Olympia expands tear gas moratorium to other chemical munitions

Peaceful protesters marching through downtown Olympia will not be subject to a wide array of crowd-control munitions for the foreseeable future after the Olympia City Council took action Tuesday to limit their use to situations involving extreme risk to public safety.

The council passed a resolution on Tuesday codifying and expanding on the action it took during its previous meeting to ban the use of chemical projectiles such as tear gas to include pepper spray, pepper balls, smoke and “other less‐than‐lethal agents for crowd control purposes during public demonstrations, which pose a risk of coughing and mucus generation …”

The resolution directs City Manager Jay Burney to immediately place a moratorium on the use of those munitions by the Olympia Police Department for the purposes of crowd control. The moratorium will not expire until Thurston County enters the final phase of Gov. Jay Inslee’s plan for reopening the state during the novel coronavirus crisis or the pandemic itself has ended.

“It does result in us not engaging when we may have engaged before,” Interim Police Chief Aaron Jelcick told The Olympian. “We would not put staff or community in a position where we needed to engage with things like batons, because those aren’t the right tools to disperse a violent crowd for a number of reasons, particularly in cases where people may be throwing things at officers from a distance. There aren’t a whole lot of ways to disperse a larger crowd.”

Council members initially adopted a ban on chemical munitions during a June 9 meeting during which many members of the public spoke out against local law enforcement, with some making reference to instances in which officers used tear gas, smoke and similar items to disperse groups of protesters who have held nighttime demonstrations throughout the month against racial injustice, police brutality and the alleged murders of multiple Black people by law enforcement across the United States.

At first glance, the council action taken June 9 appeared targeted only at tear gas and pepper balls. Burney said Tuesday that upon further review, the motion made by Council member Dani Madrone to “approve a policy that bans the use of chemical weapons for crowd control during a pandemic” applied more broadly than first thought.

Public health officials across the country have voiced concern that the use of measures that cause large groups of people to cough, sneeze and wheeze could lead to increased spread of COVID-19. Initial returns have not shown protests to cause infection spikes, though the virus can take two weeks to show itself following exposure.

“As the city attorney went back and looked at the conversation council had last Tuesday night, he interpreted they were asking for a moratorium on less lethal munitions that could lead to the spread of COVID,” Burney said. “That’s the interpretation he had of the motion that was made.”

Olympia Police officers will still be allowed to deploy otherwise prohibited munitions in the event of “extreme risk to public safety, such as and including but not limited to, hostage situations or events or locations where persons are engaging in violence and assaultive behavior against other persons who are at risk of severe injury or death,” according to the resolution.

“It does change our operating procedures — that is a fact,” Jelcick said. “We have those tools because they allow us, in circumstances when there are groups of people who engage in behavior that becomes violent, we have the ability to use those without physically engaging, which as we know, whenever we have to physically engage people, the risk of injury goes up significantly to both the police officers and the folks that are engaged in that kind of behavior.”

The Olympia Police Department received far more support during the public comment periods of Tuesday’s meeting than it did during the previous few council meetings. More than a half-dozen speakers excoriated members of the council for what they saw as abandonment of the police department, while others called for OPD to receive additional money during the next budget cycle.

Those who stood behind OPD were outnumbered by dozens of people who made impassioned pleas to defund the police department and for the city to take action against two officers who remain under investigation, one for alleged comments made during a protest and the other for a photograph taken with armed civilians stationed outside a local gun shop.

Burney told The Olympian that investigation packets containing interview transcripts and other pertinent information are being finalized before they are sent to an outside law firm for an independent review of those cases.

Some members of the public expressed their displeasure with comments made by Mayor Cheryl Selby, in which she referred to vandalism of her house last week as “like domestic terrorism.” Selby did not address the incident on Tuesday.

Many asked that the city take action to curtail the downtown patrols of vigilante militia-like groups that have shadowed protests in recent days armed with weapons ranging from paintball guns to firearms. Members of groups such as Oath Keepers and The Three Percenters have allegedly started confrontations with protesters, Jelcick read from a statement Tuesday, stating, “the Olympia Police Department does not align itself with any one group, nor does it seek the help of any militia, any armed civilians or any vigilante groups.”

Members of the city council echoed Jelcick’s call for the armed counter-protesters to stand down.

“This armed vigilante presence has not contributed positively to the situation in Olympia, and their help is not being requested or needed,” Council member Renata Rollins said. “I acknowledge it’s made a lot of people feel unsafe and resulted in less safety. We can’t have that.”

This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 2:19 PM.