Amazing how in a supposedly litigious society like America it's possible to deploy a device which causes intentional, indiscriminate, permanent injury across a crowd and not get sued into oblivion. Bit like how tobacco, asbestos and Kinder eggs all incurred product liability because they weren't intending to be damaging to health, but gun manufacturers aren't liable because their products are supposed to be dangerous.
Maybe because there is a continuously running thread in US society about who has impunity by default and who doesn't, expressed in the application of law and direction of capital.
I wonder if inflicting permanent disability without leaving any obvious physical traces on people that the police see as their adversaries is in fact part of what makes these devices attractive.
Similar to lethal injection, which looks more civilized than a bloody decapitation on the surface but can cause a slow and agonizing death to a completely paralyzed target?
Considering how rampant racism is in law enforcement (not even just in the US) as well as recent events in the US, I would actually say yes. It's "righteous punishment" for not submitting to the law (where law generally means whatever cops want you to do) and cops seem to enjoy that sort of thing.
Law enforcement users are, in most places at least, not supposed to use them in the weapon mode on crowds, but rather as very annoying long range public address systems. When used as a weapon, of course, the same rules ought to apply as for any other police use of force.
From the perspective of LRADs replacing other forms of PA, they should actually be an improvement in hearing safety, since the actual sound pressure should be lower for any given application.
And for anyone not familiar with it, there was an excellent documentary on Netflix about the use of the Taser. It argued (and it argued well - I agree with it) that the Taser was attractive because it was less lethal than a gun, but it largely did not replace the gun, it replaced other submission methods. And it ended up being MORE lethal than those submission methods. And that's a problem if you misrepresent that.
Now, I still think police should carry tasers because they're effective on a large spectrum of intermediate / gray area in the use of force continuum and it's much safer for police than many alternatives. But my point is that it's really bad to just think "less than lethal" is a cure-all. "Less lethal" can be lethal (or in this case, permanently disabling). There should still be a high threshold for deploying it.
> Now, I still think police should carry tasers because they're effective on a large spectrum of intermediate / gray area in the use of force continuum and it's much safer for police than many alternatives. But my point is that it's really bad to just think "less than lethal" is a cure-all. "Less lethal" can be lethal (or in this case, permanently disabling). There should still be a high threshold for deploying it.
I don't necessarily think that these kinds of non-lethal weapons can't be used in a "safe" or situationally appropriate way. The problem is that all of these non-lethal weapons have safety guidelines that need to be followed or else they're actually quite dangerous and have high rates of injury (even severe injury). As US law enforcement has shown repeatedly over recent weeks, they're not following any of these guidelines. People are being blinded because they're shooting rubber bullets at people's heads (against guidelines). They can't be trusted with these tools.
I don't think it's solely a US problem either. French police is incredibly eager to liberally apply pepper spray to defenseless protesters (who've committed the heinous crime of exercising their right to free speech and their right to assemble). People are also injured whenever German police use water cannons.
Absolutely agree. I've taken and helped run many, many courses on civilian self-defense, concealed weapon licensing, etc. And questions about carrying asp batons, or using bean bag rounds in a shotgun often come up. The prevailing wisdom is that civilians have no business using these things. Pepper spray seems to be an exception.
But the thinking is that if you use things against someone using deadly force on you, that's a bad strategy and you might die. If you use these things against someone not using deadly force on you, you're escalating, risking their life, and you're risking assault charges yourself. You need to be completely peaceful, de-escalate (and in some states, retreat), and then when it's time to use force, you make it deadly.
Now police officers are in a different situation but I think the continuum of force here needs to be at least a little more similar than it is. The way they're reacting to these protests is like they're trying to illustrate the protester's point for them. And one may say they're reacting to the riots and the looting, but for the most part they're not immediately present for all that anyway. There is no reason (except to simply submit a general population into not resisting them overall - and honestly that's exactly what they're doing) for you to be using "less-lethal" projectiles out of a firearm against crowds of unarmed people.
In an ideal world, LRAD's are an improvement over rifles. Fewer people would die if police used them in the same situations where they would otherwise use guns. The trouble is that police use LRAD's in situations where they wouldn't use guns.
The inconvenient thing about guns is that they leave dead bodies behind. If police use guns in inappropriate situations, the bodies will be there to incriminate them even though the law in some jurisdictions makes it difficult to prosecute police for murder.
With a LRAD, there is no body. An inappropriately targeted victim has to come forward and press charges. They may not want to do that for a variety of reasons and, if they do press charges, wantonly causing someone hearing damage is a less serious charge than murder.
If you're a police officer, it's a lot easier and less risky for you, personally, to fire a LRAD at someone than a rifle, even though they were designed to be used in similar situations.
The law needs to treat the inappropriate discharge of "less than lethal" weapons much more seriously than it does now. The police, evidently, need serious consequences to be in place.
Small correction, it's "less lethal", not "less than lethal". Many of those crowd control devices are still very lethal. A protester had to be resucitated the other day because a rubber bullet to the chest caused her heart to stop.
It wasn't a rubber bullet. It was a flashbang. Here's a graphic video of it. [0]
There was also a Twitter from a field medic describing the woman's heart stopped repeatedly. I'll look if I can find it but, frankly, there's a lot of noise about protests.
Edit: it was a Reddit thread, not a Twitter thread. [1]
Also edit: there might have been other instances too. This is just what I remembered seeing the other day.
A woman died in Ohio this week after exposure to teargas; her respiratory system stopped functioning despite not having asthma before.
Officially the use of rubber batons (bullets in common parlance) in Northern Ireland killed 17 people; although one would be wise in doubting the veracity of English reports on English behavior in Northern Ireland.
>A woman died in Ohio this week after exposure to teargas
This passive voice enrages me, it is more appropriate to say the police murdered a woman with tear gas. There were people with agency who actively made decisions which directly caused this woman's death.
I didn't mean to direct that rant at you specifically, I've just seen a lot of usage of the passive voice lately that serves to decouple police actions and their consequences.
The poor can't afford the litigation necessary for justice.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France
Has anyone actually found any evidence of damage in the field? I did a cursory search but didn't find anything, though the wiki looks pretty corporatized (sanitized). OTOH people do like to claim damage from police more often than honesty would probably dictate...
Then, if there are any actual facts not political facts, we can talk about refusing police access to non-lethal weapons and only giving access to guns and what that might mean.
The problem with less lethal crowd control tools is that police use them in situations where they would never use a real firearm, creating injuries that wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is really problematic when the police are angry at the protestors, as it gives them a way to inflict revenge pain without the PR fallout of opening fire with rifles.
There is evidence that even on a regular basis, tasers have not replaced firearms, but instead have replaced other means of de-escalation and constraint. The result is that more americans might be dead because we’ve handed out tasers to cops without a second thought.
