A tense standoff at UCLA has officers begin making arrests and dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment in May 2024.
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Brian Feinzimer
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LAist
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Topline:
A 2021 law requires California law enforcement agencies to make public reports about their use of chemical agents and less-lethal weapons at protests. But LAist found that hundreds of agencies do not appear to document the use of less-lethal weapons. The extent of that documentation varies from agency to agency, making it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable when something goes wrong.
Why it matters: Civil rights attorneys and experts told LAist that monitoring the use of chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles at protests is important because, despite their name, these weapons are dangerous.
Who is responsible: While the California Department of Justice is responsible for posting all such reports on a public website, the agency says it's not responsible for making sure they're written or evaluating their contents. Compliance with the law is left entirely up to the agencies — some of which told LAist they don’t have staffing or capacity to manage.
What lawmakers say: Cristina Garcia, a former state Assembly member from Bell Gardens and primary sponsor of the law, said it should be up to the DOJ to make sure that’s happening.
Read on... for more on what LAist found with compliance and reporting issues.
The last thing David Ramirez remembers, he was protesting peacefully at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in the early hours of May 2, 2024.
Then, he said everything seemed to move in slow motion, and there was “nothing but ringing” in his ear.
He’d just been shot in the head with a less-lethal projectile by law enforcement officers while they cleared the encampment. Ramirez described his experience at a news conference this past May.
“My first instinct was to remove the foreign object, but it triggered profuse bleeding,” he said while standing in front of a poster bearing the image of his wound.
In 2021, California lawmakers passed a law that was supposed to prevent injuries like the one Ramirez sustained. The law, Assembly Bill 48, forbids law enforcement from targeting peaceful protesters with chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles like the 40mm kinetic energy projectiles that injured Ramirez. Officers also aren’t supposed to aim less-lethal projectiles at the head.
Ramirez and three other people suing law enforcement over the violent response to the 2024 campus protests say officers with the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol broke state law that day.
The law requires that agencies report on their use of less-lethal weapons and resulting injuries. More than a year later, Ramirez still doesn’t know who fired the projectile that hit him in the head, and neither agency has reported injuring any protesters while clearing the encampment.
Four years after California lawmakers tried to rein in violent policing at protests, Ramirez’s lawsuit and more recent protests against federal immigration raids have put law enforcement’s actions under a microscope and revealed major gaps in enforcement of California’s existing protest laws.
LAist found that hundreds of agencies do not appear to document the use of less-lethal weapons, as required by law. The extent of that documentation varies from agency to agency, making it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable when something goes wrong.
While the California Department of Justice is responsible for posting all such reports on a public website, the agency says it's not responsible for making agencies write the reports or evaluating what’s in them. Compliance with the law is left entirely up to the agencies — some of which told LAist they don’t have staffing or capacity to manage.
Cristina Garcia, a former state Assembly member from Bell Gardens and primary sponsor of Assembly Bill 48, said she and other lawmakers passed the law to protect the rights of Californians, and said it should be up to the DOJ to make sure that’s happening.
“Is this [law] being implemented properly, are we meeting expectations, are we breaking promises? That should be asked of the DOJ,” she said. “If we don’t have enforcement, do we really have a law?”
What the law says
California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 48 after seeing the police response to protests in the summer of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer.
Still from LAPD body camera footage, showing officer shooting Benjamin Montemayor with a projectile during the protests of 2020.
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Under AB 48, officers are only allowed to deploy crowd control tools — including chemical agents or less-lethal projectiles — in response to violence, physical threats or to an “objectively dangerous and unlawful situation.”
The law forbids authorities from aiming at protesters' heads, neck or vital organs, or firing indiscriminately into a crowd.
Civil rights lawyers told LAist in June that the LAPD and other agencies responding to protests that month against federal immigration enforcement appear to have violated this law and the court order. They’ve secured a separate court order forbidding the LAPD from targeting journalists and filed several lawsuits on behalf of protesters.
The law gives agencies 60 days to publish reports about their use of force at protests. The LAPD missed this deadline to report on their response to the protests in June on Aug. 5.
LAPD has not responded to repeated questions about the delayed report.
The LAPD’s website does include reports on previous protests. And the department is among just 32 out of the 624 law enforcement agencies in California that have sent crowd control reports to the California Department of Justice.
LAist reviewed news reports and police documents and found several instances where agencies used less-lethal weapons during protests, yet no crowd control records were posted online as required by state law.
In one instance, an LAPD officer allegedly shot a man in the jaw with a less-lethal projectile on June 8. While LAPD has started conducting an internal investigation into the incident, a report has yet to be generated. It’s been 93 days since the man was shot.
San Francisco police officers fired pepperballs, a form of less-lethal projectile with a chemical irritant, while responding to anti-immigration enforcement protests on June 8, according to news reports. The agency does not appear to file AB 48 reports with the California Department of Justice, and LAist has been unable to locate any such reports on the agency’s website.
The San Francisco Police Department has not yet responded to a request for comment.
In another, UC Riverside PD documented using a less-lethal weapon during a joint response during UC Berkeley’s pro-Palestinian protests in a separate report, yet has not created an AB 48 report for that incident.
UC Riverside Police Lt. Jason Day said his small department didn’t have the capacity to compile the reports.
“A lot of times things are just going to have to get set aside,” he told LAist.
LAPD creates a perimeter to move back anti-ICE protesters on San Pedro Street on June 9, 2025.
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Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag
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Los Angeles Times
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Documenting injuries
Civil rights attorneys and experts told LAist that monitoring the use of chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles at protests is important because, despite their name, these weapons are dangerous.
“They absolutely are lethal weapons. They’ve killed people, they've permanently disabled people, caused really significant and substantial injuries to people,” said Rebecca Brown, an attorney who is representing Ramirez and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against agencies for allegedly misusing less-lethal weapons. “These should not be brought to a protest in the first place.”
The LAPD and CHP both filed reports about their use of force at the UCLA protest, but neither documented any injuries as a result of less-lethal weapons.
Carlena Orosco, an assistant professor of criminal justice at California State University, Los Angeles, said the nature of protest response, where multiple agencies often respond to incidents together, makes it difficult to document injuries.
“There are going to be data limitations when it comes to not only identifying categories of injuries, but also ensuring that they are reported comprehensively and accurately… especially when we think of a crowd situation,” she said.
For Brown, law enforcement’s failure to fully document the injuries they cause shows a lack of enforcement.
During the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Brown said “CHP and LAPD did not put any effort into identifying who they hurt, identifying what their injuries were, what kind of treatment they needed.” Without an enforcement mechanism making sure they report injuries, she said law enforcement agencies are “only going to report on that when they have to.”
LAPD has not responded to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the CHP said the agency could not comment due to pending litigation.
Who’s responsible?
Garcia, the former Assemblymember and lead sponsor on Assembly Bill 48, said it should be up to the California Department of Justice to make sure agencies are reporting what they need to comply with the law.
The DOJ doesn’t see it that way. The law requires the department to compile and publish a list of AB 48 webpages from all law enforcement agencies. But according to the DOJ's spokesperson, Elissa Perez, the law doesn’t ask the agency to do anything else by way of enforcement.
“The bill [AB 48] does not include requirements for DOJ to review, audit, or enforce law enforcement agency requirements,” Perez wrote to LAist.
The law also does not outline repercussions for non-compliant agencies.
According to the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which sets selection and training standards for California law enforcement, agencies are responsible for complying with the law, but there’s no repercussions if they don’t.
“The way the law is written, there is no stated enforcement mechanism,” Meagan Poulos with the commission wrote to LAist in an email. “The individual agencies are responsible.”
Orosco of Cal State LA said while it’s crucial to ensure law enforcement agencies follow the law, it would be difficult for the DOJ to check what is written in the reports filed by individual departments.
“I don't know how they would go about reviewing every department's information,” she said.
Without proactive enforcement of the law, LAist found there are few options for citizens to hold agencies accountable for their use of weapons at protests.
Officers who violate internal department policy can be punished, but those investigations often take years.
Civil lawsuits can also take years and the financial burden ultimately falls to the taxpayer. Los Angeles has so far paid $20 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from the LAPD’s response to protests in 2020.
Garcia said lawsuits like those cost taxpayer dollars and threaten existing services for constituents, so city officials should be interested in making their police departments follow the law.
Five years after Assembly Bill 48 became law, Garcia says proper enforcement requires constant partnership between cities, police departments, the DOJ, the media and constituents.
“Compliance and accountability is a constant, ongoing situation,” she said. “It's never a one-and-done. It's a partnership.”
Watchdog Editor Jared Bennett contributed to this report.
