Spray Anything: Marketing Crowd Control to Cops - Mother Jones

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Spray Anything: Marketing Crowd Control to Cops
Pepper spray machines, monster Tasers, "pain compliance rounds," and other toys to make occupiers obey.
—By Dave Gilson | Tue Nov. 22, 2011 3:00 AM PST

When Lt. John Pike pepper sprayed Occupy protesters at the University of California-Davis last week, many were outraged at a clearly disproportionate use of force in a nonviolent situation. Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop turned academic, wrote that even though he'd been trained to pepper spray noncompliant suspects, actually doing so would be "dumb-ass." In nonviolent situations, police officers should simply step in and haul away protesters, he argued: "rying to make policing too hands-off means people get Tased and maced for noncompliance. It's not right. But this is the way many police are trained. That's a shame." The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal found Pike's actions unsurprising considering that "ur police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces."

But that shift isn't just about police departments buying body armor and tanks. It's also reflected in their increasing reliance on "less-lethal" weapons such as pepper spray, weapons designed to ensure submission while minimizing the chance of deadly injuries to both suspects and officers (as well as reducing departments' legal exposure). One industry analyst predicts that the global market for these kinds of weapons will triple by 2020; more than half of the current market is for "disperse" weapons such as pepper spray.

Naturally, cops are the major target for this market, and weapons manufacturers peddle a wide array of less-lethal tools to departments large and small. Though Pike's motivations and orders remain unclear, it's possible that his seemingly nonchalant application of pepper spray (and the choice of outfitting his colleagues' with PepperBall guns) was driven in part by an eagerness to use these novel tools instead of the old-fashioned tactics Moskos refers to. Ironically, that's a temptation Pike had earlier renounced. Asked about his decision not to use pepper spray or other weapons to diffuse a potentially violent incident in 2007, Pike answered, "You've got all these tools on your belt, but sometimes they're not the best tools."

Below, a small sampling of the less-lethal weapons being marketed to police officers as crowd control tools.

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http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/less-lethal-weapons-pepper-spray-uc-davis