crowd.

At least one woman, San Franciscan Sri Louise, was struck in the face. Describing the shooting, which left a massive contusion on her throat and jaw, she said, "I was just completely stunned and scared. There was an immediate golf ball on the side of my face."

Independent videographer Ron Smith of Mill Valley nearly got shot in the mug. "I had my camera in my left hand up by my face when it hit me," said Smith, who has filed suit against the city. The projectile – probably a wooden or rubber bullet – snapped a finger bone in his left hand. "I've been in war zones. I've been in Colombia, El Salvador, and I've never seen anything like this."

While the department has claimed the protesters may have been injured when wooden and rubber bullets ricocheted off the ground, the demonstrators we spoke to said the cops appeared to be aiming directly at them – an assertion backed up by an Associated Press photo and video posted at www.sf.indymedia.org, as well as footage aired on KTVU, channel 2, and other local stations.

Demonstrators also say they were following OPD orders when the barrage began. "The protesters were complying with police orders, and the police started shooting after the protesters were already complying," said Smith, whose account of the incident was echoed by Fleming, Louise, and many other protesters interviewed by the Bay Guardian.

According to OPD spokesperson Danielle Ashford, the artillery employed during the crackdown consisted of "wood baton" and "rubber baton" rounds (eight-inch-long, 37-millimeter-wide shells packed with hard foam rubber or wood), beanbags (bruising rubber pellets wrapped in mesh and stuffed into shotgun-size shells), and "Stinger" grenades (which unleash disorienting blasts of light and sound as well as rubber pellets). The grenades can even be loaded with pepper spray or tear gas.

All the munitions are manufactured by Defense Technology/Federal Laboratories, a subsidiary of Armor Holdings, a publicly traded corporation that produces police and military matériel. The Bay Guardian obtained a copy of Defense Technology's 1999 training manual for less-lethal weapons, which states clearly, "Areas such as the head, neck, spine and groin" shouldn't be targeted "unless it is the intent to deliver deadly force."

The manual also cites some pretty jaw-dropping statistics: in a study conducted by the San Diego Police Department, less-lethal munitions killed people in 2 percent of the cases where they were deployed – mostly from shots to the head and chest – and broke bones 5 percent of the time.

Shots to the cranium, the manual explains, can cause "bruising of the brain tissue or spinal cord, resulting in a loss of normal brain function to the affected area; may cause swelling, hemorrhage, unconsciousness, and possibly death." Shots to the neck or throat can produce "fractures to the trachea and or/pharynx that could obstruct the airway," while shots to the torso can do "potentially fatal" damage to the heart.

Luckily, no one was killed or seriously injured at the Oakland docks, but the OPD's disregard for human life is chilling – and doesn't help with public relations problems related to its Riders police scandal.

In the opinion of Frank Saunders, a former Santa Monica cop and an expert on police practices, the OPD "was using those weapons inappropriately and indiscriminately. You can't just fire at anything that moves."

There's also another issue. General Order K-3 states that less-lethal weapons should be used only to arrest or detain a criminal suspect, to overcome the "use or threatened use of force," or to keep a suspect from escaping.

Rubber bullets or beanbag rounds "may be utilized only when lower levels of force have been exhausted, are ineffective or are inappropriate during attempts to control violent or combative persons," according to the order.

While the cops did make some 31 arrests (mostly for misdemeanors), they also blasted a bunch of people who were never charged with a crime and weren't threatening the phalanx of riot cops on the scene. A few bolts and bottles may have been thrown at the cops, something police later cited as prompting their use of weapons, but many witnesses said that came after numerous shots had been fired and protesters were fleeing. In Saunders's view, the criteria for firing on the crowd weren't met.

Departments are supposed to follow their use-of-force rules, according to Alan Deal, a spokesperson for the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, a state agency that schools law enforcement personnel.

"You can't decide to adhere to them today and not adhere to them tomorrow," Deal explained. "It doesn't work like that."

Oakland mayor Jerry Brown defended the OPD's tactics. For starters, he told the Bay Guardian that protesters and police have offered incongruent accounts of the day: the cops say they were met by an angry and violent mob but, the activists claim it's the other way around.

The cops, Brown argued, "took the actions that they believed were appropriate, the only actions they could take, given that the number of protesters was growing. They used their best judgment."

The alternative to opening fire, Brown told us, "was hand-to-hand combat, and that has risks, too."

After last month's shut-down-the-city demonstrations in San Francisco, the OPD was not about to let activists bring business at the port to a standstill, the mayor said. A blockage at the waterfront could've created "a major traffic jam, which itself runs the risk of causing accidents or serious injury," he said, noting that police officials will give a public accounting of the incident at April 28's city council meeting.

Police Chief Richard Word last week told the San Francisco Chronicle that hurting protesters was "certainly not something we wanted to do."