Amazing how in a supposedly litigious society like America it's possible to deploy a device which causes intentional, indiscriminate, permanent injury across a crowd and not get sued into oblivion. Bit like how tobacco, asbestos and Kinder eggs all incurred product liability because they weren't intending to be damaging to health, but gun manufacturers aren't liable because their products are supposed to be dangerous.
Maybe because there is a continuously running thread in US society about who has impunity by default and who doesn't, expressed in the application of law and direction of capital.
I wonder if inflicting permanent disability without leaving any obvious physical traces on people that the police see as their adversaries is in fact part of what makes these devices attractive.
Similar to lethal injection, which looks more civilized than a bloody decapitation on the surface but can cause a slow and agonizing death to a completely paralyzed target?
Considering how rampant racism is in law enforcement (not even just in the US) as well as recent events in the US, I would actually say yes. It's "righteous punishment" for not submitting to the law (where law generally means whatever cops want you to do) and cops seem to enjoy that sort of thing.
Law enforcement users are, in most places at least, not supposed to use them in the weapon mode on crowds, but rather as very annoying long range public address systems. When used as a weapon, of course, the same rules ought to apply as for any other police use of force.
From the perspective of LRADs replacing other forms of PA, they should actually be an improvement in hearing safety, since the actual sound pressure should be lower for any given application.
And for anyone not familiar with it, there was an excellent documentary on Netflix about the use of the Taser. It argued (and it argued well - I agree with it) that the Taser was attractive because it was less lethal than a gun, but it largely did not replace the gun, it replaced other submission methods. And it ended up being MORE lethal than those submission methods. And that's a problem if you misrepresent that.
Now, I still think police should carry tasers because they're effective on a large spectrum of intermediate / gray area in the use of force continuum and it's much safer for police than many alternatives. But my point is that it's really bad to just think "less than lethal" is a cure-all. "Less lethal" can be lethal (or in this case, permanently disabling). There should still be a high threshold for deploying it.
> Now, I still think police should carry tasers because they're effective on a large spectrum of intermediate / gray area in the use of force continuum and it's much safer for police than many alternatives. But my point is that it's really bad to just think "less than lethal" is a cure-all. "Less lethal" can be lethal (or in this case, permanently disabling). There should still be a high threshold for deploying it.
I don't necessarily think that these kinds of non-lethal weapons can't be used in a "safe" or situationally appropriate way. The problem is that all of these non-lethal weapons have safety guidelines that need to be followed or else they're actually quite dangerous and have high rates of injury (even severe injury). As US law enforcement has shown repeatedly over recent weeks, they're not following any of these guidelines. People are being blinded because they're shooting rubber bullets at people's heads (against guidelines). They can't be trusted with these tools.
I don't think it's solely a US problem either. French police is incredibly eager to liberally apply pepper spray to defenseless protesters (who've committed the heinous crime of exercising their right to free speech and their right to assemble). People are also injured whenever German police use water cannons.
Absolutely agree. I've taken and helped run many, many courses on civilian self-defense, concealed weapon licensing, etc. And questions about carrying asp batons, or using bean bag rounds in a shotgun often come up. The prevailing wisdom is that civilians have no business using these things. Pepper spray seems to be an exception.
But the thinking is that if you use things against someone using deadly force on you, that's a bad strategy and you might die. If you use these things against someone not using deadly force on you, you're escalating, risking their life, and you're risking assault charges yourself. You need to be completely peaceful, de-escalate (and in some states, retreat), and then when it's time to use force, you make it deadly.
Now police officers are in a different situation but I think the continuum of force here needs to be at least a little more similar than it is. The way they're reacting to these protests is like they're trying to illustrate the protester's point for them. And one may say they're reacting to the riots and the looting, but for the most part they're not immediately present for all that anyway. There is no reason (except to simply submit a general population into not resisting them overall - and honestly that's exactly what they're doing) for you to be using "less-lethal" projectiles out of a firearm against crowds of unarmed people.
In an ideal world, LRAD's are an improvement over rifles. Fewer people would die if police used them in the same situations where they would otherwise use guns. The trouble is that police use LRAD's in situations where they wouldn't use guns.
The inconvenient thing about guns is that they leave dead bodies behind. If police use guns in inappropriate situations, the bodies will be there to incriminate them even though the law in some jurisdictions makes it difficult to prosecute police for murder.
With a LRAD, there is no body. An inappropriately targeted victim has to come forward and press charges. They may not want to do that for a variety of reasons and, if they do press charges, wantonly causing someone hearing damage is a less serious charge than murder.
If you're a police officer, it's a lot easier and less risky for you, personally, to fire a LRAD at someone than a rifle, even though they were designed to be used in similar situations.
The law needs to treat the inappropriate discharge of "less than lethal" weapons much more seriously than it does now. The police, evidently, need serious consequences to be in place.
Small correction, it's "less lethal", not "less than lethal". Many of those crowd control devices are still very lethal. A protester had to be resucitated the other day because a rubber bullet to the chest caused her heart to stop.
It wasn't a rubber bullet. It was a flashbang. Here's a graphic video of it. [0]
There was also a Twitter from a field medic describing the woman's heart stopped repeatedly. I'll look if I can find it but, frankly, there's a lot of noise about protests.
Edit: it was a Reddit thread, not a Twitter thread. [1]
Also edit: there might have been other instances too. This is just what I remembered seeing the other day.
A woman died in Ohio this week after exposure to teargas; her respiratory system stopped functioning despite not having asthma before.
Officially the use of rubber batons (bullets in common parlance) in Northern Ireland killed 17 people; although one would be wise in doubting the veracity of English reports on English behavior in Northern Ireland.
>A woman died in Ohio this week after exposure to teargas
This passive voice enrages me, it is more appropriate to say the police murdered a woman with tear gas. There were people with agency who actively made decisions which directly caused this woman's death.
I didn't mean to direct that rant at you specifically, I've just seen a lot of usage of the passive voice lately that serves to decouple police actions and their consequences.
The poor can't afford the litigation necessary for justice.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France
Has anyone actually found any evidence of damage in the field? I did a cursory search but didn't find anything, though the wiki looks pretty corporatized (sanitized). OTOH people do like to claim damage from police more often than honesty would probably dictate...
Then, if there are any actual facts not political facts, we can talk about refusing police access to non-lethal weapons and only giving access to guns and what that might mean.
The problem with less lethal crowd control tools is that police use them in situations where they would never use a real firearm, creating injuries that wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is really problematic when the police are angry at the protestors, as it gives them a way to inflict revenge pain without the PR fallout of opening fire with rifles.
There is evidence that even on a regular basis, tasers have not replaced firearms, but instead have replaced other means of de-escalation and constraint. The result is that more americans might be dead because we’ve handed out tasers to cops without a second thought.
It seems like a corner-cube would do a serviceable job in this context and might be lighter, as long as the reflector is substantially larger than the wavelength of the sound.
Wikipedia claims that the LRADs operate at ~2.5 kHz, which corresponds to ~13 cm wavelength. If a corner-cube is about the size of a protest sign, it might be sufficient? As a rule of thumb, if it is about as big as the LRAD device itself, it'll probably have some efficacy. The more-directional the LRAD is, the more effective the corner-cube will be.
In Seattle, at least during "normal" protests, there are restrictions on the materials used in constructing protest signs (no wood bigger than 1", etc.) in order to limit the extent to which they can be used as weapons. One ought to be able to pretty-readily test whether or not foam-core-board corner-cubes (or any design) are effective reflectors with relatively low-intensity sound sources.
Parabolic reflectors require alignment and they bring incident energy to a focus no matter what.
Focusing the energy of an instrument that is designed to approach dangerous sound-intensity levels is certain to make the situation more dangerous. Non-violent action is predicated on the idea that hurting anyone, including an aggressor, is counterproductive. A corner-cube reflector won't hurt an LRAD operator any more than the LRAD operator is hurting others. A parabolic reflector could.
If the golden rule isn't sufficient motivation to avoid a focal instrument, perhaps friendly-fire will be: A parabolic reflector will always bring parallel waves/rays to a focus at the focus. If the reflector is more than a focal-length inside a crowd, it is going to destroy the ears of a protestor.
Like glass bottles that start fires in the Australian Outback by concentrating sunlight, anything that concentrates sound energy in an environment with an LRAD is a recipe for unintended consequence.
A protest can remain non-violent in the face of violence. Modern non-violent protests have succeeded against well-armed and violent opposition. I'd argue the world is better for it.
When and where violence should be resisted with violence is a question for the ages, perhaps with an answer that varies with time and circumstance.
I suspect that for the protests in America today to succeed, taking the highest-possible road of non-violence will yield the greatest dividend. The real battle is playing out in the minds of a multitude of quiet observers. The city streets are just one stage.
There is a difference between a parabolic reflector and any other reflector. Reflectors that concentrate energy make the damaging effects more intense.
It is difficult to find an analogy -- it is as if the LRAD operator has thrown a punch and the reflector turns that punch into the stab of a rapier. If and only if the reflector is properly aligned will the redirected-and-concentrated beam have the reflector-bearer's desired effect. If not, someone else may get harmed. The reflector-bearer must accept responsibility for the change in consequence between the punch and the rapier.
There is a third option -- one can readily design reflectors that disperse the energy or generically attempt to reflect it upward. Those are the tools of true pacifists.
You have a strange definition of 'retaliation'. If you throw a ball at a brick wall and it bounces back and hits you, the wall didn't retaliate or act in self-defense. The entire impetus and result is 100% on you. The same applies here.
The first use of “retaliation” should be “retaliation and/or self-defense”, like the other. I was staying a broader principle which applies to but extends beyond the immediate case.
I will agree that the proposed device might (if targeted appropriately) be more defensive than retaliatory, though the fact that it only causes harm to the focussed-on target if someone attacks it doesn't make it purely defensive or non-retaliatory, in fact, if not carefully targeted it makes it quite indiscriminate retaliation.
"Non-violent protest" is not rooted in good will because you don't want to hurt your opponent. The idea is to let yourself be beat up in order to win the media war and gain more sympathy/supporters. The whole point of this device is to not be hurt, which defeats the principle behind non-violent protest, so you might as well hit back with force. God knows the cops don't care if they permanently blind you, destroy your hearing or kill you.
> The idea is to let yourself be beat up in order to win the media war and gain more sympathy/supporters.
It is not. The idea is not to provide political cover for violent escalation by the establishment. Now, if that escalation nevertheless occurs, one response is to make lemonade out of those lemons, but it's not the goal of nonviolent protest.
“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”
“Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.”
The point is to sway the very opponent who is harming you, to convince them that hurting you is wrong. It takes great strategy, tactics, and courage. The point is not to be a martyr, it is to create change that makes a difference.
> LRADs have been a part of anti-protest tactics since the mid 2000’s, when they were adopted by police after being used as a crowd control tool by U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those who stand by idly while America does this to other people should remember that what we're inflicting on them will be inflicted on us tomorrow.
Or, you know, yesterday. And today. And also tomorrow. In the 1960's it was spraying civil rights marchers with firehoses. Now it's pepper balls and rubber bullets. "Less lethal" crowd control technology is too big a temptation for any authoritarian monster to resist.
>From a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, Philadelphia Police Department Lt. Frank Powell proceeded to drop two one-pound bombs (which the police referred to as "entry devices") made of FBI-supplied Tovex, a dynamite substitute, targeting a fortified, bunker-like cubicle on the roof of the house. The resulting explosions ignited a fire from fuel for a gasoline-powered generator stored in the rooftop bunker. The fire spread and eventually destroyed approximately sixty-five nearby houses.
Wow this spectacularly bad judgement on the part of LEO (FBI), right up there with the Waco siege (ATF). Thanks for bringing this up, I did not see it before.
Still, this looks like an improvised explosive device was used by the police, and it's not an off-shot of the US military programs.
So my point still stands - just because something is deployed by the US military abroad does not mean it will be deployed at home. To suggest otherwise is to spread needless gloom and panic.
> Just because something is deployed by the US military abroad does not mean it will be deployed at home.
Maybe not necessarily in 100% of the cases but once something is manufactured it is likely that the manufacturer will look to expand its customer base. Hence (imo) the militarization of police across the US and indeed the world.
>Rife and Liberti designed their shield to reflect audible sound waves that are condensed and carried via ultrasonic frequencies
>According to a detailed teardown of the LRAD 300X posted by another audio technician, the LRADs produced by Genasys, the company that pioneered the devices, do not use an ultrasonic beam to project sound.
It's an art piece. Someone figured out a way to get news coverage with minimal effort (and it really was very little effort). Check out their site:
Reflecting dangerous soundwaves back to the police may be prosecuted as assault on a police officer, a serious crime (automatic felony in NYC, for instance).
Yeah, they've been charging protesters who throw tear gas back at the police with assault with a deadly weapon
Because the hypocrisy of American policing wasn't obvious enough already.
> He also was arrested for what police say was “assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer” and resisting or obstructing an officer. The deadly weapon apparently was a tear gas canister that police tossed toward him and other protesters and alleged he tossed back in their direction.
Are the police legally allowed to assault protesters "with a deadly weapon"? Otherwise, it seems like a countersuit would be in order. "Police claim they were assaulted, therefore they admit to assaulting us."
Is this really a question? Police are allowed to fire rubber bullets at you. Tasers. Pepper spray. You name it, they have lots of tools to use against citizens that are completely illegal for citizens to use right back.
That is not correct — it is illegal for anyone to attack you unprovoked, even a police officer. Without cause, they are not allowed to fire rubber bullets at you, nor are they allowed to tase or pepper spray you.
The only reason they get away with it is that they are unwilling to enforce the law against themselves.
As a concept qualified immunity makes sense. The police are expected to do things which would get any other citizen sued or put in jail. So a certain amount of immunity for these actions makes perfect sense. The problem is that it has become an impenetrable shield behind which clear wrongdoing goes unpunished. We probably don't want to eliminate qualified immunity, but we need to drastically increase accountability so it isn't abused.
You’ve got QI kind of backwards. QI was never meant to alter what cops were allowed to do, it was supposed to shield them from nuisance suits. Think less “cops killing people” and more “suing the clerk over a denied license”. The bounds of acceptable police force is set by law and department policy, not QI. Before QI the police were still legally allowed to arrest people, after all.
The problem is that QI rulings are insanely narrow, to the point where minor differences get cops off scot free. The differences can be as minor as the difference between setting dogs on a surrendering suspect in a “wooded creek” vs. in a “shrubby ditch”. And every single time this happens, a specific precedent is denied for future incidents.
C'mon, it's not like police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens. This discussion is in the context of police in a stand-off against protesters that are pushing the line between peaceful and rioting.
You may not like their enforcement, and in some cases they are clearly going too far, but there is no real argument on the legality of the tools they are using in the situation. We gave them the right to act as the state's expression of force.
> C'mon, it's not like police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens. This discussion is in the context of police in a stand-off against protesters that are pushing the line between peaceful and rioting.
If this is your takeaway from the last two weeks, we won't be able to agree. My position is that the police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens, and that protestors "pushing the line between peaceful and rioting" is a mostly–manufactured narrative to give them post–hoc justification for doing so.
I agree, we probably are talking past each other. I was discussing policy, you were discussing current events. It sounded like you were discussing policy but I misunderstood. Judging from the downvotes, the hive mind feels similarly to you. I'll bow out and have the policy discussion elsewhere.
Special training would be my guess at the suit defense tactic here. Police are trained to toss the item in such a way that it’s not considered assault, etc. Same reason police are allowed to use the giant screens in their cars while they’re driving.
> Because the hypocrisy of American policing wasn't obvious enough already.
Even when police are behaving exactly by the book, they are absolutely allowed to take actions that would otherwise be considered a crime when undertaken by a private citizen. It is not accidental that they are empowered with more authority than an average citizen.
This is a non-sequitur. Nobody disagrees that no small number of cops have been overstepping their authority. The question is should they have more authority to use force than an average citizen. Our society has answered that question in the affirmative, even if some individuals may disagree.
Or why isn't it a crime to use it or any other permanent-damage-causing tech in the first place.
Rubber/plastic bullets have cost how many eyes at this point?
There IS NO justification for LE to use this stuff, as their charter in the case of protests is about maintaining peace and de-escalating any confrontational violence that may occur.
The very notion of being a force confronting/opposed to protesters is WRONG, as they should be de-escalating things, and THIS is the greater issue.
LE is waging war upon protesters instead of providing security services.
The past week has shown that cops are absolutely willing to use injurious force without even the slightest shred of justification, and then lie badly about it. In such a situation, it’s not clear why a group of people that acts this way should be given any equipment at all, let alone the legal authority to use it based on their own word alone.
> The past week has shown that cops are absolutely willing to use injurious force without even the slightest shred of justification, and then lie badly about it.
But you just said you couldn't prove this above... Which is it?
You can’t prove a negative. You can however point out that no justification was given, or that the justification given was a blatant lie.
Given that we live in a constitutional republic that provides rights to all citizens, any use of force on them that lacks justification is therefore unjustified.
No, they said they could not prove themselves to have done nothing. I know those things feel equivalent, but they represent entirely opposite ends of perspective. In the scenario they have to prove themselves innocent, the cop needs provide no justification.
And even if they don’t have justification for use of force, unless if there’s a super narrow precedent showing they shouldn’t have, they’re immune from lawsuit. And since qualified immunity dismisses lots of cases, very few new precedents are being created. The total effect is that if you have a device created after QI was invented by the courts, you’re effectively totally immune.
The clause “without justification” in my original comment matters a lot, do not ignore it.
Cops might have the legal right to use force, but they must have clear justification for that application. Indiscriminate application of tools designed to injure people by the police should be a crime, but in practice it does not appear to be so.
In that case be prepared to defend the claim of it being without justification. Which if it truly is as clear cut as you're making it out to be, should not be a problem at all.
It’s rather disturbing that you expect that the citizens prove that the cops were unjustified in their application of force, rather than expecting cops justify their application of force.
Aside from reversing the burden of proof, I can’t prove a negative, such an attitude hands the police a carte Blanche to strip citizens of their rights until the citizens can argue for their rights back. This is not how functioning democracies are supposed to work.
This is just a misunderstanding of the burden of proof. If they are unjustified, then you should be able to prove that. Otherwise what you're talking about is the police having to prove their innocence. Exactly the kind of thing that you would complain about, if you hadn't gotten it all wrong.
IANAL, but I think you're misapplying presumption of innocence here. Essentially, there are two claims:
1. that the police used force at all
2. that the civilian on which force was used did something to justify it
For claim 1, the police absolutely have the presumption of innocence. But once they concede that they did use force, the burden of proof flips around. Otherwise, you're placing a presumption of guilt on the civilian by asking them to prove that they weren't threatening a cop.
This is essentially an affirmative defense [0]: it concedes the unlawful action (e.g. police use of force) but alleges a specific set of circumstances that would shield the person from repercussions. The burden of proof lies with the one using the affirmative defense.
Exactly. There is no claim that they did not throw the tear gas back, but in order for it to be self-defense they have to show that the police did something to justify it, as you laid out in #2.
You have it backwards. The police must show that they were justified in throwing the tear gas in the first place. The burden of proof lies on them to prove that force was justified.
I never said anything about self–defense. I am saying you are misunderstanding how the burden of proof and presumption of innocence works. Your original comment, referring to a police officer using force:
> If they are unjustified, then you should be able to prove that. Otherwise what you're talking about is the police having to prove their innocence.
If I allege that a police officer used force on me, they have the presumption of innocence. However, if they admit to using force, that presumption vanishes. We can assume they did it, because they just admitted to it!
The question then becomes whether or not that force was justified. In answering that question, the burden of proof shifts to them: I am presumed innocent of threatening them, and they must affirmatively prove that I did something to justify their use of force.
Edit: I never said anything about self–defense because your original comment was about the burden of proof for use of force by the police, not against them. You are moving the goalposts.
If I shoot my neighbor, it’s not up to my neighbor to prove that they didn’t deserve to be shot. It’s up to me to prove that I was justified in shooting my neighbor.
But for some reason the moment the police are involved, that presumption is reversed. Why?
What a strange change of subjects and wording. This response feels a bit disingenuous to me, but it’s interesting enough that I’ll bite.
Throwing tear gas back (important word) at the police when you feel it’s unjustified is an interesting question. Arguably such an act could be an act of self defense, but that gets very complicated when the police are involved.
What right do citizens have to defend themselves against what they feel is unlawful police violence? Against non-state actors, you have the right of self defense, obviously. Against state actors it is obviously complicated, since nominally they have a monopoly on the legal use of force, and we don’t want everyone with a valid warrant to feel justified in shooting at the police.
But to assume that there is no force that the state can apply that would not justify self defense is to accept a complete erosion of all civil liberties once the police are involved. Not all wrongs perpetuated by the police are amenable to court restitution; if you lose out on your right to peacefully assemble, then can a court give that back after the fact? What happens if the police apply lethal force without justification; you can’t sue to get your life back.
It is obvious that some right to self defense against state action exists, but exactly where the line is seems quite fuzzy to me.
While citizen's arrest is a thing, it does not automatically give you the right to detain someone. A use of force (as would be required to detain a subject) is often only legal to stop a direct felony from taking place.
Except in this case it's being used unlawfully on peaceful civilians, and the only reason there are no consequences is that the people using it are cops.
I'd seriously doubt any court will consider a defensive move like deflecting sound waves while under duress as an assault.
On top of that,the effectiveness of a single point-source falls with the inverse square of the distance so the effectiveness of this "assault" would likely be minimal.
" a reasonable officer could have believed that beating a subdued and compliant Mr. Davis while causing only a concussion, scalp lacerations and bruising with almost no permanent damage did not violate the Constitution,” the district court ruled in tossing out the case."
With even federal judges like that i wonder what hope can be there at all.
New York courts have suspended Habeas Corpus, despite indication from the DA office that they had no intention to charge the vast majority of those arrested for breaking the curfew.
Another judge rubber stamped an subpoena against reason for mean but non-threatening comments against the FBI (“go to hell” I believe was the phrase), and a gag order preventing reason from talking about it.
Do not underestimate the willingness of the courts to rubber stamp shocking abuses by the police. They are, after all, the ones that made up QI.
But somebody needs to plan for those and arrange the logistics. Then, they end up being useless when LEO moves you elsewhere, and you probably lose them at the end of the day. I can stick a LOT of earplugs in my med-kit and hand them out when I see an LRAD..
As long as the frequency is between 1 and 10kHZ then well fitting earplugs should reduce the pressure level by 20 to 30dB. If you combine with earmuffs or noise cancelling headphones then that could approach 40dB [1]. Indeed the manufacturer of one system recommends that operators use hearing protection such as earplugs [2].
Ultrasonic? I thought the whole point of these devices is to produce ear-splitting tones that can actually be heard by humans.
From the article:
> According to a detailed teardown of the LRAD 300X posted by another audio technician, the LRADs produced by Genasys, the company that pioneered the devices, do not use an ultrasonic beam to project sound. However, Rife and Liberti say their design would still be effective against these hyper-directional blasts.
As someone who values their hearing - I religiously wear earplugs at concerts and muffs at the gun range - these absolutely terrify me. Good to see solutions, even if they're just initial prototypes that may/may not work, being developed.
okay i'll bite. What's the power output for a "5G" station, and how much of that energy can be directed to a small area with beamforming? Finally, how does that figure compare to sunlight, which is around 1000W/m^2?
