Non-Lethal Force.

A judgment sometimes applied by professionals to a non-lethal weapon is that if the weapon is any good--if it reliably protects someone from being attacked or subdues a person without causing harm--criminals will use it. Absent a small number of robberies committed with pepper spray, though, they haven't really taken to any. According to Charles Heal, an expert in non-lethal weapons, the problem is that the field is nascent, and "the options are primitive. The whole state of the art is only a shade over a decade old."

"Non-lethal" is an imperfect term. "Lethal weapons are defined by their capability," Heal says. "Non-lethal are defined by their intent." In the hands of the police, non-lethal weapons are meant to resolve a crisis (say, a Hells Angel in a bar who has broken a chair over someone's head and is overturning tables, and who, when asked to leave, draws a knife) without anyone getting badly hurt or being killed. They are also sometimes called less than lethal, less lethal, controlled force, soft kill, mission kill, and minimal force. There is no established lexicon for non-lethal weapons, but there are accepted categories and concepts, including impact or kinetic weapons--things that strike, such as batons, billy clubs, saps, and projectiles fired from shotguns (including bean bags and stun bags, which usually have sand in them instead of lead pellets), and "vivi," meaning animals. "Dog is the only non-lethal weapon I can change my mind about after I deploy it," Heal says. "The suspect sees me and puts his hands up, I can call it back. If I launch a bean bag, it's downrange. Dog's also the only one with target-acquisition radar: suspect moves, dog does, too." In addition, there are irritants, such as tear gas, which was first used on a crowd in Paris, in 1912; malodorants (stink bombs); obscurants, which interfere with seeing, either by means of lasers or smoke or other substances; electrical, such as Tasers; physiological, which includes noises that are too loud and lights that are too bright, sometimes combined in devices called flashbangs; reactants, which include activities such as cloud seeding (conducted in Vietnam above the Ho Chi Minh Trail); and soporifics, which are also called calmatives, sedatives, and hypnotics. "What they used in the Moscow Theatre," Heal says, referring to the occasion, in 2002, when Chechen terrorists took over a theatre, with nearly eight hundred people in it, and were subdued with a chemical delivered through the ventilation system. More than a hundred of the hostages died, some of them as a result of the chemical. Still, Heal says, they are the only weapons that "allow you to intervene in a lethal situation without having to resort immediately to lethal force."

Heal was among the first Americans to use modern non-lethal weapons, as a marine in Somalia in 1995. One was a foam called sticky foam, which was shot from a hose and designed to fix a person's feet to the ground. The problem was that people could move their feet faster than the sticky foam could be applied, although, Heal says, if you hit a person's thighs his legs sometimes stuck together. Heal's orders were to provide a twenty-minute window between the withdrawal of American soldiers and the arrival of "the people with crude weapons and guns on the backs of old trucks who'd rush in to take over." He had his troops scatter caltrops, ancient devices made of spiked rods welded together in such a way that, however they land, a spike faces upward, like a child's jack. The Somalis cast the caltrops aside. Heal had his soldiers lay down more caltrops and cover them with sticky foam; the Somalis picked these up, too, and threw them away, although it took longer. Heal's soldiers then put down sheets of plywood, laid concertina wire over the plywood, laid caltrops on the plywood, and covered everything with sticky foam, which held up the Somalis for about five minutes, sufficient for the troops to retreat. Heal and others think that sticky foam might work in an embassy or at a missile base or a nuclear plant, where the floors could be flooded if someone broke in.

For more than thirty years, Heal, who is fifty-eight, and is known as Sid, divided his career between the Marine reserves and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. (The Sheriff's Department acts as the police in parts of Los Angeles County that are not incorporated, and in cities such as Compton, where its services are retained by contract.) He is probably the most knowledgeable figure in America on the civil uses of non-lethal weapons. According to Nicholas C. Nicholas, the lead scientist at the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies, at Penn State, "There's nobody close to him. I saw him interviewed on TV the other night, and I said to my wife, 'That's Mr. Non-Lethal Weapons as far as the police are concerned.' " Heal has served on the front in four wars--Vietnam, Somalia, Kuwait, and Iraq. When he returned from Somalia, he says, he "ended up on the lecture tour for the Marines in lessons learned." The Los Angeles undersheriff called him into his office and ...