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Anna Feigenbaum: Fashion designers host shows and catwalks year round, but Fashion Week is the time to really shine in the spotlight. The best talents from around the world come together and the media flock to look at them. Brands know this is the time to showcase their best.For the even-security industry, in addition to industry exhibitions like Brazil’s LAAD Defence and Security Expo, the World Cup, and Olympics offer an opportunity to show-off their new season in riot control style under "real-life" conditions. Products move from glass cabinets to the streets, and buyers around the world can see them in action.
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I think the problem comes from a combination of how governments tolerate police violence, mixed with the huge range of less lethal arsenal that the police now have access to. Researchers have found that often the more weapons police are provided with, the more like they are to make a decision to escalate force. Combine this with a situation in most countries where the rate of convicting police for abuse is incredibly low, and you will continue to see excessive force.In terms of history, less lethal weapons tend to be used excessively in times of uprising and global unrest. So different countries have faced excessive use at different times—the US in the 1950s, South Africa in the 1970s, South Korea in the 1980s, anti-globalization activists in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as you saw in Genoa in 2001. However, with the Arab Spring and austerity protests that are happening around the world now, there is a huge boom in the industry.
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That’s a very important point you raise. If a country is found to be stockpiling missiles or medications, the media wants to know where they came from. But with less lethals, it’s just a bunch of smoke in the streets to compliment the story; it’s as if tear gas has become the essential backdrop to make us believe we are seeing a riot.
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It depends on the contract. Sometimes it is the government who is the purchaser, other times it might be a purchase direct from a corporation, as with an African mining firm that recently purchased the world’s first riot-control drone. Promisingly, there are some cases where campaigners have gotten a government to ban its corporations from supplying to particular countries. For example, Brazil, the US, and now South Korea have stopped their nation’s corporations from supplying tear gas to Bahrain because of the ongoing human rights abuses. However, Chinese companies can still supply.
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What makes Bahrain’s tear gas and "less lethal" abuse so visible is its excessive use in ways that are known to cause increased suffering and possible death. This includes close-range shots to the head and upper body, tear gas fired into enclosed spaces like cars, stairways, and homes, and the aggressive use of birdshot, which is supplied by UK and Italian security companies. Bahrain should serve to highlight the dangers of these weapons, but also should remind us that such abuses occur around the world.Do you see a trend towards police militarization and/or a more “sophisticated” riot control? And how is that related to the non-lethals’ booming business?
I would say that both the military and the police are becoming more militarized. The police and the military have a long history of exchanging tactics and equipment that dates back to the earliest formation of police forces. For example, tear gas moved from the military to the police in the 1920s. In the 1960s, ex-military officers wrote the first widely used manuals on riot control. And more recently, acoustic weapons, body armor, and tactics like swarming and snatching have traveled from the military to police forces.
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When talking about less lethal weapons I hear lots of people say, “at least it’s not real bullets.” But this is not the problem. Of course, if I was faced with a choice between tear gas and machine gun fire, I would take the tear gas. The real problem is that the use of these less lethal weapons is premised on the notion that they are a harmless drug when used in the correct dose. But in reality, there are many deaths and injuries from less than lethals every year. Long-term effects have barely been studied, and the psychological impacts are unknown.Non-lethals are only seen as weapons when there is a direct hit. And even then, in order to sway public opinion it must be someone important (like a journalist) or innocent (like a child) who bleeds.
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The reason chemical weapons are banned in war is to stop them from being used offensively to intentionally cause harm. In international law, “riot control agents” are exempt from the ban on the grounds that they can be used effectively, in less toxic forms, for law enforcement purposes. However, in reality, this is not how the use of chemical agents against civilians usually plays out.Riot control agents are much more frequently used to supress communication rights than they are used to stop actual riots. In fact, the use of riot control by security forces has been shown to cause violent riots.In addition, riot control agents are often used offensively by security forces, rather than as a form of defence. We see this recurrently in street protests and in prisons around the world that deploy tear gases in confined spaces and fire at close-range against unarmed people. Plus, rubber bullets and live ammunition are often fired along with smoke, tear gas, and sound grenades, creating combat-like conditions.This is why less lethals must be evaluated under real-life conditions and not just in clinical laboratory settings or at military training camps.