Officers need to be equipped with reasonable and effective means to incapacitate a resisting suspect in both close-contact and noncontact situations. After testing a number of nonlethal weapons, the Los Angeles Police Department purchased TASER's and chemical irritants to use as nonlethal weapons. The author of this article conducted a 1991 study that examined the injuries to suspects and officers in a stratified random sample of 502 Los Angeles Police Department use-of-force incidents that did not involve firearms in 1989. The research examined eight tactics used by officers to cause a suspect to fall to the ground: baton, karate, kick, punch, flashlight, swarm (an organizational tackle), miscellaneous bodily force, chemical irritant spray, and TASER. Since 66 of the 502 cases used more than one type of force to control the incident, a total of 568 uses of nonlethal force were examined. Injuries sustained by the suspects and officers from each type of force were compared. In all cases that involved tactics other than chemical irritants and TASER's there were moderate and major injuries for either the suspect or the officer. The chemical irritant spray ended 90 percent of the altercations, and TASER ended 86 percent of the altercations. Overall, the study indicates that nonlethal uses of force can be as effective as potentially lethal uses of force without producing injuries to either suspects or officers. 13 references