https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro...
(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.)
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.
But, we have de-escalation tactics, riot shields, smoke canisters, and literally guns.
If an officer wouldn't fire a gun, I think he shouldn't use tear gas.
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.
People are angry for a reason, Trevor Noah did a great part on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4amCfVbA_c
Basically the white/rich majority and the police in the US has broken their end of the societal contract for decades and now people are fed up enough.
But if I read the basic police training in the US is 6 month or less and even hair cutters need more training, this ship seems to have sailed until better training is in place. I am really shocked about what is going on in the US.
>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").
Full metal jackets are required for war, while law enforcement use bullets for stopping power.
One way the U.S. could reduce gun deaths would be to require full metal jacket ammunition; It decreases the likelihood of death for any given hit; (though increases ricochets and likelihood of stray bullets)(also increases price of every bullet sold)
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.
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.
It's largely a solved problem, and has been since the 70's. The cops in the US just don't use those tools and tactics.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro...
That being said, there has been a lot of evidence that shows that HP rounds penetrate further than conventional wisdom would expect, and it likely gives LEOs a false sense of security when firing in an apartment complex or into crowds.
(Or at least use excessive force without regard for the presence of children: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-georgia-cops-critically-... )
I'm trying to discuss the correct use of force, not if the force is being used correctly.
I can often admit that what I wrote can be misunderstood but you and mdorazio seems to ho out of your way to misunderstand me.
Why?
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.
I actually want to learn.
> 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.
At least you were polite, have my upvote :-)
Law enforcement and other self-defense applications use hollow-point (HP) bullets to minimize penetration for the safety of innocent bystanders. The idea is that the bullet is designed to not fully penetrate the first material object it comes in contact with, though over-penetration can still happen. A full metal jacket (FMJ) bullet will frequently go through multiple walls and bodies until it depletes its energy, which is desirable in military applications; the design of military bullets enhances this.
The prohibition on HP bullets from the Hague Convention is a 19th century anachronism based on the capabilities of firearms from that period, modern rifle bullets have significantly different design requirements in any case. Modern high-velocity FMJ cartridges, such as the ubiquitous 5.56mm NATO, can undergo explosive fragmentation which causes much more damage than the low-velocity use cases for HP.
FMJ is typically cheaper and feeds more reliably than HP bullets, particularly in dirty firearms, which is a major consideration for the military since the advent of semi-automatic and automatic weapons a century ago.
Aha, so that's what is happening.
Thanks a lot for the explanation.
This is one of the things that really annoy me here: every time someone make an honest argument and someone else assume that it is a
- dogwhistle
- a "just asking question" tactic
- etc
even when they have to misread or stretch the meaning quite a bit to arrive at that result.
Honestly is not the training (or lack there of) that is the problem, it is lack of accountability, the lack of transparency, and the Military Tactics/Gear/Structure that are the problem
I think the biggest issue with police forces is that they're all basically trained to treat all situations with equal gravity. They fear for their lives even when it is not warranted. And because of that they respond more like a military force, with a level of violence out of all proportion to the situation.
The police are a bigger deterrent to peaceful protest in this country than any politician, and they have been since they came into existence.
> Right - that seems horribly wrong. It shouldn't be allowed for law enforcement either.
I'm not trying to discuss if the police are doing the right thing, only te correct way of applying force.
Hollow points make sense in my opinion as police/citizens should only use lethal force in extreme circumstances. Hollow points can stop people quicker. The problem is that police has not been very good about using lethal force.
They should have their weapons and equipment taken away, like in most civilized countries.
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.)
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.
But police keep tear gassing people who are not being violent, and were doing this before any rioting and looting. That's why people began escalating in response.
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.
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.
This sounds like a distinction without a difference?
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.
https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266987708854923265
https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266988367905910784
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Wikipedia [1] says in the US 28.4 people per 10 million people are killed in the US by the police. In Germany this rate is at 1.3. In Europe all countries except for Malta and Luxembourg (no idea what's going on there) have a rate lower than 6 (or exactly 6 like Sweden). Regardless these killings are of course distressing, especially because if seems to often happen in connection with psychotic episodes of the victims [2]: "Police violence is well-documented in the United States, so well-documented that people, even in Germany, tend to think of the US first when they think of police violence. And also (from [2]):
> But here in Germany, there are people - and not just a few - who are killed in these encounters," Peter said. "It's a German problem, if on a much smaller scale than the US." > > Because US officers might kill or injure more people in a week than Germany's do in a year, police here are much more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. "The cases of death that are reported here are not like in the US, where unarmed minorities are shot," Behr said. "As a rule, there is not an intent to kill," he added.
I have lived in both the US and Germany for a long time. In Germany I never feared for my life or to get hurt by the police (even on protests). This might be luck, sure, but I also don't know anyone who did. In the US I had multiple encounters where the police tried to bully me and make me feel uncomfortable (shouting aggressively, following me, pointing a gun at me for getting to them to ask a question, …). And I am regular white dude, who doesn't look scary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/police-in-germany-kill-more-than-you-t...
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 wish you luck with the protests.
I'd love to see someone identify a country where the police have never been accused of violence or brutality.
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.
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.
that is how modern military workarounds the ban on such cruel things like HP. The small caliber very fast round (i.e. it is usually should be less than 200-300 yards for M16, AK74) would yaw/tumble upon entering the body, and either fragments as a result or just do a lot of damage by tumbling.
Historically, US introduced that trick into mass warfare in Vietnam war with 5.56 M-16 where it was noticed by USSR which in turn produced 5.45 AK-74 which was actively used in Afghanistan. The AK-74 round was called "poison" bullet by the Afghanistan mujahideen because of those horrible quickly gangrening wounds as if the bullet was really poisoned while it was a result from that yawing/tumbling behavior of those small and fast rounds. (Such behavior was somewhat amplified by that first generation bullet design, and since then that bullet seems to have been replaced in service - though not on humanitarian grounds, it just that it did have issues in some situations due to that overly tumbling behavior, and it was fixed in the next gen, and additionally the next gen bullet has much higher, 2X+, armor penetrating capability)
The way the world stands right now, i don't see any chances for Hague convention to be updated to include modern unnecessary cruel military innovations.
WARNING GRAPHIC NSFW https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article10267909/Demo...
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.
All bullets yaw and tumble when they hit a person, that is a matter of physics. The idea that they are somehow specially designed to do that is an urban myth. Bullet orientation is inherently unstable, spin-stabilization is an engineering tradeoff. Too little spin and the bullet starts tumbling before it hits the target. Too much spin and the bullet erodes the barrel and may disintegrate in flight.
Explosive fragmentation, an effect the US accidentally discovered in some early versions of the M16, occurs when a bullet that is near maximum stabilization undergoes sudden structural stress. That is literally the opposite of trying to make a bullet tumble. Explosive fragmentation actually does do significant additional damage but it wasn't a design objective; US weapon and cartridge re-designs have incidentally eliminated it in pursuit of other priorities.
The reasons militaries moved to high-velocity 5.56/5.45mm cartridges had nothing to do with lethality and everything to do with logistics and ergonomics. It dramatically reduces weight, volume, and cost of ammunition relative to the 7.62mm cartridges widely used prior. Soldiers can carry twice as much ammunition with minimal loss of performance for most purposes, which is useful in the age of automatic weapons. It greatly improves accuracy under automatic and rapid fire, and the much flatter trajectory makes it easier to aim at intermediate ranges.
In other words, the move to high-velocity small-caliber cartridges can be easily explained by its many clear and obvious advantages. They aren't any more or less cruel than the cartridges they replaced.
exactly. It has to have enough speed for the yawing/tumbling to result in fragmentation. And that is what achieved with modern weapons like M16, AK74.
>The idea that they are somehow specially designed to do that is an urban myth.
For example the 5N7 5.45 AK-74 bullet, the "poison" one, had an air-pocket in front between jacket and the core. We don't know whether it was intentionally designed to enhance the tumbling upon hitting the body - we do know it did significantly enhance it.
>occurs when a bullet that is near maximum stabilization undergoes sudden structural stress.
yep, yaw upon hitting target at short up to medium distance when the speed is still close to maximum.
> That is literally the opposite of trying to make a bullet tumble.
in that in previous sentences you're conflating bullet stabilization/tumbling during flight with the tumbling upon hitting the body. It is 2 different things.
>They aren't any more or less cruel than the cartridges they replaced.
Higher fragmentation and higher tumbling makes them more cruel. There is also shockwave issue from the higher speed, yet it it is outside of the type of effects we're talking about and is a topic on its own.
>US weapon and cartridge re-designs have incidentally eliminated it in pursuit of other priorities.
and as i already mentioned in pursuit of other priorities USSR/Russia moved to more stable round. So at least we have that.
I suspect that this is more true of the public justification for their use than the motivation (not saying it's not part of both, though.) Politically, “it reduces risk of accidental injury to bystanders” is probably more palatable, especially to the factions most likely to object to police-preferred gear, etc., than “it makes the injuries to the people we target more grievous”.
If the cops stopped carrying weapons, would the criminals stop as well?
CS is quite useless against a conventional force because all modern armies are equipped with protective masks in case the other side does use chemical or biological weapons.
I'm not saying there isn't something worth protesting right now, but the timing is far from ideal.
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.
This is actually common on a lot of rifle bullets. Search for OTM or open tip match. There are some open arguments in the gun community about it's effect on ballistics etc, but it actually comes from a by product of the manufacturing of the bullet. Most FMJ bullets have the copper skin formed so that it's open in the back, OTM bullets are "backwards" and are run through a form after the lead is poured. This shrinks the area of the opening in the shell and pushes it to the center. Which makes it easier to keep things radially concentric and balanced. Something that's very important at longer distances.
