During Tuesday's presentation, commission President Erroll Southers said he wished that the department's study had gone further and asked why police departments in cities such as New York and Chicago weren't deploying the launchers during day-to-day operations.

"It is noteworthy that those agencies are not using it," said Southers, asking the LAPD to report back to the commission with those details.

Scrutiny of so-called kinetic weapons, such as projectile launchers or shotguns that fire beanbag rounds, has heightened in recent years amid reports of protesters suffering serious injuries after being struck.

Although 40-millimeter projectiles are commonly used elsewhere for crowd control, the Los Angeles Police Department is the largest one in the nation to use them in day-to-day operations. Normally during the arrest of a potentially combative person, officers work in teams and are each given a specific role, such as holding a ballistic shield or providing cover with a firearm or a less-lethal weapon. Officers equipped with launchers are often present at encounters with people armed with edged weapons such as knives or swords.

LAPD trains officers to aim the launchers at a person's navel area or, if practical, their arms, hands and legs, avoiding the head, neck, spine, chest, groin or kidneys to prevent major internal damage. The launchers have an effective range of up to 75 feet and were originally used only by the SWAT team, with department-wide deployment beginning in 2016.

Often less accurate than bullets, the foam or rubber rounds are designed to spread the force of impact over a larger area, without penetrating the skin.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department also uses the 40-millimeter rounds, but doesn't track their effectiveness, the LAPD's report said. Neither do police in Houston, which only began using the devices in a patrol capacity in February 2023.

About 900 smaller law enforcement agencies have adopted the devices within the last two years, according to the LAPD report.

Officials here, as elsewhere, have long argued that the launchers, recognizable by their fluorescent green barrel, allow for more precise targeting of violent individuals and thereby reduce serious injuries. LAPD officers fired launchers in 74 separate incidents last year, Tuesday's report said.

But critics say referring to them as "less lethal" is a misnomer because the weapons have the potential to cause serious harm.

Attorney Carl Douglas said that officers have been known to both fire the devices indiscriminately into crowds during protests and to hesitate to use the devices in more routine encounters — creating scenarios where they resort to deadly force.

"Particularly in a mental health context and if the subject has a broom handle, for example — I have regrettably seen officers use deadly force in those occasions," said Douglas, who has successfully sued local law enforcement agencies on behalf of people shot by "less-lethal" munitions.

Other times, he said, groups of officers have simultaneously fired handguns and "less-lethal" weapons — a trend confirmed by a Times review of nearly 50 LAPD shootings between January 2020 and April 2022.

The city has in recent years paid out millions of dollars in settlements to people who say they were seriously injured when LAPD officers fired "less-lethal" rounds into crowds of protesters.

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