Records Reveal UMass Police’s Recent Weapons, Equipment Purchases

Over the last several years, the department has purchased thousands of dollars worth of lethal and “less-lethal” weapons and accessories.

By Divina Cordeiro

The following story by divina cordeiro was published originally in The Shoestring on June 1, 2025. It is reposted here under a Creative Commons license.

Smoke and pepper-spray grenades. Red-dot sights for rifles and tactical gas masks. Tens of thousands of dollars on camera equipment. These are just a few of the equipment purchases that the University of Massachusetts Amherst Police Department (UMPD) has made in the last two years, according to records obtained by The Shoestring.

UMPD’s armory appears extensive, according to the records. However, the university refuses to disclose everything it has purchased in the nearly two years The Shoestring has analyzed. 

The police department bought 20 “OC grenades” — also known as pepper spray grenades — in February 2024, according to a spreadsheet of the UMPD’s equipment purchases. That’s in addition to “white smoke grenades” it bought that same month from the company Combined Systems. And shortly before that, the UMPD also bought what appears to be a “pepper-ball” launcher from the company PepperBall.

According to Combined Systems’ website, the canister “delivers an invisible OC vapor and renders an intense respiratory effect to an non-compliant subject.” OC grenades contain oleoresin capsicum in vapor form, a chemical irritant also used in pepper spray. According to an article in the journal Human Factors and Mechanical Engineering for Defense and Safety, oleoresin capsicum “produces immediate closing of the eyes, a burning sensation to the skin, involuntary inflammation of mucous membranes, coughing, shortness of breath, and gasping.” 

The grenade that the UMPD purchased is “indiscriminate in nature and can spread to unintended targets and bystanders,” the group Physicians for Human Rights wrote in 2017. 

“Gas canisters are sometimes deliberately misused as projectile weapons fired directly at protesters at close range,” the group said. 

In 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts released a report on less-lethal weapons — just one year after a Boston police officer shot a pepper ball that killed Victoria Snelgrove. The report pointed out that police abuse of pepper spray has been the grounds of many lawsuits. The report adds that less-lethal projectiles, like the pepper-ball launcher UMPD possesses, “have proved to be just as deadly,” as seen by Snelgrove’s death.   

The UMPD does not seem to use this kind of equipment often. 

According to news reports, the last instance in which the UMPD was involved with tear gas and pepper spray for crowd control was in 2014, when the department joined Amherst police to disperse a crowd celebrating the alcohol-centered, pre-spring break university party known as Blarney Blowout. At the time, some condemned the police response because of alleged excessive force. One of the arrestees even filed a lawsuit on the same grounds, which was ultimately dismissed in 2016. 

The reason police cited for using those weapons was the thousands of people in the crowd who were throwing beer cans and snowballs at officers. Kumble Subbaswamy, the university’s former chancellor, condemned the actions of the students and commissioned a review of the events in March 2014 by former Boston police commissioner Edward Davis. After reviewing the police response at the time, Davis found that the police department made miscalculations like the “premature” use of tear gas, which made the situation worse, according to reporting from MassLive. Robert Caret, the president of the UMass system at the time, spoke to MassLive and told the outlet that there was “some unprovoked overreaction” by the police. 

Reporting by The Shoestring found that while pepper-ball use was allegedly approved during a police crackdown at last year’s pro-Palestinian encampment, where over 130 people were arrested, the weapon was not used.

In 2023, the UMPD also spent over $25,000 on what appears to be firearms, or ammunition for them, and $5,400 on red-dot rifle sights from the company Witmer Public Safety Group. According to Aimpoint, the manufacturer, the sights are the “most effective way to aim your firearm” and have several different features that facilitate aiming and hitting a target. Aimpoint is not only one of the leading manufacturers of red-dot sights, but the company behind its creation. Since 1997, the U.S military, federal immigration police, as well as several state police departments have used or contracted with Aimpoint, according to their website.

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In August and September of 2024, following the mass arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters at a solidarity encampment on campus in the spring of that year, the university spent over $30,000 on camera equipment and related expenses. That followed the nearly $60,000 the UMPD spent on similar equipment in the fall of 2023 and March and April of 2024. Among those purchases were surveillance cameras made by the network video and audio device manufacturer Axis Communications.

UMPD spent over $10,000 at Yankee Hill Machine Co., a company that manufactures and sells firearms, firearm suppressors, and accessories. The Shoestring could not confirm the specific equipment that the UMPD purchased, however, because the police department denied a public records request to provide the invoices from Yankee Hill. 

And that’s not the only information UMass has refused to disclose.

In early April, The Shoestring filed a public records request for all of the UMPD’s spending on equipment since July 2023. Two weeks later, the university police department provided a spreadsheet containing information about its expenditures. After review, The Shoestring found several equipment purchases of note in which information was missing: from companies like Combined Systems, MIRA Safety, Yankee Hill Machine Co., and more.

So The Shoestring filed another public records request for specific invoices from those companies. The UMPD, though, has yet to turn over all of them.

In a letter denying The Shoestring’s public records request, the UMPD justified withholding the records because revealing some of them, they said, would “undermine the Departments’ ability to safeguard the community and increases risks to its officers and the community we serve.” This justification, known as “exemption (n)” to the state’s public records law, is often used by police departments in Massachusetts to withhold information about their weapons and equipment. The exemption is intended to protect from disclosure records that the state’s supervisor of records deems “likely to jeopardize public safety or cyber security” if released to the public.

“It is true that some information located within the spreadsheet could be searched on the internet to determine the specific technical specifications of the equipment. Such is the case with certain descriptions of some invoices unique to Combined Systems Inc.,” Ian Cyr, deputy chief of UMPD, said in a response after The Shoestring appealed the record denial. “Other invoices from this vendor, Yankee Hill Machine Co., and MIRA Safety sought by [The Shoestring] do not provide similar specificity on the spreadsheet, however the actual invoices do provide technical specifications of equipment that relates to emergency preparedness efforts, or threat and vulnerability assessments.” 

The Shoestring has appealed the new denial and is awaiting another determination from the state’s supervisor of records. 

Other purchases the UMPD has made in the past two years include a drone with a thermal camera, a subscription for “telcom services” with the controversial data broker LexisNexis, biometric data software, shooting-range practice targets, and more than $20,000 on drycleaning.

Cyr did not respond to The Shoestring’s multiple requests for comment on the police department’s equipment purchases.

Emily Gest, the Associate Vice Chancellor of News and Media Relations, also did not respond to requests for comment.

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divina cordeiro is a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They are a summer 2025 intern at The Shoestring with support from the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News. divina is an independent reporter covering labor and social movements, pursuing a degree in journalism and social thought & political economy at UMass Amherst. They have worked for three years in legislation, policy, and research on education, child welfare, and race equity. Reach them at divina.cordeiro@proton.me or on Instagram and Twitter @divi_cordeiro