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By Root 804 0

than thirty years, Heal, who is fifty-eight, and is known as Sid, divided his career between the Marine reserves and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. (The Sheriff’s Department acts as the police in parts of Los Angeles County that are not incorporated, and in cities such as Compton, where its services are retained by contract.) He is probably the most knowledgeable figure in America on the civil uses of non-lethal weapons. According to Nicholas C. Nicholas, the lead scientist at the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies, at Penn State, “There’s nobody close to him. I saw him interviewed on TV the other night, and I said to my wife, ‘That’s Mr. Non-Lethal Weapons as far as the police are concerned.’ Heal has served on the front in four wars—Vietnam, Somalia, Kuwait, and Iraq. When he returned from Somalia, he says, he “ended up on the lecture tour for the Marines in lessons learned.” The Los Angeles undersheriff called him into his office and said that if he could specialize in non-lethal weapons for the Marines he could do it for the Sheriff’s Department. Heal became the only municipal-law-enforcement figure in America then devoted to non-lethal weapons.

Manufacturers typically produce non-lethal weapons for soldiers, because the military market is larger and the military has more money. To sell weapons to the police, the manufacturers tend to modify, rather than redesign, the military versions. In addition, manufacturers often take advice from retired military officers, who, Heal says, have “no insight into law enforcement.” Heal began urging inventors and manufacturers to design non-lethal weapons for policemen rather than soldiers, and whenever they made something he tested it. He assumed that manufacturers would be responsive, because the L.A.S.D. is so big—“Sixteen thousand employees, five thousand vehicles, and I don’t know how many boats and planes”—that he thought it could be a market in itself. As an incentive, Heal was willing to provide for free the expertise for which manufacturers paid consultants hundreds of dollars an hour.

Heal had a talent for describing to a manufacturer precisely what a policeman needed and whether or not its product worked well. Over the years, about twenty-five ideas that inventors and manufacturers have approached him with have become products, including a portable robot called a Throwbot, which has wheels and a camera and can go into rooms where someone might be hiding with a gun; the SkySeer, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a camera; the Pepper-Ball, a projectile like a paintball that disperses an irritating powder; and a few repulsive malodorants. Among those that haven’t worked out are the Bola Ball, which a policeman would carry on his belt and fling at running suspects (it was too difficult to master), and a device shaped like a pistol which used ultrasound to detect concealed weapons (it worked well on cotton and wool but less reliably on leather or synthetic fabrics). Recently, Heal has attended tests of the Active Denial System, or A.D.S., made for the military by Raytheon, which sends a beam of energy that heats a person’s skin to a hundred and thirty degrees within a matter of seconds. It is sometimes called the pain ray. Heal says that being beamed with it is like stepping into a scalding shower. “It’s the first non-lethal device in history to provide protection against lethal force, because its range exceeds rifle fire,” he says. The military hopes to use the A.D.S. in Iraq to disperse crowds or stop people at check-points who keep coming after being told to stop. It currently has little use in law enforcement, though. “If they gave it to us for free, we probably couldn’t use it,” Heal told me. The first police chief to use the pain ray on Americans would become famous overnight.

It isn’t so much that the police are uncomfortable about using violence when they feel that their safety is jeopardized; it is that often when they kill people they end up in lawsuits. When a non-lethal weapon is being tested, Heal says, the critical standard is whether it creates