Cooking With Pepper: Officers are Adding PepperBall to the Mix
Faced with public scrutiny, a public health crisis and calls for de-escalation tactics, law enforcement agencies are always looking for more less-lethal tools to add to their arsenal.
For more than two decades, PepperBall has provided what it touts as non-lethal solutions that have yet to yield any deaths or serious injuries since its inception. With applications for daily patrol, crowd control and corrections, PepperBall sees itself as a one-stop shop for agencies in search of ways to avoid having to use higher levels of force.
The California-based company was in attendance at SHOT Show in Las Vegas earlier this year where it debuted several new products, as well as new training courses. The PepperBall Patrol Carine (PPC) and PepperBall Blast join an already robust family of products offered by the company.
A mission to assist officers
PepperBall CEO Bob Plashke says the company’s purpose and mission is to do what it can do to help officers do their jobs in a way that makes them safer. “Every morning, hundreds of thousands of law officers wake up, greet their spouse, say goodbye to their kids and they go off to work. They are walking into harm’s way. They literally, every day, put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”
He adds that for every time a PepperBall projectile is launched, it likely means that deadly force didn’t need to be used in that situation. “I talk to police officers every day and they tell me: ‘That’s the last thing we want to do is to use lethal force.’ For us to be able to give them a tool that put some time and some space in the situation and allows them to de-escalate means we have improved, maybe just a bit, the chance that they won’t have to use that lethal force.”
Monte Scott, Vice President of Law Enforcement Sales at PepperBall, has been with the company for 20 years and previously served as a law enforcement officer in Southern California where he says he truly learned the need for a non-lethal option for law enforcement.
“Over the past 20 years, PepperBall has served our law enforcement colleagues by providing them with a solution in mobile field force, crowd control and correctional applications,” he says. “As we move into 2022, we focus our efforts on providing the best first option for patrol officers by introducing the PepperBall Patrol Carbine and the PepperBall Blast. Patrol officers now have a day-to-day product that they can use to help keep them and the public safe.”
A launcher for patrol
The PepperBall Patrol Carbine was designed to be a compact easy-to-use launcher that officers can have in the trunk of their patrol vehicles or on an in-vehicle rack. Scott says the PPC is something that patrol officers can use to prevent a situation from becoming something larger where other resources are needed. “It’s also going to be the best first option for them where they need distance, cover and protection in a situation that can quickly become out of control.”
Joe Buice, Associate Director of Training at PepperBall and a 23-year veteran of law enforcement, demonstrated the benefits of the PPC at SHOT Show. “What’s the difference between this launcher and some of our other launchers? When I was running field operations and I had some of the guys on the road, one of our big concerns was making sure we topped off the tank with the compressed air. With this new launcher, it helped us eliminate that problem.”
The CO2 cartridge is located in the stock of the carbine, allowing officers to focus on their jobs instead of worrying about the status of the launcher. “Roll call, they come in, I make sure they have it in their car, mount it in their car, and they are good. You can leave it in the car. You don’t have to worry about refilling, and you get over a hundred trigger pulls with this,” he says. “It eliminated a lot of the problems we were getting.”
Buice calls the new launcher a “gamechanger.” It is fed by a 10-round magazine and includes a picatinny rail that allows for red dot or optical sights to be mounted. “Once you get it in your hands, you can just tell it feels good,” he says. “It feels like a launcher and I think it’s really going to help a lot of the officers get the job done on patrol, get it in their cars, get it out in the field where we need it.”
A handy tool
The PepperBall Blast is a single-use reloadable device that can be carried on a duty belt. The device expels a large cloud of pepper dust as far out as 10 to 15 feet. “The powder dust is immediately effective on the person it’s used against, providing a safe alternative non-lethal option that can be carried day-to-day by police officers,” says Scott.
Carl Sims, Director of Training at PepperBall, demonstrated the new device at SHOT Show. The Blast’s 8 gram nitrogen cartridge allows officers to deliver the payload downrange at about 2600 feet per second. “That gives me two benefits,” he says. “One, it sends that powder downrange in a very targeted and very direct way. The other thing it does for me is it allows that powder to step away from me, onto the subject and out of my cross-contamination zone. Which means the chances of me getting cross-contaminated by the powder is extremely limited.”
PepperBall held a beta test in Volusia County, Florida, in which one of the CERT team members volunteered to take a hit with the Blast. “You see that 2600 psi push forward and immediately envelope the subject,” says Sims. “As a result, his eyes immediately slam shut, he attempts to walk forward, he had to close his eyes again. You can see the involuntary mucus, the nose, the slobbering, completely involuntarily. I asked him if he could talk and his response was ‘No.’ I asked him if he could see, ‘No.’ It took the subject approximately 8 minutes to decon where he could actually open his eyes again.”
Training classes
As part of PepperBall’s efforts to assist agencies with incorporating its products into their day-to-day use, it is offering new classes that will be made available starting this year. “We not only want to provide products that help officers do their job on a day-to-day basis; we want to provide the best training possible,” says Scott. “As part of that effort, we went out and recruited some of the best tactical instructors across the United States. They are going to utilize the Force Science Institute model on de-escalation and conflict resolution to help officers not only be safer for themselves, but for the public as well.”
Conflict Resolution: Tactics and Techniques for Patrol, the PepperBall Instructors Training Course and the PepperBall Correction Course will soon be offered to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
“PepperBall is going to bring to your agency a force-on-force reality-based training into which your officers can use the PepperBall system as well as many others in their method to de-escalate and confront high-risk patrol tactics,” says Sims about the patrol class. “It’s been very clear across the country that the officers are faced today with more and more challenges as it relates to de-escalation, dealing with mentally ill persons, those who are emotionally disturbed and those who just flat-out won’t comply.”
The PepperBall Instructors Training Course sends master instructors to an agency that is then shown the proper way to implement PepperBall, its systems and its tactics, into the agency’s policy and procedures.
The PepperBall Correction Course introduces ways to interact and de-escalate critical incidents within a jail. “Our instructors will show you control techniques, de-escalation methods and identifying problems such as extreme mental illness, excited delirium and if you are dealing with a behavior that is a medical condition or a simply disruptive, non-compliant inmate,” says Sims. “Our instruction will show you control techniques, de-escalation methods and identifying problems such as extreme mental illness, excited delirium and if you are dealing with a behavior that is a medical condition or a simply disruptive, non-compliant inmate. Our instruction will allow your officers to mission-plan, do risk assessments, environmental assessments and bring that incident to a successful, safe resolution,” says Sims.
Paul Peluso | Editor
Paul Peluso is the Managing Editor of OFFICER Magazine and has been with the Officer Media Group since 2006. He began as an Associate Editor, writing and editing content for Officer.com. Previously, Paul worked as a reporter for several newspapers in the suburbs of Baltimore, MD.
