Few details are available about the arrest earlier this week of a Bangor man who allegedly threatened to burn down his neighbor’s home — he reportedly displayed a gasoline container at the time — then barricaded himself inside his own mobile home when officers arrived.
Even so, the case stands out for the manner in which police stopped 33-year-old Matthew Gormely when he finally came out of his home and allegedly resisted arrest: They used an unusual weapon to fire two blunt objects at him.
On Wednesday, Bangor police Sgt. Wade Betters provided limited information about the weapon. He said that it consisted of a “launcher” that fired off two “direct impact munition[s]” that were considered “less lethal” than a firearm. They were 40 mm in size and helped to “subdue Gormely” so that he could be safely taken to jail.
Betters has not responded to follow-up requests for more information about what those munitions were made of, whether they hit Gormely or what happened to him after they were fired. But it seems likely that they were probably made of a material such as rubber, foam or bean bag, according to online stores that advertise “impact munitions.”
Like the stun guns commonly referred to by the brand name Taser, those projectiles are meant to give police an instrument for stopping noncompliant suspects that’s less deadly than their sidearms but more powerful than the flashlight they carry around with them, according to Dennis Kenney, a former police officer who is now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Still, the projectiles are powerful enough that they could kill someone in certain situations, according to Kenney. He said that it’s fairly uncommon for individual officers to carry the weapons since they are more unwieldy than stun guns. He added that it’s more likely they would be carried by a special police unit.
“You need something that’s hard enough that will deliver an impact, but not so hard that it will penetrate the body,” Kenney said of the projectiles. “The problem obviously with those is you’ve got to fire at the torso. They’re not all that easy to aim. If it hits them in the head, there’s a pretty good chance it kills them, and if it hits them in the arm, there’s a chance it wouldn’t work.”
Betters has said that the Bangor Police Department sent its bomb squad, special response team and crisis negotiators to Gormely’s home at 28 I St. in the Birch Hill Estates mobile home neighborhood off outer Broadway.
The Bangor department’s own use-of-force policy defines “less-than-lethal munitions” as “low-kinetic energy projectiles” that can have “a disabling effect.” They are primarily meant “for use against subjects who appear to pose a threat of death or serious bodily injury to themselves or others,” according to a version of the policy that will take effect at the end of next week. The policy classifies the projectiles as “non-deadly force.”
On Thursday, Betters did not respond to questions about whether the department was investigating the use of the projectiles.
The state’s attorney general’s office reviews cases in which police officers use deadly force, but it does not investigate other uses of force, according to Marc Malon, a spokesman for the office.