What a safety expert thinks journalists should know about “less than lethal” rounds and chemical irritants used by ICE

On January 18, a photograph of a pair of safety goggles in a hardware store floated across my Instagram timeline. “#JOURNALISTS covering #iceprotest in #Minneapolis: Less lethal projectiles move 400-600 feet per second. Z87.1 glasses no longer provide the protection required,” read the caption.

The post came from Crisis Ready Media and was shared by the National Press Photographers’ Association (NPPA). A few days later, on January 26, The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a story about the different types of chemical irritants being used by federal agents in that city. Both seemed like prime examples of service journalism, especially as photos and videos of federal agents using those devices have become commonplace; the visuals are familiar, though the impacts are more murky. But one question stuck in my head: How was anyone identifying details like the speed of projectiles or the types of irritants being used?

To find out, I called up Bryan Woolston, who co-founded Crisis Ready Media with Chris Post in 2023. Before they became journalists, both spent years working in crisis situations: Woolston spent 20 years in the military, including a nearly nine-year stint in the Army’s bomb disposal squad, while Post worked in emergency response for about two decades and led firefighting operations at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

Now Woolston is a photojournalist, while Post primarily works in video; they met in 2015 while covering protests in Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray. They founded Crisis Ready Media, a nonprofit, to bring hostile environment training to journalism schools and small publications, and partner with other journalism support organizations — like the NPPA or the Committee to Protect Journalists — to spread awareness of how journalists can stay safe in conflicts both domestic and international.

My conversation with Woolston, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Fast forward just a couple months down the road to Minneapolis now, and just before that it was Chicago. There’s a very small percentage in every crowd that is out just to be violent, just to take advantage of the situation, but as far as the random rocks and bottles and bricks being thrown, we don’t really see that as much in Minneapolis or in Chicago. There’s been very little protester violence.

What we are seeing there is very — some would say proactive, and others would call it aggressive — behavior from the law enforcement. But specifically, we have these more high-velocity “less than lethal” rounds that will defeat the standard eye protection we’ve been telling people to use for the last two or three years. They’re different from what was being used a year ago.