To add to that, getting attacked using a water cannon during freezing weather, like during the Dakota Pipeline protests, will literally give you hypothermia [0] even if it doesn't blind or maim you. Not to mention that the cops used a combination of tear gas, baton rounds, and water cannons during that protest.
You're not supposed to hit people in the face with full blast at short distance. That's why these things have multiple settings. The high pressure tight beam is meant for large distance.
Tear gas has a similar problem: a tear gas cartridge in the face may blind you (or worse). Wikipedia says "As with all non-lethal or less-lethal weapons, there is some risk of serious permanent injury or death when tear gas is used. This includes risks from being hit by tear gas cartridges that may cause severe bruising, loss of eyesight, or skull fracture, resulting in immediate death. A case of serious vascular injury from tear gas shells has also been reported from Iran, with high rates of associated nerve injury (44%) and amputation (17%), as well as instances of head injuries in young people." [1]
You're also not supposed to shoot baton rounds ("rubber bullets") directly at people's heads. This does nothing to stop police from shooting people in the head. It seems a common problem with all of these non-lethal weapons is that they are actually lethal in the hands of a cop.
You say this with such certainty, but empirically we have seen that protests turn violent once police start escalating and attacking them, and turn peaceful again after the cops leave [0][1][2][3][4][5]. So no, it's not the right tool for the job. The protests have continued precisely because the government has not showed a single sign of even beginning efforts toward overarching societal reform.
And yet parts of the government with abilities to act locally (where protests occur) allow the rioting instead of doing anything useful. When the politicians show up they get attacked. There is plenty wrong on either side but burning down your own city and destroying local businesses is not going to help anybody.
When a politician, singular, showed up, he got attacked [by protestors] in Wisconsin. Of course, most of the violence and threats toward politicians at protests has been at the hands of police [0][1][2]
You seem to have forgotten about Rand Paul being attacked as well. Then theres the teenager getting into a battle with three criminals (or so they allege) at least one of which was holding a gun they had no right to own. What was the Police's hand in that situation that caused grown adults to attack a teenager?
Apologies. I forgot about Rand Paul because in all the videos of the incident, he appears unharmed. To him, violence is being surrounded by his constituents.
Empirically from those same links, tear gas as a “riot” control agent works.
It’s impossible not to see an obvious strategy of police provocation, hilariously on display in [2], but tear gas as a tactic to disperse groups of people can’t seriously be argued not to work, as shown in that very same [2].
[0]: “...the protests largely ended the same way for days: with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests.”
[1]: “The vast majority of people began to disband, while some stayed behind to continue protesting.”
[2]: “Minutes later, the march ended in chaos as the police lobbed flash-bang grenades and sprayed the protesters with tear gas and pepper spray.”
[3]: focused on strategy
[4]: ‘officers have met peaceful protesters...with disproportionate and brutal force, often for no reason but to “disperse” a crowd.’
[5]: focused on effects of tactics
The people being dispersed won’t always be peacefully protesting injustice, and the police themselves won’t always be the subject at hand.
I also specifically mentioned it as a tool for managing a riot in progress, not provoking the current protests occurring across the US.
I think it's pretty apparent to anyone not on the left that this is the exact line of thinking that led to the homelessness crises in liberal enclaves. Just tolerate a problem and claim it's society's fault, while also not doing anything about it.
The best way is to prevent them starting in the first place, and the methods for deescalating conflict will have to be used eventually in any case, because escalating rather than deescalating conflict leads to civil war, independence, or massacres.
Also relevant: protesters are starting to teach themselves how to deal with tear gas.
What’s the best way to stop them from starting? What de-escalation methods are proven to work? Surely these would be in use already in far-left strongholds like Portland and Seattle.
You're assuming the police actually WANT to de-escalate. They generally do not. (If you are suggesting the police in "far-left strongholds like Portland" behave or are motivated qualitatively differently than police in other cities... nope).
They want to scuffle, they want to punish people who have verbally antagonized or threatened them, or who they think deserve it; they want to protect challenges to their authority and maintain control of the situuation, or think they need to crack down hard to avoid a total social breakdown (the opposite of de-escalation) -- they have a variety of values and priorities, avoiding a "riot" is seldom one of them. ("Winning" the riot is).
Here in Baltimore, the last few months of protest had very little property destruction or scuffling. Some here wanted to credit the restraint or intentions of "proestors" -- I think it's far more likely that the police administrators this time, somehow, got the forces in the street to actually avoid escalation.
I am a middle-aged leftist who has been at many many protests. Every "riot" I have been near was initiated by escalation by police, including chemical weapons use, agitating the crowd to respond, bringing more response in turn. If the police avoid escalation, it doesn't happen. This isn't always what the leftist radicals want to admit either -- they may want to think it's "the people" who are in control of things, who are angry enough to rise up or something. In fact, it's the folks who are trained to act together, with the better weapons and the (usually) disciplined command and control structure, who have pre-existing relationships of working together as a team -- who largely determine whether to escalate or de-escalate -- and this isn't that surprising.
The police usually don't actually want to de-escalate, they want to knock heads. By "the police" I mean both the "white shirts" and the "blue shirts". Sometimes the decision-makers might have preferred not to escalate, but literally would not be able to control those they ostensibly control though; the police are there for a fight.
I think you're way off the mark to be honest. Riot police broadly follow orders, they aren't acting on their own to any significant degree to begin with, let alone enough to express these motivations. I'm with you that riot cops tend to be thugs, but... So are rioters.
I don't think the riots were the result of police escalation, that strikes me as an attempt to sell snow to eskimos. I think they were the result of people realising they could get away with it, which is why they stopped when the national guard stepped in. People aren't torching car dealerships and looting flat screen TVs from Walmart because of the police, they're doing it because it's fun.
I dunno what I have seen and what matches the experience of most other people I know who have been there, is some parts of the crowd do SOMETHING illegal or 'inappropriate', sure, the cops respond with force or chemical weapons, which escalates the situation by angering/triggering the crowd to be more aggressive towards the police, rinse repeat.
I am not denying some kind of provocation from the crowd. What we're talking about is if the police respond with escalation or de-escalation. Separate from an issue of "fault", just an objective observation of what happens.
I'm not talking about whole-scale insubordination from the police. I'm saying individual cops and unit-leaders have discretion of when to respond with what force -- like cops do generally.
I think one reason the national guard makes a difference is because they have very different training, risk-tolerance, different ingrained norms about when it's appropriate to use force against civilians. Military is trained to try to avoid using force against civilians; police not so much because that's literally their job. We are seeing lately how often the police respond to any perceived risk with overwhelming force -- that is what they are trained to do. National guard, when facing civilians, are trained to use it as a last resort, police seem trained (whether explicitly or implicitly) to use it as a first resort, at least when dealing with certain populations (protestors, poor people) where traditionally mainstream society sees them as "dangerous". Honestly, I think the national guard is a lot more likely to respond to "provocation" from civilians with de-escalation or just holding ground; the police much more likely to respond by escalation, some form of violence against the crowd in general, in a way that brings an escalated reaction.
"The idea that the US Democrat party is “far-left” is hilarious from here in Europe."
Just to add to this:
Right-wingers who fantasize about Seattle or Portland being "far-left" really need to visit and see that capitalism is alive and well there (thriving, actually), private property has not been abolished, the workers don't own the means of production, and massive socioeconomic inequality still exists.
None of these would be true if Seattle or Portland were really "far-left".
The police have started far more riots with chemical weapons than they have stopped. Most things resembling riots are in fact started by police escalation and aggressiveness, including chemical weapons use. Yeah, there are various studies and reports showing this, it's also the general experience of most who have been present.
I don't think so? "Why can't we stop the police from using chemical weapons too?" => "How else would you stop a riot?" => I say: "in fact, police use of chemical weapons have started far more riots than they have stopped".
There are several answers better than gassing one's own citizens. The bottom line is, taking this form of riot control away from governments is a net benefit:
1. Don't have a despotic government. If you have a despot, like in Belarus, that despot should not have access to these weapons.
2. Don't kill people in the course of law enforcement. This happens far too frequently in some places. Police that do this should not have chemical weapons.
3. How many recent riots are down to other causes? How many recent uses of teargas are legitimate and necessary? If there is no legitimate need for teargas, get rid of it.
That's not at all why it's banned in war. It's banned because the opposing side might mistake it for something like nerve gas, and then respond with something like nerve gas. Important to note that the chemical weapons treaty does NOT ban chemical weapons in war, it bans "first use."
The police here in Denmark also uses CS gas. How else would you stop a riot?
>tear gas its own citizens every night
HN, reddit and twitter overwhelmingly sympathize with the far-left rioters in the US, France etc. We need another example to point out why the police resorts to tear gas: How would you stop a group of Neo-Nazi rioters marching towards a minority neighborhood?
This is not a productive line of questioning, because currently in America the police don't stop armed neo-nazi rioters. Instead they do nothing about or actively aid them.
I fear the answer you might well get will be "bullets". The idea that you need means to less-harmfully disperse political dissenters and opposition only holds if you want to live in a world where dissent and opposition are allowed. As an outsider, it seems very much like Americans (of all political stripes) are becoming increasingly intolerant of that.
In Portland the police have opted not to use tear gas vs right wing protestors. They've simply stood aside and watched as folks from the Proud Boys and similar groups drive around downtown shooting people with mace and pepper balls from paint ball markers. They've waited until after the proud boys et all finished their "demonstration", only then declaring an illegal assembly, and gassing the remaining protestors.
So you don't have to pretzel yourself into contrived hypotheticals. The police have made very clear clear that in your imagined case, they'd simply wave the rioters on with a smile, so long as they're against BLM.
The best way to get rid of chemical weapons is to make people realize that they are less effective than conventional weapons. Most armies realized it at some point.
Chemical weapons tend to be hard to control, easy to defend against, and not that lethal once you consider the difficulty of dispersing the agent.
Even terrorists don't use them much. The famous Sarin gas attack in Tokyo subway "only" killed 10, a regular bomb would likely have been much worse.
The only application where chemical weapons are used effectively now are in crowd control and less lethal weapons (tear gas).
Chemical weapons provide more of a terrorizing effect than raw kills. It demoralizes civilians and it harasses the military. They can also have long term negative effects on survivors as well.
I am reminded of the "Black Smoke" from various [cross-media] versions of "War Of The Worlds". Granted that an alien species may not fully want, need, or utilize native architecture but keeping such intact at least for initial reasons just after successful invasion has uses.
Hmmm. Given the recent headlines, what is easy to defend against something like Novichok, which allegedly exists in fluid and powdered form? One could spread that from the back of a bicycle, motorcycle, car while driving a pattern through the most busy areas of a town. Or by quadcopter flying a preprogrammed pattern until its power is depleted. Or even several of them at different places at once.
1) If I had a dollar for each "unjustly" downvoted post on HN I'd be rich
2) There is a big difference between murdering a particular person vs "official" use of weapon in war.
3) We have groups of people on various side(s) who would downvote posts not complying to their perceived party line no matter what. Politics, Apple, Python as the best language etc. etc.
I personally feel that the accepted moral standard is actually fairly ridiculous in some sense.
Because although maybe in some way some weapons can be _more_ horrible, there is no such thing as a weapon that is not terrible. Or even ethical in my opinion.
The "ethical" mass usage of weapons is based on a kind of psychological trick. Each side is certain that theirs is the just and righteous cause, and the other is surely evil and inhumane.
When people fail to resolve large-scale conflicts without resorting to deadly violence, especially in today's age of instantaneous mass communications and auto-translation etc., that is where the civilization gives way to the underlying savegery of humans, just like other animals.
It's very easy to consider modern precision weapons like cruise missiles ethical:
The alternative is carpet bombing, including all the civilians nearby.
Mass use of precision guided weapons is meant to avoid excess casualties. How is that not ethical?
I'm guessing this relies on a naive convenience position like "we should never have war" - ironically a position that can only be held when you already have peace, freedom, and a strong and effective military.
You are over simplifying Iraq and Afghanistan. Also misunderstanding the last point: effective military. If someone breaks the peace (9/11) you have to shut it down. We dont have all the secret intel the military had all along, some of it prior to 9/11 easily. Its easy to make assumptions without all the facts but it doesnt fix anything. How many of us would of acted differently if we had the top secret intel the same army had at the time? Theres no way of currently knowing but it wouldnt surprise me if history would not be altered by much.
I did not say anything about Afhanistan. As for Iraq - the reasons were officially stated and they were false as far as I can remember. It is not me oversimplifying, it is you trying to approve murder of hundreds of thousands people.
The precision of munitions is not the problem. I'm sure the hellfire missiles fired from predator drones are as precise as a very good team of engineers could manage. I'm sure the intelligence that was acted on was as precise as the spies and analysts could manage.
They are still killing an unknowable number of civilians and writing them off by a sort of guilt by association - you had the audacity to be standing in the vicinity of someone who was in contact with people we don't like, so that makes you an enemy combatant.
I realize this organization is focused around chemical weapons. However, as laudable as this objective might be, the elephant in the room are nuclear weapons. I wish they had included them in their charter. Or, better yet, merged with other organizations already working on de-nuclearization:
A focused effort by a larger organization would be far more powerful and should be far more effective than a bunch of separately funded teams competing for the hearts and minds of world citizens and their financial support.
Can we get rid of both chemical and nuclear weapons? I don't know. I think we do know what to do with the nukes...
Let's give Elon all the nukes so he can take them to Mars and do something useful with them:
77 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadThey can still cause significant injuries when abused, but they are far more humane than teargas and rubber bullets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cannon
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/dakota-pipeline-protests/d...
Tear gas has a similar problem: a tear gas cartridge in the face may blind you (or worse). Wikipedia says "As with all non-lethal or less-lethal weapons, there is some risk of serious permanent injury or death when tear gas is used. This includes risks from being hit by tear gas cartridges that may cause severe bruising, loss of eyesight, or skull fracture, resulting in immediate death. A case of serious vascular injury from tear gas shells has also been reported from Iran, with high rates of associated nerve injury (44%) and amputation (17%), as well as instances of head injuries in young people." [1]
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tear_gas
Tear gas won’t manage gentrification and economic inequality, and overarching societal reform won’t manage a riot in progress.
Right tools for the job and all that...
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/31/portland-pr...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21278285/peaceful-protest-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/26/opinion/blm-p...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/opinions/aggressive-police-pe...
[4] https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21279619/protesters-police-vio...
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-keep-using-fo...
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/06/03/all-t...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/nypd-sergeants-benevolent-associati...
[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/norman-oklahoma-councilwoman-a...
It’s impossible not to see an obvious strategy of police provocation, hilariously on display in [2], but tear gas as a tactic to disperse groups of people can’t seriously be argued not to work, as shown in that very same [2].
[0]: “...the protests largely ended the same way for days: with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests.”
[1]: “The vast majority of people began to disband, while some stayed behind to continue protesting.”
[2]: “Minutes later, the march ended in chaos as the police lobbed flash-bang grenades and sprayed the protesters with tear gas and pepper spray.”
[3]: focused on strategy
[4]: ‘officers have met peaceful protesters...with disproportionate and brutal force, often for no reason but to “disperse” a crowd.’
[5]: focused on effects of tactics
The people being dispersed won’t always be peacefully protesting injustice, and the police themselves won’t always be the subject at hand.
I also specifically mentioned it as a tool for managing a riot in progress, not provoking the current protests occurring across the US.
Also relevant: protesters are starting to teach themselves how to deal with tear gas.
You're assuming the police actually WANT to de-escalate. They generally do not. (If you are suggesting the police in "far-left strongholds like Portland" behave or are motivated qualitatively differently than police in other cities... nope).
They want to scuffle, they want to punish people who have verbally antagonized or threatened them, or who they think deserve it; they want to protect challenges to their authority and maintain control of the situuation, or think they need to crack down hard to avoid a total social breakdown (the opposite of de-escalation) -- they have a variety of values and priorities, avoiding a "riot" is seldom one of them. ("Winning" the riot is).
Here in Baltimore, the last few months of protest had very little property destruction or scuffling. Some here wanted to credit the restraint or intentions of "proestors" -- I think it's far more likely that the police administrators this time, somehow, got the forces in the street to actually avoid escalation.
I am a middle-aged leftist who has been at many many protests. Every "riot" I have been near was initiated by escalation by police, including chemical weapons use, agitating the crowd to respond, bringing more response in turn. If the police avoid escalation, it doesn't happen. This isn't always what the leftist radicals want to admit either -- they may want to think it's "the people" who are in control of things, who are angry enough to rise up or something. In fact, it's the folks who are trained to act together, with the better weapons and the (usually) disciplined command and control structure, who have pre-existing relationships of working together as a team -- who largely determine whether to escalate or de-escalate -- and this isn't that surprising.
The police usually don't actually want to de-escalate, they want to knock heads. By "the police" I mean both the "white shirts" and the "blue shirts". Sometimes the decision-makers might have preferred not to escalate, but literally would not be able to control those they ostensibly control though; the police are there for a fight.
I don't think the riots were the result of police escalation, that strikes me as an attempt to sell snow to eskimos. I think they were the result of people realising they could get away with it, which is why they stopped when the national guard stepped in. People aren't torching car dealerships and looting flat screen TVs from Walmart because of the police, they're doing it because it's fun.
I am not denying some kind of provocation from the crowd. What we're talking about is if the police respond with escalation or de-escalation. Separate from an issue of "fault", just an objective observation of what happens.
I'm not talking about whole-scale insubordination from the police. I'm saying individual cops and unit-leaders have discretion of when to respond with what force -- like cops do generally.
I think one reason the national guard makes a difference is because they have very different training, risk-tolerance, different ingrained norms about when it's appropriate to use force against civilians. Military is trained to try to avoid using force against civilians; police not so much because that's literally their job. We are seeing lately how often the police respond to any perceived risk with overwhelming force -- that is what they are trained to do. National guard, when facing civilians, are trained to use it as a last resort, police seem trained (whether explicitly or implicitly) to use it as a first resort, at least when dealing with certain populations (protestors, poor people) where traditionally mainstream society sees them as "dangerous". Honestly, I think the national guard is a lot more likely to respond to "provocation" from civilians with de-escalation or just holding ground; the police much more likely to respond by escalation, some form of violence against the crowd in general, in a way that brings an escalated reaction.
1. Left-right is a completely different axis to authoritarian-liberty. I’ve known both an anarcho-communist and an anarcho-capitalist.
2. The idea that the US Democrat party is “far-left” is hilarious from here in Europe.
> What’s the best way to stop them from starting? What de-escalation methods are proven to work?
The ELI5 answer is “political competence”. These are things that would take at least a degree module to understand fully, not a comment thread.
Just to add to this:
Right-wingers who fantasize about Seattle or Portland being "far-left" really need to visit and see that capitalism is alive and well there (thriving, actually), private property has not been abolished, the workers don't own the means of production, and massive socioeconomic inequality still exists.
None of these would be true if Seattle or Portland were really "far-left".
1. Don't have a despotic government. If you have a despot, like in Belarus, that despot should not have access to these weapons.
2. Don't kill people in the course of law enforcement. This happens far too frequently in some places. Police that do this should not have chemical weapons.
3. How many recent riots are down to other causes? How many recent uses of teargas are legitimate and necessary? If there is no legitimate need for teargas, get rid of it.
Tear gas is banned in war but legal for law enforcement purposes.
(source, I took a class on Bioterrorism at RPI, which is still being taught apparently: http://catalog.rpi.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=8&coi... )
>tear gas its own citizens every night
HN, reddit and twitter overwhelmingly sympathize with the far-left rioters in the US, France etc. We need another example to point out why the police resorts to tear gas: How would you stop a group of Neo-Nazi rioters marching towards a minority neighborhood?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/29/fac...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/09/california-pol...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/armed-neo-nazis-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/22/portland-po...
https://www.insider.com/police-salem-oregon-protesters-stay-...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33798854/jac...
So you don't have to pretzel yourself into contrived hypotheticals. The police have made very clear clear that in your imagined case, they'd simply wave the rioters on with a smile, so long as they're against BLM.
Chemical weapons tend to be hard to control, easy to defend against, and not that lethal once you consider the difficulty of dispersing the agent.
Even terrorists don't use them much. The famous Sarin gas attack in Tokyo subway "only" killed 10, a regular bomb would likely have been much worse.
The only application where chemical weapons are used effectively now are in crowd control and less lethal weapons (tear gas).
Mayhem!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yushchenko
Churchill allegedly was quite happy to see famine in the Indian colonies but that doesn’t mean the Holocaust never happened.
2) There is a big difference between murdering a particular person vs "official" use of weapon in war.
3) We have groups of people on various side(s) who would downvote posts not complying to their perceived party line no matter what. Politics, Apple, Python as the best language etc. etc.
They signal to the west and their enemies that they are willing to use chemical weapons in the west, even when it causes civilian collateral damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Amesbury_poisonings
Because although maybe in some way some weapons can be _more_ horrible, there is no such thing as a weapon that is not terrible. Or even ethical in my opinion.
The "ethical" mass usage of weapons is based on a kind of psychological trick. Each side is certain that theirs is the just and righteous cause, and the other is surely evil and inhumane.
When people fail to resolve large-scale conflicts without resorting to deadly violence, especially in today's age of instantaneous mass communications and auto-translation etc., that is where the civilization gives way to the underlying savegery of humans, just like other animals.
The alternative is carpet bombing, including all the civilians nearby.
Mass use of precision guided weapons is meant to avoid excess casualties. How is that not ethical?
I'm guessing this relies on a naive convenience position like "we should never have war" - ironically a position that can only be held when you already have peace, freedom, and a strong and effective military.
The exact conditions that the US had when it attacked Iraq killing boatload of their population directly and indirectly in a process.
I would say this mode of thinking is the real problem; the alternative to war is different war.
There is a peace-shaped hole in your view of what is possible in the world.
With regard to the "precision" of munitions, I've found this talk illuminating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g
The precision of munitions is not the problem. I'm sure the hellfire missiles fired from predator drones are as precise as a very good team of engineers could manage. I'm sure the intelligence that was acted on was as precise as the spies and analysts could manage.
They are still killing an unknowable number of civilians and writing them off by a sort of guilt by association - you had the audacity to be standing in the vicinity of someone who was in contact with people we don't like, so that makes you an enemy combatant.
I agree. Considering things like incendiary weapons for example ...
https://www.icanw.org/
https://www.globalzero.org/
A focused effort by a larger organization would be far more powerful and should be far more effective than a bunch of separately funded teams competing for the hearts and minds of world citizens and their financial support.
Can we get rid of both chemical and nuclear weapons? I don't know. I think we do know what to do with the nukes...
Let's give Elon all the nukes so he can take them to Mars and do something useful with them:
https://www.space.com/elon-musk-serious-nuke-mars-terraformi...