My name is Darren Lindsay. I'm a firearms instructor. I'm also the less lethal coordinator for the Denver Police Department. Less lethal, pretty much the name just explains it's some other form of way to gain compliance from subjects where we don't have to go all the way to lethal force. It's just one more tool and their toolbox to keep the public safe, themselves safe, even the subject that they're dealing with safe. One of the items in our toolbox is a personal defense spray. We just refer to it as our pepper spray. Benefit to this is that everyone has it on their belt so they can get to it. It's convenient. We would use this when maybe you're met with someone who's aggressive looking to assault you but does not have a weapon and you're not justified in moving to a stronger use of force from your toolbox. It's something that they can be decontaminated from and go on about their lives and it doesn't have a permanent effect. What I would do when I go to deploy this I would hold out as arm's length. We don't want to be any closer than three feet. You can permanently damage their eyes and that's what we instruct is to spray across their eyes from ear to ear just in little one second bursts. So you want to be three feet or further away but you don't want to be so far back that it's ineffective and you can't accurately get the target that you're shooting for. Then we've got the taser system and that's an individual carry item as well. Each patrol officer in the city right now has one individually issued to them. An officer would deploy the taser when the subject rises to the level of active aggression. An active aggression is defined as the threat or perceived threat of an assault on the officer. The taser runs off of electricity it can immobilize a person immediately and it's really really good for not giving long-lasting effects. The taser cartridge that we use has 25 foot wires connected to the probes. So from about 10 to 12 feet away I've got my subject here. His threat level has reached the active aggression level so I'm going to take out my taser put the red dot right on him after I activate the safety switch and I'm going to call out taser taser taser for any officers around so that they're aware that I'm about to deploy it. Taser taser taser taser taser taser taser the way that we train is that you don't ever deploy less lethal unless you've got another officer there to cover you. When the taser was deployed and the person was incapacitated they would come up and actually take that person into custody. Another tool in the toolbox that we use is the 40 millimeter this is a multi launcher. 40 millimeter helps us with distance. It projects this foam baton it's a little black rubber baton it goes out about as fast as a professional baseball pitcher about 90 to 100 miles an hour it will leave bruising possibly some welts it should incapacitate a person or make them stop doing whatever they're doing but it gives us the advantage of being further away versus the pepper spray and the taser this can be used a lot of times for suicidal parties I would deploy it in their extremities their thighs their arms to either disarm them or incapacitate them so that we can come up and take them into custody and get them the help they need. This is a training round and it just saves money because we can reuse these so this is what I'll be using to show you how to deploy it down range. I'd come up on target take the safety off and then shoot. We have a pepper ball system and that also creates distance for us it's much like a paintball what it has is a powdered pava which is similar to the pepper spray effect this can be used better than the 40 millimeter if you're searching for someone or if someone has secreted themselves in a position of advantage we can deploy the pepper balls into that area and just the powder itself will activate and make them come out. We've had it where we've been searching for a suspect for whatever reason say down an alley and we believe that he might be in a dumpster it's not safe for us to look into the dumpster or reach into the dumpster but what we can do is deploy the pepper balls into the dumpster creating that fog in there and when it activates it'll cause him to come out and surrender. We are also trained in CIT critical incident training we are trained now better than ever to be able to identify schizophrenia dementia people who are bipolar those types of things and ask the appropriate questions are you on medication those types of things because when you realize that somebody may not be acting the way that you want them to act we're finding out now oftentimes it's not because they're aggressive or that they're intending to hurt anyone it's because they have another issue that can be dealt with without even deploying any of these less lethal systems.