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On January 18, a photograph of a pair of safety goggles in a hardware store floated across my Instagram timeline. “#JOURNALISTS covering #iceprotest in #Minneapolis: Less lethal projectiles move 400-600 feet per second. Z87.1 glasses no longer provide the protection required,” read the caption.
The post came from Crisis Ready Media and was shared by the National Press Photographers’ Association (NPPA). A few days later, on January 26, The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a story about the different types of chemical irritants being used by federal agents in that city. Both seemed like prime examples of service journalism, especially as photos and videos of federal agents using those devices have become commonplace; the visuals are familiar, though the impacts are more murky. But one question stuck in my head: How was anyone identifying details like the speed of projectiles or the types of irritants being used?
To find out, I called up Bryan Woolston, who co-founded Crisis Ready Media with Chris Post in 2023. Before they became journalists, both spent years working in crisis situations: Woolston spent 20 years in the military, including a nearly nine-year stint in the Army’s bomb disposal squad, while Post worked in emergency response for about two decades and led firefighting operations at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
Now Woolston is a photojournalist, while Post primarily works in video; they met in 2015 while covering protests in Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray. They founded Crisis Ready Media, a nonprofit, to bring hostile environment training to journalism schools and small publications, and partner with other journalism support organizations — like the NPPA or the Committee to Protect Journalists — to spread awareness of how journalists can stay safe in conflicts both domestic and international.
My conversation with Woolston, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Neel Dhanesha: Tell me a bit about what it’s like on the ground for journalists in Minneapolis right now. Are things different from protests you’ve covered before? Have your training materials and safety tips had to change?
Fast forward just a couple months down the road to Minneapolis now, and just before that it was Chicago. There’s a very small percentage in every crowd that is out just to be violent, just to take advantage of the situation, but as far as the random rocks and bottles and bricks being thrown, we don’t really see that as much in Minneapolis or in Chicago. There’s been very little protester violence.
What we are seeing there is very — some would say proactive, and others would call it aggressive — behavior from the law enforcement. But specifically, we have these more high-velocity “less than lethal” rounds that will defeat the standard eye protection we’ve been telling people to use for the last two or three years. They’re different from what was being used a year ago.
Dhanesha: What kind of weaponry is the federal government using?
It used to be that in civilian defense forces, everything would be of the 37- to 39-millimeter size, because the military’s grenade launcher is 40 millimeters. So that’s the size for high explosive rounds, and they just made them a slightly different size to make sure that you couldn’t interchange rounds and make a mistake. Law enforcement isn’t firing high explosive rounds, anyway. But this newer technology uses 40-millimeter [foam or rubber] rounds, and it moves faster.
The less than lethal rounds also come in hand grenade form. They’re about the size of a softball, black and made of rubber. When they’re thrown, there’s an expelled charge on the inside that bursts, and these rubber balls, maybe the size of large marbles, burst out in all directions.
Dhanesha: How did you identify that? How did you know the speed?
I also have great sources and friends still in government industries, and I am getting regular updates from them. They’re not giving away secrets or anything; they’re just telling me what equipment is being used. And they’re telling me what’s different from here to there, like the difference between what a local government is doing and what a federal agency might be doing. It’s a little bit of shoe-leather work.
Dhanesha: Who collected the rounds for you on the ground?
Woolston: We did it ourselves. We also collected dunnage in L.A., and that’s when we first started seeing these higher-velocity rounds. So that’s how we figured out things were changing.
Dhanesha: Tell me a little bit about the chemical irritants the government is using.
Sometimes you’ll see a smoke dispersal agent, and everybody will run because they think it’s gas. And then you’re standing there, and you don’t smell anything. That is just a smoke screen. It’s meant to create a smoke screen so [they] can move behind it and not be seen. But the way it’s used now in law enforcement is “disperse or else the next one coming is the tear gas.” The green smoke is not an irritant, but there’s an older smoke, HC (hexachloroethane), which is gray, and it’s considered a carcinogen.
The last spray is the OC spray, which is the newer pepper spray, and that comes out as an orange gel or foam that kind of clings to the skin. It’s supposed to be more persistent.
So those are the main dispersal agents we’re seeing.
Dhanesha: How has your guidance for protection changed?
For gas, neither the tear gas or the OC spray is going to kill 99% of the population. So you can either get a half-face respirator that will protect you from the gas and then get good goggles that protect your eyes, or you can get full-face respirators. Now, the problem with the full-face respirators is most of their eye protection is still rated at Z87, so finding a new mask with the right type of cartridge and the higher protection for your eyes is difficult to do right now (note: some gas masks, like the Mira Tactical Gas Mask CM-6M, are rated for impact).
The consideration that we make with all of our recommendations is, “What is the safest thing you can use while still getting your assignment done?” The bomb suit I wore in the military provided great protection, but you can’t work all day in that. We recommend body armor, but do we recommend the highest level? No, because you can’t walk around in level 4 body armor that weighs 25 pounds all day.
Dhanesha: Things are constantly changing on the ground. What do you think about when you look ahead?
As a retired bomb technician, my fear — to use a term the Department of Defense likes — is that more “kinetic activities” will begin. There are folks out there who don’t care about politics, or about the cause of the day. They’re just out to wreak havoc, and there are people on each side of the political spectrum who are fervent enough in their beliefs to do utter acts of violence. I don’t know how far we are from the kind of violence we saw in Ireland in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I’m not saying I see that type of behavior in our crowds today. But I don’t know how far we are from it. And if these more hazardous things are brought into the protest scene, law enforcement will counter it, and probably over-counter it. So instead of protesters being across the street, maybe they’re going to want protesters a block away, and what tactics are they going to use to get them there? How much pressure are they going to use to make that happen?
And for journalists, it’s not like in the olden days where there were one or two camera people going out with one or two street personalities. What’s a little scary to me is that it’s our youngest colleagues, often our female colleagues and our colleagues of color, who are being really thrust to the front. And so on top of all the other hazards, they have the associated hazards of maybe not being the gender or race that somebody wants to interact with. Now, all of a sudden, they have a cell phone, and now they’re on the front lines of something crazy happening. So I just want to make sure they have the resources they need to stay safe.
Photo by Ellen Schmidt/MinnPost/CatchLight Local/Report for America, under a Creative Commons license.
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