UC approves new less-lethal arms for its police force amid protest

Minutes after a UC regents committee began debating the purchase of additional less-lethal weapons and ammunition this afternoon, pro-Palestinian students in the UCLA meeting room drowned them out.

“Why did you shoot us?” one shouted — a reference to the less lethal rounds used at last spring’s campus unrest. 

Regent Jay Sures, chair of the compliance committee, showed little patience for what has become a common protest tactic.

“If you want to disrupt the meeting, you can disrupt the meeting,” he told them. “We’re going to clear the room. It’s not going to be productive. You’re all going to waste your time. What I would suggest is you listen. If you have issues, you can send letters for regents.”

He then called on UC police to declare an unlawful assembly and moved the committee to an adjoining room, where it swiftly approved the purchase of drones and ammunition such as pepper bullets and sponge rounds. There was no debate.

About an hour later, the full board approved the committee’s recommendation, also without debate.

The student protesters had cleared out by then, complying with police demands that they leave the area within three minutes. 

It’s likely that the regents were preparing for a lengthy discussion about the inventory of weapons at campuses, their purpose and whether the schools need new equipment. Regent John Pérez set that inquiring tone just as the compliance committee began. But when the committee reconvened moments later, Perez was gone. Also not in the room was Jody Stiger, the UC director of safety, who was explaining the uses of the weapons and equipment before the students shut down the meeting. He was in the next room where protesters and police squared off.

Under a 2021 state law, all police agencies must seek approval from their governing boards to fund and use military equipment. UC says the weapons and ammo its police forces requested are all less lethal, even if by law they’re classified as military equipment. However, campus departments have in their possession dozens of rifles and thousands of rounds of ammo, the system disclosed in its report.

Several students spoke out against the weapons purchases during the public comment period yesterday and today before regents heard the issue in the afternoon, including members of UCLA’s undergraduate student government.

Graduate students also questioned the need for weapons.

“Everyone in this room knows that we need to rebuild trust in our community, but improving military-grade equipment for crowd control is not going to help that process,” said Ryan Manriquez, president of the UC organization representing graduate students, to the board. “Because we know that on any event on campus, protests are the most likely to be subject to crowd control measures. And who do we know participates in protest the most? Students.”

Jonah Walters, a UCLA academic who studies less-than-lethal weapons, told regents today that “these munitions can and do cause major injuries, including lethal ones.”

In a brief interview afterwards, Walters said the pepper pellets stimulate “blistering to mucous membranes throughout the body, which is something that can simulate the experience of suffocation. It can cause temporary blindness. It has, in some cases, been linked to more severe and permanent eye damage,” he said.

Walters noted that the product description for one of the weapons today warns in its product manual that a user should “never aim or shoot at the head, face, eyes, ears, throat, groin or spine. Impact in these areas could result in unintended severe or permanent injury or death.”

Later, in an interview, he said “it’s shocking and offensive” that UCLA would award him a competitive fellowship based “based on its recognition that this research is meaningful and important, and then turn around less than three months later and request to purchase these very munitions that I study and my research has called into question.”

A spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, Stett Holbrook, wrote in an email that “this is a routine agenda item that is not related to any particular incident.”  He added that “many of the requests are replacements for items used in training.”

The UC’s “use of this equipment provides UC police officers with non-lethal alternatives to standard-issue firearms, enabling them to de-escalate situations and respond without the use of deadly force,” Holbrook wrote. As for the use of drones, he said they can help detect shooters, other dangerous suspects and “crime scene reconstruction by delivering comprehensive aerial data.”

Stiger told the regents that the drones cannot be used to surveil peaceful student protests “unless authorized by the chancellor” of a campus.

The less-lethal weapons, Stiger said, are not for “crowd control or peaceful protest,” but for “life-threatening circumstances.” He added these weapons may be used at protests that turn violent and “where law enforcement and campus leadership have deemed the need for law enforcement to utilize force to defend themselves, others or to affect an arrest, which is consistent with state law” and the system’s police response procedures.

In a written report to the board, UC’s police departments also detailed their use of weapons and ammo for 2023 — one year before protests over the war in Gaza broke out across campuses. Data for the equipment used last school year, a time period that includes UC police’s clearing of protest encampments, will be published next fall.

Also today, a coalition of faculty groups said it is filing unfair labor practice against the UC with the state’s public labor relations board. During a press conference near the regents meeting, they alleged that the system’s responses to last spring’s unrest violated their rights, including the system’s use of police force to clear encampments. A labor relations spokesperson for the UC said the system views the faculty group’s filing as it does a similar July filing by a UCLA faculty association: “wholly without merit.”