CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: No National Rules on Less-Lethal Weapons That Injure Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:36 am | |
| Time and again over the past two decades, police officers have targeted civilian demonstrators with munitions designed to stun and stop, rather than kill. As many as 60 protesters have suffered head wounds during Black Lives Matter events, including bone fractures, blindness and traumatic brain injuries. Activists and civil libertarians have urged police to ban less lethal projectiles from use for crowd control. Law enforcement in the United Kingdom stopped using them that way decades ago. Little has changed over the years in the U.S., report USA Today and Kaiser Health News. Beyond the Constitution and federal court rulings that require police use of force to be “reasonable,” there are no national rules for discharging bean bags and rubber bullets. Nor are there standards for the weapons’ velocity, accuracy or safety.
A pattern has emerged: Shooting victims file lawsuits, cities pay out millions of dollars, and police departments try to adopt reforms. A few years later, it happens again. Law enforcement officers are bound only by departmental policies that vary from one agency to the next. Sometimes referred to as kinetic impact projectiles, less lethal ammunition includes bean bags (nylon sacks filled with lead shot), so-called rubber bullets that actually are tipped with foam or sponge and paintball-like rounds containing chemical irritants. Over decades, munitions that originally were touted as safe and nonlethal have proved otherwise. In 2017, a coalition of law enforcement groups advocated a ban on police use of martial arts weapons but did not extend it to less lethal munitions. The Justice Department’s inspector general said Thursday it had launched an investigation of federal officers’ response to protests in Portland and Washington, D.C. Leaders of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight committees asked the office to review federal officers’ “violent tactics” used against protesters nationwide
https://thecrimereport.org/2020/07/24/no-national-rules-on-less-lethal-weapons-that-injure/
_________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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