Rockford, Ill. — A 28-year-old woman on suicide watch in the mental-health unit of Winnebago County Jail refused to surrender her clothing and hid in the corner of her cell.
In response, an officer fired a pepperball launcher into the cell: a high-pressure air gun that propels projectiles containing chemical irritants. Three pepperballs struck the woman’s foot, broke apart and filled the small space with a burning cloud as she tried to wash herself off in the sink, according to records obtained from the county.
When the woman still would not comply, the officer fired two more rounds into the cell, followed by two bursts of pepper spray. The officer then fired three more pepperballs that struck her leg and backside, records show. Officers entered the cell and restrained her.
The April incident is part of a pattern in Winnebago County Jail. Since 2019, officers have fired pepperballs at people to force them to comply in dozens of incidents, often aiming through the food slot of cell doors. Officers have used the launchers to force people to uncover a window, surrender clothes or come forward for handcuffs or medication. People inside the cells often attempt to hide or shield themselves from the pepperballs with blankets or mattresses. Many have a mental illness, and some were awaiting transfer to state psychiatric facilities.
Since 2019, eleven Illinois county jails have reported using what they call “pepperball launchers” or “AR pepper ball guns,” according to an Illinois Answers Project analysis of county incident reports. Staff typically decontaminated areas afterward and offered people showers, fresh clothes and medical attention. In some cases, the pepperballs caused bruises, welts, coughing, irritated eyes and difficulty breathing. In Jefferson County, a man who officers shot with pepperballs had to go to a hospital. In Sangamon County, a sergeant fired 30 to 40 rounds into a cell, sickening a fellow officer to the point that they had to go home.
“When that round hits you, it’s like getting hit or struck by the end of a baton. There’s kinetic energy delivered in addition to the [chemical agent],” said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association. He said the use of pepperball guns is not “routine or commonplace.”
Statewide outside of Winnebago County, officers typically fired pepperballs to quell fights and large group disturbances happening in common spaces, with officers first aiming at walls, ceilings or floors before targeting people. Rock Island County Jail records show that in 2023, detained people had caused flooding and refused to return to their cells for over an hour when officers responded with riot shields, Tasers, a dog and pepperballs.
Pepperball launchers are “good for distances, and so the classic use of them is when inmates are fighting in a housing area,” said Gary Raney, a former sheriff in Idaho. “As with anything, it can be abused. It really shouldn’t be used against a single individual in a single cell.”
In Winnebago County Jail, the state’s second-largest, incident reports show officers have fired at a single person inside a cell 24 times since 2019, directly hitting them in at least 13 of those incidents. Winnebago County has documented more pepperball incidents than any other jail in the state, and it’s becoming a more frequent practice there: Officers used pepperball launchers at least ten times in the first half of 2026 alone.
Asked about the incidents, Winnebago County noted the jail’s large size and said officers have fired pepperballs at fewer than half of 1% of people detained there.
“The Pepperball launcher provides our corrections officers with a less-lethal option to address certain situations while maintain[ing] distance from an inmate,” the jail said in a statement. “In some circumstances, this allows officers to gain compliance without placing themselves or others in close proximity to a combative or resistant inmate and without immediately resorting to a higher level of force.”
United Tactical Systems, based in Lake Forest, manufactures PepperBall launchers used by jails in Illinois. The company sold $1.7 million worth of equipment to the federal government for immigration enforcement at the height of Operation Midway Blitz, the Chicago Reader reported. PepperBall claims its projectiles can be fired up to 150 feet. The chemical agent they contain can cause tears, temporary blindness, burning sensations, difficulty breathing and irritation of the skin, eyes and respiratory system.
“If exposure or ingestion occurs, get medical advice/attention,” a company user manual states. Another manual states “operators should maintain a stand-off distance of at least 3 feet, to minimize serious injuries,” though one agency has a policy requiring at least 6 feet. Records Illinois Answers reviewed show officers routinely placed the barrels of pepperball guns through food slots to fire into small cells.
PepperBall touts the weapon as a “non-lethal solution to de-escalate conflict and resolve situations with the least amount of force.” The company urges users to “consider vulnerabilities before deployment whenever possible.” Incidents inside Illinois county jails raise questions about whether facilities are complying with that guidance. And it’s all happening with little oversight.
“Just shooting a bunch of chemical irritants into an enclosed space, especially one where you can’t escape, it’s just very very bad from a health perspective but also from a basic human decency perspective,” said Scott Reynhout, a research consultant at the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights who studies crowd-control weapons.
Eleven Illinois county jails fired pepperball guns
Most Illinois county jails don’t even have pepperball launchers, including Cook County Jail, the state’s largest. But officers in 11 jails have fired them at least 71 times since 2019, according to county incident reports obtained by Illinois Answers. In a handful of other incidents, officers at those jails displayed pepperball guns but didn’t fire.
Another nine jails said they have pepperball launchers but haven’t used them. Kendall County, for example, said correctional staff have had pepperball launchers for about seven years but have never fired them outside of training.
“They are available to our highly trained correctional emergency response team, and for use in a situation of a major disruption/riot — only after authorization from jail administration,” wrote Christopher Covelli, spokesperson for Lake County Jail. “They are not carried around by staff or used on a day to day basis.”
The Vermilion County Sheriff’s Department acquired a pepperball launcher about two years ago but hasn’t used it. “It can be used for barricaded persons in buildings or vehicles or to attempt to subdue armed persons in certain circumstances without having to use a higher level of force,” said Cpt. Michael Hartshorn.
Macon County, which documented firing pepperball guns seven times in 2024, purchased another launcher last year, the facility’s annual inspection shows.
Several jails have policies specific to pepperball launchers, which typically require officers to be trained, notify superiors, give verbal warnings before firing and justify each use of force. Some counties only permit use when a detained person is actively resisting, restrict direct hits only to “when a subject exhibits violent behavior” or acknowledge the device is “generally used as a crowd control option.” Boone County, for example, has had a specific policy for more than two decades. Other jails rely on broader use-of-force policies that may mention pepperball launchers.
“Everyone that has one of those should have a policy in place,” said Daniel Sheline, past president of the Illinois Correctional Association. “They have to have limitations.”
Asked about Vermilion County’s policy on the use of pepperball launchers, Hartshorn initially said the county didn’t have one, but later added that the county is updating its policies and intends to implement one on pepperball use.
PepperBall declined to say how many Illinois agencies have purchased launchers. The company provided a statement that said, “every law enforcement situation is better off when non-lethal tools like ours are available and properly used.”
These types of weapons have been at the center of lawsuits nationwide. People detained in jails in Colorado, Georgia and North Carolina have alleged excessive use, and, last year, an Indiana jail guard was sentenced to two years probation for excessive force after he pled guilty to shooting a pepperball gun point-blank into a detained person’s spine without warning. In New Mexico, one family settled a wrongful death lawsuit after sheriff’s deputies fired 60 pepperballs at an elderly man who later died.
Protesters and journalists have also sued over pepperball injuries. In Illinois, federal agents fired pepperballs at reporters and protesters outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview last year, according to federal complaints. A media coalition sued the Trump administration for violating First Amendment rights.
Physicians for Human Rights cautions law enforcement against deploying chemical irritants in confined spaces. Severe reactions and fatalities are “mostly associated with concentrated exposure, which you can really only get if you deploy chemical irritants into an enclosed space from which there is no egress,” Reynhout said. “That essentially defines the prison context.”
‘Don’t shoot again’
Winnebago County Jail has documented at least 28 incidents involving the use of a pepperball launcher since 2019 — the most of any jail in Illinois, according to an Illinois Answers analysis of county incident reports.
Officers documenting the incidents often identified the people they’ve fired pepperballs at as having a mental illness, being housed in a mental-health unit or awaiting transfer to state psychiatric facilities through the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS). The sister of a man Winnebago County officers shot with pepperballs in 2020 told Illinois Answers that he suffered from schizophrenia.
In at least six incidents in Winnebago County, officers launched pepperballs at people who refused to be handcuffed in order to receive medication, according to county incident reports.
The county’s use-of-force policy requires officers to attempt de-escalation techniques and consider additional factors when engaging with people who have mentally illness, such as whether the person was incapable of making rational decisions and whether force is necessary.
Asked about the incidents, Winnebago County said “each incident is evaluated based on the circumstances at the time, with the goal of resolving the situation safely and using the level of force reasonably necessary.” Detained people have been offered showers and medical attention after the incidents, and there have been "no serious injuries reported as a result of the deployments" in 2026, the county said.
Sheline, the past president of the Illinois Correctional Association, questioned some of these uses of force. “Using that to make them take medication, that’s a bad look in itself,” he said. “If you’re just blindly shooting through a food slot, who knows where those are going.”
Raney, the former sheriff, reviewed pepperball incident reports obtained by Illinois Answers and said the uses of force appeared to range from “very reasonable” to “very questionable.”
“My lingering questions at the end of these are about sincere de-escalation attempts and the seemingly frequent use of the [pepperball] gun as compared to aerosol OC,” Raney wrote. “Was there a need to add pain compliance on top of the use of a chemical agent?”
Dan Pacholke, the former secretary of the Washington State Department of Corrections who has testified in use-of-force cases nationwide, also reviewed the incident reports. He described what’s happening in Winnebago County as “outlier behavior.”
“It seems like they default to this pepperball gun because they kind of like it,” Pacholke said. “It’s not normal. It's not typical. It’s not usual — anywhere.”
Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency physician who researches crowd control weapons, said the incidents were “shocking.” In her research, Haar said she’s seeing law enforcement agencies using pepperball launchers more frequently — and more companies manufacturing them, too.
“I think they’re becoming more and more popular,” she said. “And I think this is a really bad trend.”
Pepperballs fired in a vacuum of oversight
Illinois Answers obtained copies of internal use-of-force reviews that some jails conducted to assess whether officers deployed pepperball launchers appropriately. Those reviews typically found the deployment justified. Other jails relied on outside review from the Jail and Detention Standards Unit (JDSU) within the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), which monitors jails for compliance with state standards.
Illinois state standards require jails to report an array of "extraordinary or unusual occurrences,” such as the use of a control device or chemical agent, to the JDSU. Those reports require staff to provide details about what happened and offer “recommendations to prevent future occurrences.”
In state fiscal year 2025, the JDSU received thousands of “extraordinary or unusual occurrences” reports from county jails, but only reviewed about a dozen. The JDSU didn’t review any of the nine pepperball reports it received over that period. IDOC previously told Illinois Answers that the unit makes every effort to review reports but is not required to do so.
Some incidents may never have been reported to the unit in the first place. Neither Winnebago County nor the JDSU could provide documents showing any of the nine incidents where guards fired pepperballs in 2026 had been reported to the JDSU.
Only some of the reports jails submitted to the JDSU since 2019 offered “recommendations to prevent future occurrences.” One officer urged the state “to have people being held because they are deemed unfit for trial by the courts placed in DHS custody in a more timely manner.” Another wrote: “DHS needs bigger facilities or I suggest prioritizing their patients, accepting the most severe first." Others said that they had a “possible mental-health subject” or that a detained person “needs mental-health treatment.”
Others left the field blank.
Meredith Newman contributed fact checking. This story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation to the Illinois Answers Project.