The moral dangers of nonlethal weapons Stephen Coleman
what I want to talk to you about today
is some of the problems that the
military of the Western world Australia
United States UK and so on face in some
of the deployments that they’re dealing
with in the modern world at this time if
you think about the sorts of things that
we’ve said Australian military personnel
- in recent years we’ve got obvious
things like Iraq and Afghanistan but
you’ve also got things like East Timor
and the Solomon Islands and so on and a
lot of these deployments that were
actually sending military personnel to
these days aren’t traditional Wars in
fact a lot of the jobs that we’re asking
the military personnel to do in these
situations are ones that in their own
countries in Australia the knight
estates and so on would actually be done
by police officers and so there’s a
bunch of problems that come up for
military personnel in these situations
because they’re doing things that they
haven’t really been trained for and
they’re doing things that those who do
them in their own countries are trained
very differently for and equipped very
differently for now there’s a bunch of
reasons why we actually do send military
personnel rather than police to do these
jobs if Australia had to send a thousand
people tomorrow to West Papua for
example we don’t have a thousand police
officers hanging around that could just
go tomorrow and we do have a thousand
soldiers that could go so when we have
to send someone we send the military
because they’re there they’re available
and heck they’re used to going off and
doing these things and living by
themselves and not having all this extra
support so they are able to do it in
that sense but they aren’t trained in
the same way that police officers are
and they’re certainly not equipped in
the same way police officers are and so
this has raised a bunch of problems for
them when dealing with these sorts of
issues one particular thing that’s come
up that I am especially interested in is
the question of whether when we’re
sending military personnel to do these
sorts of jobs we ought to be equipping
them differently and in particular
whether we ought to be giving them
access to some of the sorts of
non-lethal weapons that police have
since they’re doing some of these same
jobs maybe they should have some of
those things and of course there’s a
range of places where you’d think these
things would be really useful so for
example when you’ve got military
checkpoints if people are approaching
these checkpoints and the
military personnel they are unsure
whether this person’s hostile or not so
this person approaching here and they
say well is this a suicide bomber or not
have they got something hidden under
their clothing what’s going to happen
they don’t know whether this person’s
hostile or not if this person doesn’t
follow directions then they may end up
shooting them and then find out
afterwards either guess we shot the
right person or no this was just an
innocent person who didn’t understand
what was going on so if they had
normally four weapons then they would
say well we can use them in that sort of
situation if we shoot someone who wasn’t
hostile
at least we haven’t killed them another
situation this photo is actually from
one of the missions in the Balkans in
the late 1990s situations a little bit
different where perhaps they know
someone is hostile where they’ve got
someone shooting at them or doing
something else that’s clearly hostile
throwing rocks whatever but if they
respond there’s a range of other people
around who are innocent people who might
also get hurt you know the collateral
damage that the military often doesn’t
want to talk about so again they would
say well hey if we have access to
non-lethal weapons if we’ve got someone
we know is hostile we can do something
to deal with them and know that if we
hit anyone else around the place at
least again we’re not going to kill them
another suggestion has been since we’re
putting so many robots in the field we
can see the time coming where they’re
actually going to be sending robots out
in the field that are autonomous they’re
going to make their own decisions about
who to shoot and who not to shoot
without human-in-the-loop and so the
suggestion is well hey if we’re going to
send robots out and allow them to do
this maybe it would be a good idea again
with these things if they were armed
with non-lethal weapons so that if the
robot makes a bad decision and shoots
the wrong person again they haven’t
actually killed them now there’s a whole
range of different sorts of non-lethal
weapons some of which are obviously
available now some of which they’re
developing so you’ve got traditional
things like pepper spray OC spray up the
top there or tasers over here the one on
the top right here is actually a
dazzling laser intended to just blind
the person momentarily and disorient
them you’ve got non-lethal shotgun
rounds that contain rubber pellets
instead of the traditional metal ones
and this one in the middle here the
large truck is actually called the
Active Denial system something the US
military is working on at the moment
it’s essentially a big microwave
transmitter it’s sort of your classic
idea of a heat
it goes out to a really long distance
compared to any of these other sorts of
things and anybody who is hit with this
feels this sudden burst of heat and just
wants to get out of the way it is a lot
more sophisticated than a microwave oven
but it basically is boiling the water
molecules in the very surface level of
your skin so you feel this massive heat
and you go I want to get out of the way
and then they’re thinking well this will
be really useful in places like where we
need to clear a crowd out of a
particular area if the crowd is being
hostile if we need to keep people away
from a particular place where we can do
that with these sorts of things so
obviously there’s a whole range of
different sorts of non-lethal weapons we
could give military personnel and
there’s a whole range of situations
where they’re looking at them and saying
hey these things would be really useful
but as I said the military and the
police are very different yes you don’t
have to look very hard at this to
recognize the fact that they might be
very different in particular the
attitude to the use of force and the way
they’re trained to use force is
especially different the police
and as I knowing because I’ve actually
helped to train police police in
particularly in western jurisdictions at
least are trained to de-escalate force
to try and avoid using force wherever
possible and to use lethal force only as
an absolute last resort military
personnel are being trained for war so
they’re trained that as soon as things
go bad their first response is lethal
force the moment the fecal matter hits
the rotating turbine you can start
shooting at people
so their attitudes to the use of lethal
force are very different and I think
it’s fairly obvious that their attitude
to the use of non-lethal weapons would
also be very different from what it is
with the police and since we’ve already
had so many problems with police use of
non-lethal weapons in various ways I
thought it would be a really good idea
to look at some of those things and try
and relate it to the military context
and I was really surprised when I
started to do this to see that in fact
even those people who are advocating the
use of non-lethal weapons by the
military hadn’t actually done that they
generally seem to think we’ll
why would we care what’s happened with
the police you know we’re looking at
something different and didn’t seem to
recognize in fact they were looking at
pretty much the same stuff so I actually
started to investigate some of these
issues and have a look at the way that
police used non-lethal weapons when
they’re introduced in some of the
problems that might arise out of those
sorts of things
when they actually do introduce them and
of course being Australian I started
looking at stuff in Australia knowing
again from my own experience about
various times when non-lethal weapons
have been introduced in Australia so one
of the things I particularly looked at
was the use of OC spray or lor is IAM
capsicum spray pepper spray by
Australian police and seeing when that
had been introduced what had happened
and those sorts of issues and one study
that I found a particularly interesting
one was actually in Queensland because
they had a trial period for the use of
pepper spray before they actually
introduced it more broadly and I went
and had a look at some of the figures
here now when they introduced OC spray
in Queensland they’re really explicit
the police minister and all whole heap
of other public statements made about it
they was saying this is explicitly
intended to give police an option
between shouting and shooting yeah this
is something they can use instead of a
firearm in those situations where they
would have previously had to shoot
someone so I went and looked at all of
these police shooting figures and it’s
you can actually find them very easily
for individual Australian states I could
only find these ones this is from a
Australian Institute of Criminology
report as you can see from the Friant
period if you can read it at the top
police shooting deaths means not just
people who have been shot by police but
people who have shot themselves in the
presence of police but this is the
figures across the entire country and
the red arrow represents the point where
Queensland actually said yes okay this
is where we’re going to give all police
officers across the entire state access
to OC spray so you can see there were
six deaths sort of leading up to it
every year for a number of years there
was a spike of course a few years before
but that wasn’t actually Queensland
anyone know where that was wasn’t Port
Arthur no Victoria yes correct that
spike was all Victoria
so it wasn’t the Queensland had a
particular problem with deaths from
police shootings and so on so six
shootings across the whole country
fairly consistently over the years
before so the next two years was the
years they study 2001 2002 anyone want
to take a stab at the number of times
given how they’ve introduced this the
number of times police in Queensland
used OC spray in that period hundreds 1
3 thousands getting better explicitly
introduced as an alternative to the use
of lethal force
an alternative between shouting and
shooting I’m going to go out on a limb
here and say that if Queensland Police
didn’t have OC spray they wouldn’t have
shot 2226 people in those two years in
fact if you have a look at the studies
that they were looking at that the
material they were collecting and
examining you can see the suspects were
only armed in about 15% of cases where
OC spray was used right it was routinely
being used in this period and of course
still is routinely used because there
were no complaints about it
you cannot within this in the context of
this study anyway it was routinely being
used to deal with people who were
violent who were potentially violent and
also quite frequently used to deal with
people who were simply passively
non-compliant right this person is not
doing anything violent but they just
won’t do what we want them to they’re
not obeying the directions that we’re
giving them so we’ll give them a shot of
the OC spray they don’t speed them up
everything will work out better that way
all right this was something explicitly
introduced to be an alternative to
firearms but it’s being routinely used
to deal with a whole range of other
sorts of problems now one of the
particular issues that comes up with
military use of non-lethal weapons and
people when they’re actually saying well
hey there might be some problems there’s
a couple of particular problems that get
focused on one of those problems is that
non-lethal weapons may be used
indiscriminately one of the fundamental
principles of military use of forces
that you have to be discriminant you
have to be careful about who you’re
shooting at so one of the problems
that’s been suggested with non-lethal
weapons is that they
be used indiscriminately that you use
them against a whole range of people
because you don’t have to worry so much
anymore and in fact one particular
instance where I think that actually
happens where you can look at it was the
Braga theater surge in Moscow in 2002
which probably a lot of you unlike most
of my students had ad for actually old
enough to remember so Chechens had come
in and taken control of the theater they
had were holding something like 700
people hostage they’d released a bunch
of people but they still had about 700
people hostage and the Russian special
Military Police Special Forces spec
Knapp’s came in and actually stormed the
theater and the way they did it was to
pump the whole thing full of anaesthetic
gas and it turned out that lots of these
hostages actually died as a result of
inhaling the gas right it was used
indiscriminately they pumped the whole
theater full of the gas and it’s no
surprise that people died because you
don’t know how much of this gas each
person is going to inhale what position
they’re going to fall in when they come
unconscious and so on they were in fact
only a couple of people who got shot in
this episode so when they had a look at
it afterwards there are only a couple of
people who’d apparently been shot by
armed by the hostage takers or shot by
the police forces coming in and trying
to deal with the situation virtually
everybody that got killed got killed
from you know inhaling the gas the final
toll of hostages is a little unclear but
it’s certainly a few more than that
because there are other people that died
over the next few days so this was one
particular problem they talked about
that it might be used indiscriminately
second problem that people sometimes
talk about with military use of
non-lethal weapons and it’s actually the
reason why in the chemical weapons
convention it’s very clear that you
can’t use riot control agents as a
weapon of warfare the problem with that
is that it seemed that sometimes
non-lethal weapons might actually be
used not as an alternative to lethal
force but as a little lethal force
multiplier that you used non-lethal
weapons first so that your lethal
weapons will actually be more effective
the people you’re shooting out aren’t
going to be able to get out of the way
they’re not going to be aware of what’s
happening and you can kill them better
and in fact that’s exactly what happened
here
the hostage takers who had been rendered
unconscious by the gas were not taken
into custody they were simply shot in
the head
so this non-lethal weapon was being used
in fact in this case as a non as a
lethal force multiplier to make killing
more effective in this particular
situation now the problem that I just
want to quickly mention is that there’s
a whole heap of problems with the way
that people actually get taught to use
normal ether weapons and get trained
about them and they get tested and so on
because they get tested in nice safe
environments and people get taught to
use them in nice safe environments like
this you can see exactly what’s going on
the person who’s spraying the OC spray
is wearing a rubber glove to make sure
they don’t get contaminated and so on
but they don’t ever get used like that
they get used out in the real world like
in Texas like this I confess this
particular case was actually one that
piqued my interest in this it happened
while I was working as a research fellow
at the u.s. Naval Academy and news
reports started coming up about this
situation where this woman was arguing
with the police officer she wasn’t
violent in fact he was probably six
inches taller than me and she was about
this tall and eventually she said to him
well you know I’m going to get back in
my car and he says if you get back in
your car I’m going to tase you and she
said huh
go ahead tase me he does yeah and it’s
all captured by the video camera running
in the in the front of the police car so
you know she’s 72 and it seemed that
this is the most appropriate way of
dealing with that and other examples are
the same sorts of things with other
people where you think well is this
really an appropriate way to use
non-lethal weapons yeah police chief
fires taser into fourteen-year-old
girl’s head she was running away what
else was I supposed to do
or Florida police tase a six-year-old
boy at elementary school and they
clearly learnt a lot from it because in
the same district police reviewed policy
after children shocked second child
shocked by Taser stun gun within weeks
same police district another child
within weeks of tasering the
six-year-old boy just in case you think
it’s only going to happen in the United
States it happened in Canada as well and
a colleague of mine sent me this one
from London but my personal favorite of
these ones I have to confess does
actually come from the United States
officers taser 86 year old disabled
woman in her bed
I checked the reports on this one I
looked at it I was really surprised
apparently she took up a more
threatening position in her bed I kid
you not that’s exactly what it’s it she
took up a more threatening position in
her bed okay but I’d remind you what I’m
talking about I’m talking about military
uses of non-lethal weapons so why is
this relevant because police are
actually more restrained in the use of
force in the military are they’re
trained to be more restrained in the use
of force in the military are they’re
trained to think more to try and
deescalate so if you have these problems
with police officers with non-lethal
weapons what on earth would make you
think it’s going to be better with
military personnel the last thing that I
would just like to say when I’m talking
to the police about what a perfect
non-lethal weapon would look like they
almost inevitably to say the same thing
they say well it’s going to be something
that’s nasty enough that people don’t
want to be hit with this weapon so if
you threaten to use it people are going
to comply with it but it’s also going to
be something that doesn’t leave any
lasting effects in other words your
perfect non lethal weapon is something
that’s perfect for abuse what would
these guys have done if they’d had
access to tasers or to a man-portable
version of the Active Denial system a
small heat ray that you can use on
people and not worry about so I think
yes there may be ways that non-lethal
weapons are going to be great in those
situations but there’s also a whole heap
of problems that need to be considered
as well
thanks very much