You know, I am old enough to remember the national news coverage of the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, PA. The 1985 MOVE bombing, May 13, 1985, was an airstrike of residential homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia by the Philadelphia Police Department, during an armed standoff with MOVE, a black liberation organization. Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode (who was also African American, BTW) got a lot of criticism for it, I remember. Some say his actions were motivated by his disgust for the group. They lived in a squalid house, where they deliberately tried to attract rats and cockroaches, because they felt it brought them closer to nature. But I was thinking at the time even. There are much better ways for unruly person and crowd control. Most people, internationally at least, condemn the use of tasers. They are used for what is called pain compliance. Using extreme pain to make incapacitate someone or have them comply with your orders. And they are still used in the US and the UK. Most people believe that is unnecessary, pain. Or at least unjustified in any situation. But crowd and person control is necessary sometimes. For large groups of people, in movies they have knockout gas grenades. I don't know if they still use them. It would be hard to control where the knockout gas goes, especially outside on a windy day. But in a building, like with the MOVE bombing, that should be no problem. Or there was this thing about 15 years ago, I remember. A foam that makes the floor or ground too slippery to walk on. That will incapacitate anyone. And it is mostly safe. Or there are loud noise, like with percussion grenades. Those could damage your hearing, perhaps even permanently. But that risk could be justified in some situations. I guess. There are also microwave emitters, that cause confusion and unconsciousness, I seem to recall. Or, why not just wait till midnight and cut the lights? Cut the street lights too, but warn the neighbors. If they did that for the MOVE bombing, and without warning, that might have been enough. To confuse them just long enough to get the situation under control and take them all into custody.
On October 23, 2002, the Dubrovka Theatre was seized by 41 Chechen separatists. At 05:00 on 26 October, Russian Spetsnaz began pumping a powerful anesthetic gas into the Dubrovka’s air-conditioning system. Approximately 15 min later, three separate Spetsnaz assault teams stormed the theater, systematically eliminating most of the hostage-takers. By 07:20, the building was deemed secure. Although War Veterans Hospital No. 1 stood just across the street, there was no field hospital set up nearby, no triage teams had been readied, and there had been no organized preparation to distribute the hostages across the city’s healthcare network. Initial responders were not told what chemical had been used and were not given instructions on how to treat affected hostages.The aerosol was likely a mixture of carfentanil and remifentanil, incredibly potent fentanyl derivatives. This failure of communication between security forces and medical personnel directly lead to the deaths of at least 125 hostages in the raid. Hundreds more suffered from permanent damage to their vision and hearing. Nord-Ost: Russia’s Medical Failure in the 2002 Crisis
Originally marketed as “non-lethal,” Tasers are now supposed to be a “less lethal” alternative to the use of a firearm – although they can kill. Estimates suggest as many as a thousand people have been killed by Tasers in the United States. Furthermore, at least ten people have been shot by police officers who later said that they were attempting to draw their Taser, but mistakenly drew their service revolver and fired. Tasers don’t seem to be an alternative to firearms at all. The only comprehensive study of the question reviewed 36,112 use-of-force incidents by the Chicago police and found no evidence that carrying and deploying Tasers reduced the use of firearms or that a Taser played the role of substituting for the use of a firearm. In fact, “We find no substitutions between Tasers and firearms.” Hence, despite widespread acceptance of the practice of police carrying Tasers, and using them as weapons of compliance, the reality is that tasing is often not a substitute for a firearm, but a form of intentional, or unintentional, torture. The Trouble with Tasers - The Prindle Institute for Ethics NYCLU Analysis Finds Misuse of Tasers by Police Across NY State - NYCLU Complying While Black (Taser Edition) | ACLU
