Digby on Tasers, Guns and the Next Wave of Police Militarization
September 2, 2014
by Joshua Holland
Heather Parton, better known as the blogger “Digby,” has been writing about poli ce officers’ use of force for years – both at her blog Hullabaloo, and as a columnist at Salon. BillMoyers.com spoke with Parton about the killings in Ferguson and St. Louis, and new technologies being developed to control crowds of protesters. Below is a transcript of our discussion that has been edited for length and clarity.
Holland: You recently had a piece at Salon about new crowd control devices that are currently in development.
Digby: One of them is already deployed. In Ferguson, they used the LRAD, which is a sound cannon that has been used in a number of situations around the country. It’s designed to be so unpleasant that it will make people disperse. In Ferguson they used it pretty responsibly. They didn’t put it at full blast, which can cause hearing damage and can be very, very painful to someone who has sensitive ears.
And Taser has a number of big weapons on the agenda, one of which is called ShockWave and it’s like a Taser machine gun, or grenade — it fires many, many darts. It would be mounted on top of these paramilitary vehicles that they have, and it’s going to be pretty indiscriminate. The company’s marketing video opens with the question: “What if you could drop everyone in a given area to the ground with the push of a button?”And then they have another one called the XREP, which is a Taser dart that can be fired at a distance from a real gun. And it gives off 20 seconds of electroshock. That will kill people; right now the electroshock impulses in handheld Tasers last for about 5 seconds. If you put 20 seconds worth of electricity into people, some are going to die.
And then finally, there is this really awful new weapon called “the active denial system” which is being developed by the military. Interestingly enough, 60 Minutes did a story on it a couple of years back and it showed exercises they were doing with this weapon and a crowd that was carrying signs that said, “Peace Now,” or “World Peace” — these were soldiers playing a part in a war game but they were dressed up as hippies. That doesn’t sound like something that they’re just planning to use in the Middle East. It’s a terrible weapon that actually streams a beam of heat out into the crowd that raises the surface temperature of your skin to 130 degrees. They claim that no one will get hurt, but there have been a couple of accidents where people got burned.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/02/digby-on-tasers-guns-and-the-next-wave-of-police-militarization/
= new reply since forum marked as read
