Police in Seattle, USA, have made extensive use of blast balls: a type of hybrid distraction device that combines the explosive lights and sounds of flash-bang grenades with the chemical element of tear gas grenades.
While these grenades are not explicitly advertised as fragmentation devices, shrapnel generated by their detonation has been implicated in a number of injuries dating back to 2016, with victims including a journalist who was struck in the face and several people who were injured during the George Floyd protests of 2020.
In June of 2020, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to prohibit the use of many CCWs for protest, including blast balls. A court ruling later found the Seattle Police Department in contempt of court for violating the prohibition. In the order, U.S. District Judge Richard Jones expressed special concern over the indiscriminate and imprecise nature of blast balls and the risk they pose to peaceful demonstrators, noting that several violations of the prohibition represented use that was either indiscriminate or disproportional.
