How to stop — and unshoot — a bullet

For 50 years, police have championed less-lethal rounds as life-saving alternatives to deadly force. The history of these “kinetic impact projectiles,” however, tells a different story — one of imprecise science, unmeasured usage, untrained police forces, death and disfigurement.

In The People vs. Rubber Bullets, the most comprehensive explainer of kinetic-impact projectiles ever produced, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie McRobbie documents the full story of these policing tools, from rubber bullets’ invention in 1970s Northern Ireland through the explosion of less-lethal shootings during the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests. It's a deep dive into the brutal history of less-lethal munitions and how law enforcement frequently misuses them.

At Long Lead , we believe high-quality journalism can have an arresting impact. For this production, we wanted the full force of the issue to hit readers as soon as they arrived at the story. But with names like "rubber bullets," "sponge rounds," "bean bags" and "pepper balls," these blunt trauma weapons are often easily dismissed as harmless, which they are not.

To show the remarkable damage a kinetic-impact projectile can produce, the project's creative director Natalie Matutschovsky and art director Emily Keegin enlisted producer Beau Harris to use a Phantom VEO camera — which captures video at thousands of frames per second — to record various objects being hit with less-lethal rounds.

The results were astounding. Some objects, like the rubber head, absorbed the shot's energy entirely, while others, like the egg, were essentially vaporized upon impact. We used most of these videos as promotional content for the story, but the cantaloupe ended up being the production's hero shot. The bullet blasted straight through the melon, clearly exiting on the other side.

We worked with our design partners at Decimal Studios to splice the video into individual images (103 frames on desktop, 241 on mobile) and build an interactive opener that let users take control of the bullet. It took some fine-tuning and file compression to achieve an ideal trade-off between image quality and website performance, but the end result was nothing short of magic. The People vs. Rubber Bullets doesn't just give readers the power to stop a bullet, but also to un-shoot it.

The People vs. Rubber Bullets is currently competing in The Webby Awards against some of journalism's biggest names: ProPublica, The Washington Post, NBC News, and Glamour. We're all vying for the Best Editorial Feature prize. If you like what you've learned about producing arresting editorial openers, we hope you'll support Long Lead in the Webby's People Voice Awards. You can vote for us here through Wednesday, April 19.