South Bend police Wednesday unveiled a new nonlethal tool to subdue people that looks like it’s straight out of a comic book.
It was really loud but it wasn’t a gunshot that South Bend Police Officer Brian Meador fired at me and other willing reporters Wednesday in the firing range. Meador hit us with the BolaWrap, the department’s new tool that shoots a Spiderman-like piece of barbed Kevlar that lassos a person’s legs and arms.
It’s the department’s latest tool to apprehend or neutralize people in tense situations without hurting them. And it didn’t hurt. I felt a slight pinch in my calf for a moment but it went away quickly. I was wearing pants and the officers lent pants to some female reporters who were wearing skirts.
Meador had wrapped up my legs from 15 feet away, which left me only able to take baby steps until two other officers approached and cuffed me. The sound startled me but they say I didn’t flinch too badly.
Meador is the department’s master instructor on the BolaWrap, and he’s trained and equipped a handful of officers to pilot the device for a while. If it goes well it will be deployed more widely.
"We look for the availability and the right tools, whether that's our speech or the way we communicate with an individual, but also this is a device that can be used early in those interactions for de-escalation," Meador said.
Meador says the BolaWrap will complement rather than replace the taser, officers’ other primary way to avoid using deadly force. Chief Scott Ruszkowski says that where the taser is considered less lethal, the Bolawrap is nonlethal.
"This hopefully will be another tool to avoid somebody getting hurt and us getting hurt," Ruszkowski said. "You can look at our Transparency (data) Hub, we're probably over 1,200 or 1,500 mental health calls for service. That is not the sole purpose."
South Bend police have been looking at the BolaWrap since last year. Last week the city’s Board of Public Safety approved buying the first batch of the devices.
Arizona-based Wrap Technologies developed the BolaWrap in 2017 and Los Angeles police first started using it in 2019. Meador said more than 900 police departments are now using it, including St. Joseph County Police since 2020.
County Police Spokesman Troy Warner said they started with nine devices in 2020, added 21 more in 2021, and last month bought 30 more, for a total of 60. On average across the whole department, Warner says all officers combined have used them about once a month.
The devices cost about $800 each. The county has spent about $75,000 on BolaWraps, money Warner says is well spent.
"When you look at the big picture, $75,000 isn't a huge cost," Warner said, "when potentially you have one opportunity to de-escalate a situation where things can go really bad."
Last month South Bend saw what might have been a textbook example of why the BolaWrap was created. On June 11, two officers responded to an area downtown near the East Race, where 70-year-old John Neiswender was threatening people with a knife. An officer tased him but Neiswender, who was homeless, was unphased because he was wearing so many layers of clothing. As he walked toward the officers with a knife pointed at them, refusing their commands to drop it, an officer shot Neiswender multiple times, killing him.
Ruszkowski was asked whether Neiswender might be alive today if one of the responding officers had a BolaWrap.
"If they would have had one, that is obviously... I can't say that oh yeah, they would have or could have or should have, but there like was a possibility there for them to have used that."
