Riot Gear

The clothing and equipment carried by American police officers to quell civil disturbances has changed significantly over the years. While the tank-like water cannons we see in overseas footage are often the stuff of news footage about the Arab Spring are not standard issue here, the actually physical clothing and “stuff” that individual officers carry today has evolved significantly. Transparent plastic shields can be used when stones and other objects may be thrown, when a mobile wall is desired or when a recalcitrant prisoner needs to be extracted from his cell, but let’s look at the evolution of standard issue personal equipment – as featured in the December 3rd New York Times – since the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968.

1968 “Special Equipment” – Gas mask, helmet, Billy club, tear gas grenades

1995 (Million Man March) – Soft hats, coordination with march organizers by telephone and mobile walkie-talkies and overwhelming numbers of officers.

2011 (Occupy Oakland Eviction) – Riot helmet with face shield, gas mask, Kevlar tactical body armor, 12 gauge shotgun (loaded with “non-lethal” bean bags and tear gas canisters), flash grenades, overwhelming numbers of officers and strategic arrests.

We are watching the increasing frequency of use of non-lethal assault technology including the application of old-world tear gas, the more violent use of rubber projectiles, bean bags, etc. (some of which can still maim or kill), mace, pepper spray and the exceptionally controversial

Taser (with its share of deaths as well). These latter forms of crowd control were intended to prevent the kind of severe casualties that attached to the use of real bullets, set off by the horrible Kent State tragedy on May 4, 1970, when an anti-Vietnam War protest was shattered by 67 rounds of live ammunition fired off in 13 seconds by a National Guard unit called in to contain the campus disturbance. Four students were killed and nine injured from that attack.

As the years have progressed, police have resorted to using such “non-lethal” devices in more routine police work as well, citing the ability to subdue “uncooperative” suspects and reduce the risk of physical harm to the arresting officer. This description of a local police department’s instruction to its officers is pretty typical: “Manhattan, Kan. (AP) - Riley County police soon will be more likely to use Tasers and pepper spray than their hands to subdue uncooperative suspects… Department administrators said this week that several officers had been injured during physical force training, leaving some disabled for weeks or months… Because of that, patrol officers will be encouraged to use Tasers and pepper spray to take unwilling suspects down.” Associated Press, September 23^rd [emphasis added]. In the other Manhattan – New York – police used mace and Tasers to dislodge Occupy Wall Street protestors earlier this fall.

Since the impact of using such devices on suspects is supposedly non-lethal, and supposedly the effects don’t last long, the definition of “uncooperative” or “unwilling” can often be pretty loose and profoundly subjective, as the recent incent at the University of California at Davis with officers spraying very peaceful protestors with pepper spray attests. The risk here is not only the bad publicity or the fact that occasionally “non-lethal” actually is lethal, but the litigation against police who “shoot first and ask questions later” – the issue of whether excessive force was used – also ties up municipal defense lawyers and subjects such localities to massive liability if their officer(s) are deemed to have overreacted. In short, that which appears to be expedient and justifiable – based on decisions made in a split second – can often subject financially impaired communities to serious financial liability without any genuine benefit to that municipality. Not to mention some unnecessary deaths and serious injuries along the way.

In the end, we have to ask the bigger questions: 1. Are our police actually sufficiently trained to use such non-lethal force? 2. How do we teach police officers to treat the use of such devices and chemical agents more like bullets and less like non-lethal inconveniences? We’re certainly not going to give up such tools of control, but those who are empowered to make the deployment decision need to notch up their decision threshold in way too many circumstances.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we have to make sure that when it comes to deciding guilt or innocence and appropriate punishment, it is the courts and not the police who decide.