'Nonlethal' crowd-control methods can cause serious injury, death

As protests continue in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes, reports and social media videos are proliferating of the “nonlethal” methods being used to quell rallies.

According to reports, peaceful protesters, rioters and even children have found themselves the targets of pepper spray, tear gas or so-called rubber bullets the past several days.

But calling some of them nonlethal — particularly tear gas and rubber bullets — is “flat-out wrong,” according to Rohini J. Haar, a California emergency medicine physician quoted in a report in Wired.

“Like all weapons, their lethality depends on how they are used or misused,” Wired quotes Haar as saying. “When you see that their use is so widespread, so prevalent, you will inevitably get fatalities and serious injuries.”

A grandmother in La Mesa, Calif., ended up in intensive care after being struck between the eyes with a rubber bullet, according to San Diego’s Channel 8, a CBS affiliate.

Her family is asking that the officer involved be publicly identified and charged with attempted murder. She’s in a medically induced coma, according to the station.

Rubber bullets might be a bit of misnomer. They’re also known as kinetic impact projectiles, according to Wired, and they include plastic bullets, beanbag rounds, sponge rounds, pellet rounds and more.

“Most of the weapons that are used these days are mixtures of metal and foam — hard, dangerous foam — or shards of metal inside rubber,” Haar tells Wired. The report notes they’ve been known for decades to be inaccurate.

In case you are wondering, this is the size of a rubber bullet. I saw these all over the ground in LA. pic.twitter.com/hbHX33WBIO

— Tamara Dhia (@tamaradhia) June 1, 2020

There are multiple reports of people losing the use of an eye from police-fired projectiles over the past few days. One of them was journalist and mother Linda Tirado of Nashville, the Daily Mail writes.

an update: I am permanently blind in my left eye, and the docs absolutely refuse to let me go back to work for they say six weeks. I’m definitely not allowed to be near smoke or gas.

Usually if I had to stay home I’d spend a lot of time amplifying folk but reading hurts today

— Linda Tirado (@KillerMartinis) May 30, 2020

Wired cites a study of rubber bullet use by Israeli police during protests in 2000, which found “severe injury and death in a substantial number of people.” Three people died from their injuries, researchers found.

“This ammunition should therefore not be considered a safe method of crowd control,” researchers wrote.

As for tear gas, its name is similarly misleading. First, it’s not technically a gas, Wired points out. Rather, it’s powders that disperse through the air and target one of two pain receptors, “irritating sensitive tissues in the eyes, nose, mouth and lungs.”

Along with “blurred vision, difficulty swallowing, skin burns, nausea, vomiting, and more,” prolonged exposure can cause blindness or respiratory failure, Wired reports.

The canisters they’re fired in can be hazardous, too. As reported by The Hill, Balin Brake, a weekend editor at an Indiana television station, lost an eye from being hit by one over the weekend.

Additionally, Wired points out, the coughing and sneezing induced by tear gas amid the covid-19 pandemic could add another element of danger, acting to help spread the illness.

This was the scene outside of the White House on Monday as police used tear gas and flash grenades to clear out peaceful protesters so President Trump could visit the nearby St. John’s Church, where there was a parish house basement fire Sunday night https://t.co/nFrCqYpqZR pic.twitter.com/DVP11iiVIh

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2020