Oh great, Mayor Bruce Harrell wants to can the blast ball ban. by Ashley Nerbovig Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed legislation to eliminate a ban on Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers using blast balls, as well as other “less-lethal weapons,” to move crowds during protests. Harrell’s suggested repeal would remove one of the last vestiges of local reforms that resulted from the 2020 protests.  In a letter to the Seattle City Council, the mayor said SPD made serious policy changes after they learned some important lessons in 2020, when their officers caused a woman’s heart to stop, caused another person to suffer hearing loss, and in general bloodied and bruised people with their indiscriminate use of blast balls, which are like little grenades that explode and sometimes spray peppery gas. Harrell called 2020 and 2021 restrictions on crowd control weapons such as blast balls, pepper balls, and pepper spray "severe," and now he wants to allow the use of any tools SPD deems necessary to prevent injuries or serious property damage. His bill also prevents people from suing the City if an officer illegally uses one of those weapons and removes a requirement for outside law enforcement to follow SPD crowd management policies when assisting with large-crowd events. Essentially, Harrell’s bill clears the way for SPD’s existing interim crowd management policy. The legislation comes as the City works to end federal oversight of SPD, which hinges on US District Court Judge James L. Robart’s approval of SPD’s crowd-management policies. Robart stressed during a hearing last week that he wanted assurances that SPD had trained its officers to follow those policies. The judge also complained about the City’s sluggishness, considering the department began sketching out its new crowd-management policies back in 2021. Those policies failed to wow community activists. SPD may have strategically delayed the submission of its new policies to the court. After the council passed the 2021 blast ball ban, the department technically had about two months to turn in updated policies to the federal monitor, who oversees compliance with the consent decree, but the agency took two years instead. When SPD finally gave the new policy to Federal Monitor Antonio Oftelie, they also included a letter telling him to ignore the proposal. Oftelie listened to SPD, telling Publicola he planned to sit back and let the mayor and the new city council hash out a plan. Stalling clearly paid off for SPD, as Harrell is now pitching a full repeal of the blast ball ban to a cop-loving council that’s uninterested in holding SPD accountable or limiting their power. Since at least 2016, the Community Police Commission has complained about the way SPD casually lobs chemical explosives into crowds of protesters. The 2020 protests prompted a renewed focus on SPD’s use of the weapons, as numerous reports emerged about the cops injuring bystanders and lawful protesters. (In 2024, the City settled a $10 million lawsuit over SPD’s crowd management behavior in 2020.) In the summer of 2020, the public pressured officials to rein in the cops, and another federal judge held SPD in contempt for their violence against protestors. In response, former Council Member Kshama Sawant sponsored a bill to ban SPD from using crowd control weapons such as blast balls and tear gas in any situation. The law passed, but Robart quickly thwarted it on the basis that it needed his approval and said, “I can’t tell you today if blast balls are a good idea or a bad idea, but I know that sometime a long time ago I approved them,” according to the Seattle Times. The city council tried again with the 2021 law, which banned blast balls for crowd management but allowed certain SPD units, such as SWAT, to still use them. The bill’s sponsor, former Council Member Lisa Herbold, even included a provision requiring Robart’s approval before the law went into effect. That court review provision gave SPD the opportunity to do fuck-all until a friendly council came to power. The battle over SPD’s use of blast balls underscores what community leaders told The Stranger in early 2023: The federal consent decree, once a vehicle to crack down on unconstitutional policing, has become a hindrance to transformative changes to policing. Even Robart and lawyers for the Department of Justice (DOJ) have admitted the futility of federal oversight at this point. Robart said he could no longer maintain the consent decree on the issue of police accountability, since any progress on that issue required collective bargaining with the Seattle police union, over whom Robart has no authority. Robart also pointed out that racial disparities still appear in SPD’s use of force data, to which attorneys for both the City and the DOJ basically threw up their hands and said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “What are you gonna do? At least they have the data to show the disparities.” Without Robart and the consent decree, Seattle could have passed an enforceable ban on blast balls that could have prevented at least one weekend of injuries to protesters. Instead, that summer, SPD officers kept escalating protests for several more weeks. And cops continue to act like assholes at protests, as they proved at a protest this February.  The repeal of the 2021 law banning blast balls isn’t a done deal. The council still needs to approve the mayor’s bill, which Council Communication Director Brad Harwood said would likely first go to the Public Safety Committee for approval, but not until after the council completes the budget process, which usually ends in early December. Maybe one of these cop fangirl council members sees the value in limiting the types of weapons cops can fling at protestors. Obviously, I’m not holding my breath, or I am, but only because of the excessive number of pepper balls I’m preparing to dodge.