Some North Texas police departments adopting "electronic lassos" for non-lethal arrests
NORTH TEXAS – The use of deadly force by police officers has outraged communities and polarized the nation at times.
But there's a new tool that some law enforcement agencies hope will make a difference by giving officers another non-lethal option when making arrests.
You'll find them on the belts of Chief Bill Weatherly and his two officers who patrol the small Kaufman County town of Oak Ridge.
"When you're ready to shoot, you push the button and it shoots back in here. You're ready to go. It's that simple," Weatherly said.
Oak Ridge is one of two Dallas-Fort Worth area police departments that, along with about two dozen others statewide, have purchased BolaWraps.
"To me, it's a great thing," Weatherly said. "Think of them as sort of an electronic lasso."
"The BolaWrap is not going to harm the individual," said J.D. Methfessel, WRAP's chief strategy officer. "It's going to give the officer three to four seconds to move in to de-escalate the situation."
Law enforcement officers from cities across the nation have faced intense criticism and often criminal charges for inappropriately using deadly force.
When deployed, the BolaWrap sounds like a gun but fires a Kevlar rope that wraps around a person with hooks that dig into clothing the more they move.
"I was pretty skeptical like a lot of police officers are on new technology, and I came out and tried it out for size, so to speak, and I understood the value in it," said Rodney Sherrod, a retired police officer.
The lasso-shooting guns are less expensive than Tasers and more acceptable to anti-police brutality groups.
"I think it shows some promise," said John Fullinwider, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality. "This appears, if used properly, it doesn't cause any injury to the suspect or any direct pain. This is a way for even a cop that's not skilled in de-escalation to diffuse a situation and take a subject into custody."
The BolaWrap works from as far as 25 feet away and is easy enough to deploy.
The company that makes them says this summer police in San Francisco replaced their Tasers with BolaWraps, which they've already been used to safely restrain people suffering from mental illness and drug-related episodes.
Law enforcement officers don't want to hurt someone who's having a mental health crisis, and the BolaWrap by design does not use harm to bring people into compliance.
Officers in Oak Ridge have yet to deploy their BolaWraps, but the chief believes they could someday save the life of a citizen or possibly protect the career of an officer.
