Do you have a suggestion for a better way to achieve the same results?
(Of course we can discuss if most of the uses of tear gas are wrong, but lets for a moment think that we have a moment were we need to chase away a crowd of evil persons riotong and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.)
Did you really just use a “think of the children!” argument to justify tear gas? Not cool.
To answer your question, basic tactics in crowd control using water cannons and riot shields with minimal force is plenty to handle crowds when you don’t deliberately antagonize them to violence.
> Did you really just use a “think of the children!” argument to justify tear gas? Not cool.
Way to misunderstand and derail an honest opinion in my opinion.
Also I am not playing the "think of the children card", I'm just trying to create a situation where we can discuss
- the correct use of force
separate from the issue of
- if the use of force is correct
Feel free to come up with a better example.
> To answer your question, basic tactics in crowd control using water cannons and riot shields with minimal force is plenty to handle crowds when you don’t deliberately antagonize them to violence.
Let me explain:
Why I wrote what I wrote: I've been subjected to tear gas while locked in and unable to escape until allowed (military training). I know very well what tear gas can feel like: coming out from the bunker I felt I was suffocating but I did as I was told and ran until it cleared up and lived to tell. Same with everyone else.
So unlike many (most?) HNers I have actual personal experience with it.
I've also worked with and around some high pressure pump systems (farming) and seen some demos of firefighting water cannons and my best guess is that water cannons will be more dangerous if you use enough force to have the same effect. After all, being knocked to the ground is really dangerous if you don't manage to protect your head.
I'm open to learn though, preferably if someone who actually know what they are talking about (might very well be you, just explain how you know) will explain.
You wrote a crowd of evil persons [rioting] and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.) so you cannot say you are not playing the 'think of the children' card. It really seems like you are just trying to take over control of the conversation and make it run in the direction of normalizing the use of force.
So unlike many (most?) HNers I have actual personal experience with it.
Why are you assuming HNers are not politically active? I've been tear gassed 6 times since last Friday and this is not my first rodeo. I have a bunch of use gas grenades sitting on my desk whose manufacturers I'm tracing right now.
Your military training experience is good as far as it goes, and I have heard similar stores from many police officers, but it seems to me you are overlooking many factors. You were selected for physical fitness and toughness before being admitted to military training and you knew that however unpleasant the experience that it was a controlled setting supervised by experienced people with full medical facilities and personnel available if anything went wrong.
Imagine yourself part of a small crowd of people of mixed experience, age, mobility, and physical health. Some are prepared with masks or respirators, eye protection, and full-body clothing, others are in casual wear like shorts and t-shirts. You and they are standing on the sidewalk around an intersection, occasionally someone shouts an opinion or a few people chant something but mostly people are quiet. Halfway down each block is a line of police in riot gear with gas masks. At an order from their sergeant a grenadier on one street fires two or three small CS gas grenades toward where the street meets the intersection. People run or walk briskly away from that line of police and around the corner. Most are OK although a few are not handling it well and need help breathing or rinsing their eyes. Next the police farther up that street fire a couple of grenades at the street, causing the crowd to change direction. Some run across the street, if they can. The police on the 3rd and 4th streets repeat the process and now about half the crowd is off the sidewalk and in the intersection. Police throw a larger combination CS gas grenade into the middle of the intersection which explodes with a 175 dB bang, a bright flash of light, and a much larger and thicker cloud of CS gas. While everyone is variously indisposed, the lines of police move from down each block right up to the intersection, penning the crowd in from all sides. Than a recorded message is played declaring an illegal assembly because so many people have departed the sidewalk.
The stated cause for this action was that some minutes earlier, when 2 streets were still open down to the next intersection, an unknown person drove up to and through the intersection, dinged another car, and down the street at a dangerous speed before making a sharp turn and driving away. It's unclear to me why this was considered the fault of the people standing on the sidewalk. This happened about 36 hours ago in the Bay Area. Here are two short videos captured early in the process.
You can always make up a scenario where a given approach or tool is the most economical and appropriate. It's a good diversion from the unpleasant facts of widespread inappropriate deployment that are happening now.
> You wrote a crowd of evil persons [rioting] and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.) so you cannot say you are not playing the 'think of the children' card.
It is easy to attack me when you cut away half my words an all the context.
Look at what I am actually writing, and what it is a reply to:
>>> oicu812 3 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: The business of tear gas
>>> The article states, "It also lives in a legal gray zone, due to international treaties that allow it to be used in domestic law enforcement but not in war."
>> geogra4 3 hours ago [–]
>> Right - that seems horribly wrong. It shouldn't be allowed for law enforcement either.
reply
> -4 points by eitland 3 hours ago [–]
> Do you have a suggestion for a better way to achieve the same results?
> (Of course we can discuss if most of the uses of tear gas are wrong, but lets for a moment think that we have a moment were we need to chase away a crowd of evil persons riotong and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.)
Can you see it now?
I'm trying to ask an honest question, if someone has a better solution instead of using tear gas.
To clearify that I don't want to support the actual use of tear gas in this situation I'm creating a hypothetical situation where (in the hypothetical situation) an angry mob of evil people are attacking innocent children.
At no point am I suggesting that you are an evil mob. At no point am I playing the "think of the children card" but it seems someone managed to post one comment that derailed the question "what should we use instead of teargas" into this mess.
>> So unlike many (most?) HNers I have actual personal experience with it.
> Why are you assuming HNers are not politically active? I've been tear gassed 6 times since last Friday and this is not my first rodeo. I have a bunch of use gas grenades sitting on my desk whose manufacturers I'm tracing right now.
Have my respect. I do really respect people who care enough to go out and face that stuff and I know you are probably angry, but don't be angry with me for something I didn't write!
Also - and this just feels stupid now - but my actual words still stands and it is not just based on a technicality:
Most HNers -unlike you- know nothing about CS except what they see on the news.
I'm not attacking you, I'm citing what you wrote. Nor did I accuse you of suggesting I was part of an evil mob. I think you're reacting to feeling dogpiled on and have got invested in defending a piece of rhetorical ground that is not worth holding. It happens.
I also think you might be underestimating the breadth of experience on HN, even if many people choose not to go into detail about their priors.
Let's look at an unstated major premise here: That it's imperative to achieve the result in question.
Given that the result is, among other things, to escalate the situation and increase civil unrest, it's hard for me to see your argument even that far. This is, at best, a smart way to achieve a stupid result.
That's assuming that that's what the government was looking to achieve in the first place. If they were hoping to calm things down and restore order, then it's just stupid through and through.
>> but lets for a moment think that we have a moment were we need to chase away a crowd of evil persons riotong and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.
> Let's look at an unstated major premise here: That it's imperative to achieve the result in question.
I tried really hard to create the perfect hypothetical situation to discuss the correct use of force instead of discussing if the use of force is correct.
I failed pretty badly it seems and this time jnlike a number of other times I can't see why.
I think the problem there is that, in the process of trying to create a hypothetical that is unambiguous, you ended up accidentally creating one that is a straw man.
A better one that I can think of: Imagine a violent clash between protesters and counter-protesters. To me, that is potentially an appropriate use of tear gas, because things have escalated to the point where people are being harmed.
I think, though, that, what's interesting with both my and your hypothetical, and markedly distinct with what's been happening in the news lately, is that we are not talking about a simple face-off between protestors and police. Perhaps that's cultural DNA? I would guess that virtually every natural born citizen of the USA studied the Boston Massacre in history class, and is consequently at least somewhat aware that violent retaliation against civilians - even an angry mob - doesn't have a great track record of actually making things better.
When considering a use-of-force continuum, I'd sure rather have a family member or myself be tear-gassed than shot. If you take an intermediate level away, sure you get fewer people tear-gassed, but I think you replace some of them with people being shot.
But that is based on the assumption that force is the correct choice in the first place. Having more options on how to apply force avoids the fact that the correct choice is to de-escalate.
It's almost always to de-escalate. But only almost.
I'm willing to grant the police the power to appropriately use force and give them the broadest spectrum of options to match to the need. That's not dependent on them showing for a whole year with no force that they've thought about what they did wrong so far.
It seems you went from tear gas to live fire without considering other options like firing over the head of a crowd, or using riot shields and batons to push people, or any of many other options. It seems to me that quite a few people just want to endorse whatever the police are doing and just attach some half-baked rationalization to it like 'do you prefer to be murdered.'
It wasn't excluded. "If an officer wouldn't fire a gun, they shouldn't use tear gas." I was examining the case where a cop could fire their gun, but instead chooses a less-lethal means first because we've given them a continuum of force.
Imagine a scenario where a small group of cops is watching a peaceful rally. You and your family are part of the rally. Now, a subgroup of the people near the rally start to pelt the cops with bricks and rocks. The cops are surrounded and wildly outnumbered. If de-escalation does not immediately work and the cops have a less-lethal means of response, they should use that initially. If you deny them all the less-lethal means, they're going to use lethal means to defend themselves. You and your family are now in the area where copper bullets are flying because you didn't want the cops to have tear gas.
I'm sure being tased sucks. I know tear gas sucks. I'm also pretty sure both suck a lot less than being shot and that the Taser company and police use of tear gas have saved lives.
Now, a subgroup of the people near the rally start to pelt the cops with bricks and rocks. The cops are surrounded and wildly outnumbered.
Why, and where did they come from? I'm not here for this scarifying nonsense, which is little better than pro-cop propaganda. The police are a heavy militarized force and the police's use of less lethal weapons in the current conflict is being done to escalate and injure; for example, rubber bullets are meant to be fired from 40-70 feet away and bounced off the ground to deter approach while minimizing injury, but cops have been firing directly at people and causing serious injuries, including the loss of eyes. Yesterday evening cops in armored vehicles in Walnut Creek CA were telling unarmed protesters with their hands ups to 'get out of the way or you will be dead'. There are Tiananmen square moments happening all over this country right now so you can take your imaginary wild subgroup and stuff it back into the collection of worn out authoritarian tropes that it came from.
If cops find themselves in your fantasy situation it's because they have earned such ire. I advise them to put their hands up and allow themselves to be disarmed and taken prisoner.
As I've written to mdorazio I've actually had the full tear gas experience: locked in a cramped bunker, unable to escape, forced to try to talk in a thick fog of it until officers were happy.
I'd rather take that again than a good number of other unpleasant experiences.
Mentioned it in the same sentence as the use of actual guns seems to indicate that you either talk about a different kind of tear gas or that you don't know what you are talking about at all.
Experiencing tear gas doesn't come without long term effects on health. There are also many varieties available, but CS is pretty rough and the most common form used in the US.
FWIW I've tried to do my research and CS seems to be the one we were exposed to (it was also called that at the time but I didn't want to say it as I wouldn't state that as a fact based on what I heard informally 20 years ago.)
We were a few hundred recruits who were exposed to it at that week and everyone seemed to be fine next day.
I'm fourty now and I've never experienced any problem that I would guess comes from my experience with tear gas.
(FWIW, I was exposed to it in a closed room but only briefly, not more than a minute or so I'd guess, possibly less.)
Maybe commonly, but a) we have a pandemic right now and making people cough feels like an absolutely stupid idea and b) what about people with respiratory illnesses, e.g. asthma? You don't think that could play out badly?
I've been in CS gas chambers multiple times over the past 20 years. No big deal. Should be even less of a problem for people sucking a bit of gas in the open air, not deliberately breathing it.
>evil persons rioting and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children
This is a great and important question, and something that deserves way more R&D than it gets currently from the US's leviathan budget, but you should be aware that this lineup of statements is a bog standard bad-faith rhetorical tactic, and may be [mis]interpreted that way (i.e. this is often basically a paraphrase of "if you, Mr. Individual, do not have a solution right now, then you must be OK with the killing of innocent people").
That requires that the protestors want the situation to deescalate as well. When they want to loot and burn buildings it doesn't work. Your options are to let them do that or use violence to stop them.
This implies that a riot was the intended goal of the protestors. I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine militarized police showing up gave the protestors warm and fuzzy feelings. The implied threat of violence amps up adrenaline, and it only takes one person doing something dumb for the police to violently swoop in and for everything to fall apart.
At the very least, there should be a parity in force used. The current police strategy seems to be overwhelming force, which is both not working, and a moral failure in my opinion.
You don't know what they want. If you deploy teargas before any of that has happened then perhaps the behavior you object to was in response to escalatory behavior of yours. You're essentially saying you have the right to deploy force because it's justified by any subsequent retaliation. If people don't retaliate or take any defensive action then you can declare a great victory and say they wanted to but you dominated them.
Your entire chain of reasoning is built on the claim that you have special knowledge of the future. Fine, so do I. If these people are not stopped then they're going to build Skynet and there will be nuclear strikes followed by terminator robots. Prove me wrong.
If you've noticed such a pattern and dislike it, you could have restructured your argument to avoid it. I toss or substantially rewrite more comments than I eventually post.
I reread it a number of times and I often do the same.
In this case it seems I had written what I meant though and a number of people just read mdorazios comment, saw that I was being downvoted and decided to continue piling on.
Also I guess a number of people like you are tired and angry and not in the mood for discussing alternatives-to-CS-gas-in-a-situation-where-the-use-of-force-is-actually-warranted.
Whatever, I don't care about stupid internet points, I just wish people here could read what I actually wrote instead of what mdorazio think I wrote.
I think eitland's question is reasonable clear, and seems honestly asked.
The answer to your reframing seems likely to be that tear gas is better than rubber bullets, and that some sort of violence would be needed in order to stop the initial persistent violence.
Something else that's key, IMO, to the underlying situation is the rule of law; that those at any political level committing crimes need swift, visible, justice to demonstrate democracy is being adhered to. It should be much harder for a person in a position of power to avoid a prosecution and loss of power ... the ease with which that is happening for some at the highest echelons of power, to me, shows that the system is corrupt and demonstrates that justice will not be delivered for us plebs. Why then submit to that system, when those in power do not.
one is the question: if there exist a situation where the use of force is good, is teargas/cs gas a good way to apply that force instead of water cannons/ shields and sticks/etc?
This is the question I tried to ask before getting downvoted heavily.
The other question is if it is correct to use force.
(Or based on the amount of downvotes and weird answers I have got it seems more like some people think I support police brutality while other think I use the "think of the children"-argument.)
"threatening to kill perfectly innocent children"? See, even you feel the need to ratchet up the situation to justify it's use. What you're positing is way beyond anything that's happening in the current situation where it's being used.
I disagree with the premise, I'm not aware of protestors threatening bystanders. And at the point that they're threatening to kill bystanders, that has progressed past rioting to terrorism.
At that point, I think the full spectrum of force (including lethal force) is fair game.
Now if we take a situation like the present one, where there is a mixture of peaceful protests, and riots that threaten property, I think the response is different.
Firstly, immediate escalation from the police only begets escalation from protesters. Start with officers in uniform and somebody with a bullhorn. You shouldn't need riot gear unless the rioters are violent towards police. If the rioters start throwing things, upgrade to police in riot gear with shields and batons.
Responding with tear gas and rubber bullets should be saved for if the police are utterly unable to contain the riots to within a certain area. Building barricades and waiting them out is a potentially effective option. Yes, there will be property damage, but that's pretty much a foregone conclusion. Build the barricades, arrest people as they leave the area.
There are also other less than lethal options. Pepper spray seems like an effective system with minimal harmful side effects. There is an acoustic system that generates painfully loud sound (although I believe it comes with a risk of permanent hearing damage). Batons and riot shields seem like an effective system. Regular old vision obscuring smoke grenades would cut out some of the mob mentality since you can't see everyone else rioting.
(Of course we can discuss if most of the uses of tear gas are wrong, but lets for a moment think that we have a moment were we need to chase away a crowd of evil persons riotong and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.)