Impact munitions and crowd settings

On Saturday, September 26, 2026, about six hundred people marched from Harbor Park to City Hall to protest the planned closure of the maternity unit at Port Ardent General Hospital. Students who took the emergency management course studied that day as a public order event. What they did not see in that course was a white van parked on a side street two blocks from City Hall. Inside were eight members of the service's public order unit with batons, helmets and two launchers for impact munitions, along with a sergeant who had the authority to deploy them if the duty captain ordered it.

They never left the van. At 14:20, a few demonstrators and counter-demonstrators shoved each other for less than a minute near the steps; the liaison officers in soft caps who had walked with the march separated them, and no one complained of injury. At 15:20, a man who had climbed the City Hall flagpole for reasons unrelated to the march came down after forty minutes of talking with a negotiator. 'That van is one of the best things that happened that day,' Haddad says. 'It was ready, and it stayed shut. If you ever end up in a public order unit, remember that your success is measured by how rarely you get out of the van.'

What impact munitions are

Impact munitions are projectiles fired from a launcher, designed to strike a person from a distance with enough force to stop them without penetrating the body. Police in both countries use several types, including sponge-tipped or foam rounds, often fired from a dedicated launcher, and fabric bags filled with small pellets, often called bean bag rounds, fired from a modified shotgun. Some rounds also carry OC powder or marking dye. These weapons are sometimes grouped under the name kinetic impact projectiles, and older names, such as rubber bullets or plastic bullets, are still used for some types used in other countries.

The main reason police carry impact munitions is distance. A person armed with a knife, a bottle or another weapon who is a threat to themselves or others may need to be stopped from further away than a conducted energy weapon can reach and well beyond arm's length, without using a firearm. In those situations, an impact munition can give officers a less-lethal option at a distance that keeps everyone safer. Like the other weapons in this course, impact munitions are used only by officers who have completed specific certified training, and nothing in this lesson teaches how to use them.

Injury risk

Impact munitions can cause serious injury and death, especially at close range or when they strike the head, neck or chest. In 2017, researchers published a systematic review in the medical journal BMJ Open of studies from around the world on injuries from these projectiles in crowd-control settings. Across 1,984 people with injury data, 53 died and 300 were left with permanent disabilities. Strikes to the head and neck accounted for about half of the deaths and more than four in five of the permanent disabilities, many of them eye injuries leading to blindness. The researchers concluded that these weapons were not appropriate for crowd control. Much of the data came from countries and periods in which harder and more dangerous projectiles were used than many Canadian and U.S. services carry today, but the review is still one of the most cited sources on the risk.

The numbers show why these weapons are treated as a serious use of force. About one in every 37 people in the studies who were injured died, and nearly one in five was either killed or permanently disabled. Joan Ivey tells the class she has never been to a call where an impact munition was used, but she has read the trauma reports. 'Distance makes these safer than a firearm,' she says. 'Distance that is too short, or a strike in the wrong place, makes them deadly.'

Policy for impact munitions

Policies generally restrict impact munitions to specially trained officers, require a supervisor's approval or presence where practical, and allow their use only against a specific person whose behavior presents a threat of serious harm, not against a crowd as a whole. Officers must give a warning where safe, avoid areas of the body where strikes are most likely to cause death or permanent injury, consider the distance and the risk to bystanders, and have medical help available. Firing into a crowd, firing at people who are simply present at a demonstration, or using these weapons to disperse a crowd that is not violent are prohibited by most modern policies.

U.S. agencies set their own rules, and after the protests of 2020, when large numbers of people were injured by impact munitions in several cities, many agencies tightened them. Federal courts in several cities issued orders restricting their use against protesters, and in 2022 a federal jury in Denver awarded 14 million dollars to a group of protesters who had been injured. International guidance points the same way. The United Nations Human Rights Office's 2020 guidance on less-lethal weapons in law enforcement says that kinetic impact projectiles should be used only against a specific person engaged in violence, never fired indiscriminately into a crowd, and should not be aimed at the head or face.

Crowds, rights and less-lethal weapons

Demonstrations raise special issues for less-lethal weapons because they involve the rights to free speech and peaceful assembly under the First Amendment. The great majority of people at most demonstrations are peaceful, even when a few people commit offenses. Weapons that affect an area, such as OC mists or chemical irritants, or projectiles fired into a crowd, will inevitably hit peaceful people, journalists, medics and bystanders. That is why policies and international standards distinguish so sharply between dealing with a violent individual and dealing with a crowd.

After 2020, many U.S. agencies and cities reviewed their protest policing and adopted policies that emphasize facilitation and communication, require a clear dispersal order with a way for people to leave before any force is used, and restrict area weapons and impact munitions to specific violent individuals. Port Ardent's plan for September 26 followed that model. Liaison officers in soft caps walked with the march, the organizers had the liaison sergeant's phone number, the route had been agreed in advance, and the public order unit stayed out of sight unless needed.

A distance scenario

Haddad describes a training scenario the public order and tactical units practice. A man is standing in an empty schoolyard on a weekend holding a large kitchen knife to his own throat and refusing to talk. Officers have formed a perimeter about fifteen meters away. A negotiator is on the way. The man suddenly starts walking quickly toward the fence, beyond which a group of children are playing in a park. In that situation, she says, an impact munition fired by a trained officer might be the option that stops him before he reaches the children, without a firearm and without anyone having to close the distance to a man with a knife. 'That is what these weapons are for,' she says. 'Not for crowds. For a specific person, at a distance, when the alternative is worse.'

She also points out what the scenario does not include: an instruction about where or how to fire. 'That is for the certified course, with the instructor watching every step,' she says. 'In this room, what you need to understand is the purpose, the limits, the risk and the accountability.'

Planning before the event

The September 26 plan was written two weeks before the march. Haddad, who helped draft it, describes how less-lethal weapons appeared in it. The plan named who could authorize their use, which was the duty captain only, and in what circumstances: a specific person committing violence that put others at risk of serious injury, where lesser options would not work. It required that any deployment be filmed, that a paramedic team be staged nearby, and that every officer in the public order unit be current in training for the weapons they carried. It also said plainly that no less-lethal weapon would be used to disperse the march or to remove people who were simply refusing to move.

'Writing those limits into the plan does two things,' Haddad says. 'It tells the officers in the van what is expected, so nobody improvises. And it gives the public, and any review afterwards, a clear standard to judge us against.' Desjardins adds that some services now publish their public order plans, or summaries of them, before large events, as part of building trust with organizers.

Haddad adds that impact munitions also appear in calls that have nothing to do with demonstrations. Tactical teams carry them to situations involving a barricaded person, a person in crisis with a weapon, or a person threatening to harm themselves, where they give officers an option at a distance that is safer than closing in. In those situations, the same rules apply: a specific person, a threat of serious harm, a warning where safe, attention to distance and the areas of the body most at risk, medical help ready, and full reporting afterwards. 'The setting changes,' she says. 'The principles do not.'

Desjardins reminds the class that every one of these decisions, on September 26 and in any tactical call, would have been reviewed afterwards in exactly the way lesson 11 describes.