Rubber bullets are supposed to be fired at shin height, to achieve the appropriate mix of pain and risk reduction. They’re not zero risk because of ricochets, but flat, low trajectories help. It should go without saying that they should only be used when necessary, but if they must be used there is a way it should be done.
The number of people being struck in the chest and head by rubber bullets implies that the cops are aiming for the head, a gross abuse of force if true.
Even if you were to ID the attacker, qualified immunity prevents you from suing them personally for violating your rights. You sue the police department, and then the taxpayer pays the settlement, and the cop suffers no negative consequences.
It’s only the less effective shot shells that are more likely to bounce around and be hard to track.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/guy6ln...
At the paintball size it’s now more common to see CS filled paintballs. Those don’t require a huge amount of kinetic energy to work, although exposure to CS gas has its own long term side effects.
[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/05/31/us-law-e...
even if you can't sue them personally, they can be held accountable to their supervisors.
To put that in perspective, try to make the largest circle you can make with your index and thumb (think OK symbol shape). That's more or less the shape of these things and they are effectively a thin layer of rubber with a solid steel core. The inside of your finger circle is the steel and the thickness of your fingers is the rubber.
Hope this helps.
40mm, about 1.5"
I'd agree that traceable rubber bullets is for much further down the line. First you need prosecution of any officer shown using a gun at a person's head or upper-torso when they're not responding to a situation of immediate threat of loss of life. Seems the evidence should be there for that.
Swift prosecution, and where appropriate conviction, of police abuses would help to quell the current unrest IMO. Like on Reddit yesterday I saw video of an officer placing a stick in an already subdued persons hand, then beating them in the head and retrieving the stick ... is there any reason that person isn't already in jail? They should fast track prosecutions, have them in prison - of found guilty - by the end of the week.
Swift, open and impeccable justice is called for.
You can't entirely blame individual officers IMO, watching riot footage knee-on-neck is clearly a widely adopted technique, presumably it's taught. And putting someone in a riot with a weapon, we should expect aggressive actions, it's a natural human response that can't easily be trained out.
Mandatory gun cameras for riot police might be useful as this point though?
“Held accountable”
They don't care how they're using rubber bullets because there are zero consequences for misusing them, or anything else they do.
So while a serial number can prove that a particular round came from a specific officer, proving a direct connection between any specific damage and a specific round would be an area of uncertainty and conjecture.
And even if you do keep track of an individual round, the above argument itself would allow for officers/lawyers to argue that case anyway, introducing enough reasonable doubt to weasel out of repercussions.
Surely though simply requiring all police officers to have their cameras on 24/7, with instant firing for switching them off while on-duty, or taping them. I've seen both during the protests. When the cops killed the BBQ guy, it was like 50 officers on site. All had their cameras off.
When I was at school they[0] brought round a rubber bullet (I presume it was a plastic bullet actually but they called it rubber). It was a light grey, featureless cylinder, flat at both ends, at least as my memory has it. It was surprisingly light, seemed to have barely any heft at all.
We were told it was the very bullet that killed a protester in northen ireland.
[0] I can't remember who 'they' were, an ant-violence group I guess.
It used to be batons. Then beanbag guns. Then it was tasers. Then rubber bullets.
Every time the police are given a new tool, it is used to its maximum force, which is scary considering so many departments are now getting military equipment without military training in how to use it right.
The politicians who authorize these purchases don't seem to understand that police are not trained to use minimum force in a life-threatening situation. The cop shooting a guy in the foot to get him to drop a weapon is just Hollywood. In real life, cops are trained to shoot for the chest to kill because in real life when they draw their guns, it's almost always a life-or-death situation.
Give a cop a "less lethal" weapon, and he still uses it with his shoot-to-kill training. Police officers aren't soldiers, but we're turning them into soldiers.
I think it would be better to have a camera that takes a picture every-time a trigger is pulled. Then again nothing stops them from finding a way to disable it like the body cameras.
What "long term side effects" does CS have? The US Army (at least) routinely puts all soldiers through a CS filled gas chamber as part of chemical warfare training and has done so for decades.
eitland has been exposed to concentrated cs at least once, Anigbrowl multiple times including more than just once just this last week and it seems to be common in military training from what I read so I guess it is in fact well studied and reasonably harmless compared to many alternatives.
That said I agree with a number of people here that in most cases the best alternative might be to talk to people instead, and to not kill suspects in custody, obviously, and also to not handcuff and throw people on the ground when all that should be necessary was to ask simple questions.