CHP justifies its officers’ use of force at Gaza protests, without providing evidence

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A newly released report from the California Highway Patrol asserts that its officers acted properly when firing nearly 60 rounds of “less lethal” rounds at pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA in early May, but it does not provide evidence to back up the claim.

The one-page report said officers were “met with assaultive resistance” that included “multiple protesters throwing items, such as frozen water bottles, bottles containing urine and other unknown fluids, full 12 oz soda cans, pieces of plywood, wooden poles, and various sized fire extinguishers.”

A CalMatters review of footage from the protests found officers aimed at people’s heads and fired into crowds. State law and training guidelines prohibit those actions, except when there is a “threat to life or serious bodily injury.”

In response, CHP Director of Communications Jamie Coffee said that officers did indeed face a threat from protesters. However, protesters do not appear to attack or threaten the CHP officers in the videos recorded by CalMatters. No battery or assault charges have been announced against protesters.

By law, CHP had to prepare a report on the use of force and file it with the Department of Justice. The new CHP report echoed what Coffee said in May. The agency also denied firing discriminately into crowds.

“This doesn’t build public trust. Where is the evidence?” said Jeff Wenninger, a former Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant who oversaw use of force investigations. “They’re sharing their opinion on what happened but not explaining the rationale of how they got there.”

Wenninger said the report doesn’t address all the criteria it’s supposed to under the law, noting that CHP doesn’t cite anything to corroborate their claim that protesters were threatening lives or serious bodily injury. He called the report “nothing more than boilerplate.”

Wenninger was one of two law enforcement experts who reviewed the footage for CalMatters. He said he didn’t see evidence of a threat to life or serious bodily injury, and criticized an officer for improperly firing a number of bean bag rounds in succession into a crowd. “Bag rounds are meant for a single target, used for an individual engaged in a violent act, not indiscriminately into a crowd,” he said.

The report also put numbers to the officers’ use of force: it says that officers fired 33 beanbags rounds and two dozen 40mm sponge rounds at pro-Palestinian protestors while clearing a UCLA encampment. The agency said it deployed 240 to disperse the encampment of 800 protestors.

Lorena Gonzalez, who as an assemblymember authored the 2021 bill that strictly restricted officers’ use of “less lethal” munitions, has called the police actions “a total training failure by CHP” in response to CalMatters’ reporting.

“Our bill was a first attempt to ensure that crowd control in protests didn’t result in unnecessary and vicious injuries,” said Gonzalez, who now heads the California Labor Federation. “It seems to me at first glance that the training that the CHP deployed to these officers wasn’t sufficient, because it appears that there are both violations of the law and the violations of the spirit of law.”