By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council approved legislation yesterday that retroactively authorizes the Seattle Police Department to adopt its own policies governing how officers can use “less lethal” weapons such as pepper spray, foam-tipped bullets, and blast balls—rubber grenades that can cause serious, even life-threatening injuries when they explode. The bill imposes a handful of new restrictions—requiring cops to throw blast balls “underhand, like a bowling ball,” in most cases—but otherwise retroactively authorizes a set of policies SPD has been using, without official approval, since early 2023.
The council passed legislation in 2021 restricting SPD officers’ use of less-lethal weapons and instructed them to come up with a crowd control policy that complied with the new law. Instead, the police ignored the law for years, eventually adopting their own “interim” internal policy that placed limited restrictions on the use of less-lethal weapons for crowd control.
The crowd control legislation the council adopted Tuesday doesn’t incorporate any of these policies into law; instead, it authorizes SPD to create its own policies, consistent with a handful of new restrictions, and to change those policies (to allow the use of novel weapons in the future, for example) without coming back to the council for approval or review.
The council approved the crowd control ordinance, which explicitly authorizes the use of blast balls, 6-3 vote, with Cathy Moore, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Joy Hollingsworth voting “no.” Ever since the WTO protests of 1999, blast balls and other types of grenades have caused serious injuries during protests, and the city of Seattle has doled out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits by people harmed or maimed by the grenades.
As we’ve reported, the new law directs SPD to follow a set of general principles, such as respect for free speech, in crafting its crowd control policy, and says less-lethal weapons should only be used when “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.”
It also restricts the use of tear gas to “riots” (defined in existing SPD policy here), putting SPD in compliance with state law, and directs officers to throw blast balls “underhand” and “away from people,” unless throwing them overhand into a crowd is necessary to stop someone who, in an officer’s opinion, is causing an “immediate threat to life safety.”
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On Tuesday, the council rejected several amendments that would have placed guardrails around SPD’s use of less-lethal weapons, arguing that it would be inappropriate for the council to impose too many restrictions on internal police policies.
Objecting to an amendment from Moore that would have required the mayor to approve any use of blast balls, Council President Sara Nelson said, “If we tie SPD’s hands too much, or complicate things so much in the moment… and they’re not able to use less-lethal weapons or tools in certain situations, we risk the likelihood of of them having to turn to other tools that are not less lethal or are even more dangerous.” (That amendment failed 6-3, with Moore, Hollingsworth, and Rinck voting “yes.”).
The same 6-3 majority voted against another Moore amendment that would have created a legislative pathway for the council to object to, and potentially prohibit, the use of new less-lethal weapons in the future. Councilmember Bob Kettle argued that Moore’s proposal was tantamount to “crowding out our accountability partners,” specifically the Community Police Commission—a purely advisory body that Kettle argued was a more appropriate venue for the public to raise concerns about SPD’s use of new types of less-lethal weapons.
Seven councilmembers, including Hollingsworth, voted down a Moore amendment that would have prohibited SPD from deploying officers from outside jurisdictions, such as the Washington State Patrol or National Guard, if those officers refused to comply with Seattle’s crowd control policies.
Moore said the amendment was more necessary than ever at “a time when we are asking for mutual aid from other jurisdictions [and] we are not entirely sure where they line on the spectrum of law enforcement issues.”
Kettle retorted that if the city imposed this requirement, “”jurisdictions will not come to our aid” in the future. “If we get too precise in terms of policies… that will basically mean that nobody will show up. Nobody will show up,” Kettle said. “And if we’re in a dire situation, and our officers are on the street and they don’t feel anybody’s going to show up, that’s problematic. That creates even more danger, more danger. We should not put ourselves in that position.”
Speaking to reporters before the vote, Kettle said he considered the crowd-control legislation the final step before US District Judge James Robart will lift a 12-year-old consent decree between Seattle and the US Department of Justice. Last year, Robart said the city needed to adopt crowed control policies that complied with the settlement, which also covered biased policing and use of excessive force by SPD officers.
“We have a very different Seattle Police Department today” than when the consent decree started in 2012, Kettle said, “and this legislation is the final piece of the puzzle, [to] get to a place where we can go to Judge Robart, go to the court and seek for the consent decree to be ended,” Kettle said. “Going through this process, getting this bill complete, and [enabling] the end of the consent decree would also acknowledge all the work that’s been done over the last dozen-plus years in terms of reform of the Seattle Police Department.”
