“Watched the video this morning on a shooting. 16 rounds? Are you shitting me! Recently at a gas station in Wyoming, we had a drug addled adult female pouring gas all over her car and body. My friend hit the emergency stop on the pumps as someone called the police. When they arrived they hit her with a reduced loaded shot-shell, it has a play dough like substance that ruins your day. We use to load them too shoot at road signs and other targets as young punks. The female dropped in her tracks with some very sore ribs, handcuffed her and off to lockup. My question is why are these rounds not used in urban areas?”

-Ishmael

I have discussed this subject with two officers, a detective on narcotics detail and a Captain. I have no idea how representative their claims are for the reasoning behind urban departments not using “sub-lethal” loads, or not using them more.

First, I did see one video from Arizona [I think] filmed on a rocky hillside where this guy was camping, in which cops shot a guy with sub-lethal loads, shot him with live loads, and set a dog on him. So, I do not know if the use of the sub-lethal is necessarily going to prevent use of the lethal load, as the weapons are in two different hands, and, in most of the videos of cop activity I see, the cops act independently, not as members of a military unit of the same size would.

On Thanksgiving a family member said something to me about a shooting in a city that they could not identify in which a fleeing suspect was shot 16 times. I have been trying to finish a number of books and have not been following the news other than Baltimore crime, as I am also involved in contributing to a crime map of Baltimore.

So, between the narc and the captain here are the reasons they have given me for police aversion to sub-lethal loads.

1. Most cops patrol and respond on their own, and, in a city where so many illegal handguns exist, deploying a weapon with a sub-lethal load could be suicide.

2. Since urban criminals have gotten so good at gaming the system and using the civil courts to win judgments against officers—most of which do not involve the discharge of a police firearm—the consensus is that use of sub-lethal loads will still bring litigious heat.

3. “We’re fighting a fuckin’ war, Bro!” is what the narc told me, saying that the closest analogy to what he did in Baltimore was special operations strikes against terrorists in Iraq.

Although I am no fan of the police in general, or their political masters, they are engaged in a federally mandated drug war, so named by multiple presidents, in which they face paramilitary operations who routinely execute noncombatants in order to spread fear and keep witnesses to their actions from coming forward, which does qualify them as terrorists. As much as I decry The War on Drugs, it is being lost after 40 years of prosecution, and, so long as our masters continue to insist that the salvation of our young people is dependent upon prosecuting this war, then we can hardly expect the outgunned, outnumbered, outgeneraled and outwitted “Warriors” sent into the conflict, to practice any form of unilateral disarmament.

Ishmael, I don’t even know what city this shooting took place in, but in Baltimore, we do not have police work as described in your gas station incident. Nor do we have a community to police. This is a drug war zone, fought over between gangs and the cops, and the rest of us are nothing more than potential collateral damage. Oh, yes, two gang members that I know of have used paintball guns to scare rival dealers off of a corner. So, it seems that only the winning side in a war has the luxury of using sub-lethal loads.