More than 119,000 people have been injured by tear gas and other chemical irritants worldwide since 2015, and about 2,000 have suffered injuries from “less lethal” impact shells, according to a report released Wednesday.
The study by Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, in collaboration with the Omega Research Foundation, required 2.5 years of research. It provides a rare partial death count, compiled from the medical literature, from these devices used by police around the world, including in Colombia, Chile, Hong Kong, Turkey, and during Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.
The vast majority of the data comes from cases in which a person arrived at the emergency room with injuries from crowd control weapons and the attending physician or hospital staff made efforts to document it, said the report’s lead author, Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician and researcher at the University of California School of Public Health at Berkeley.
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The report on the victims of a largely unregulated industry cites an alarming evolution of crowd control devices into more powerful and indiscriminate designs and deployments, including the release of tear gas from drones.
Calls for a ban on rubber bullets and multi-projectile devices in all crowd control environments and tighter restrictions on weapons that can be used indiscriminately, such as tear gas, acoustic weapons and water cannons, which in some cases have been loaded with irritating dyes and chemicals.
US Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said the report underscores serious problems.
“These troubling global numbers echo the concerns I raised locally when Donald Trump first sent armed troops to Portland in 2020 with no indications of their use of chemical munitions near schools and against protesters when most were exercising their First Amendment rights peacefully,” Wyden said. “The recommendations in the report are highly worthy of the Department of Homeland Security’s consideration.”
Portland, Oregon has been the epicenter of racial justice protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. Police and protesters clashed, with officers firing tear gas, pepper spray and other devices, turning parts of the city into battlefields.
Protesters walk away from tear gas during a Black Lives Matter protest July 23, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, Files)
Then-President Trump sent militarized federal agents to protect federal property, and violence escalated, with officers beating protesters with batons and showering crowds with tear gas and other irritants. Bystanders and nearby residents are choking on the fumes, their eyes watering and burning.
Portland Police Bureau spokeswoman Terri Wallo Strauss noted that the department’s updated policy emphasizes “the goal of avoiding the use of force whenever possible.”
Police say crowd control devices are, when used correctly, an effective tool for dispersing rioters.
“Gatherings basically go out of control when they’ve been hijacked by individuals who have come in with a nefarious purpose to create rioting, looting, that kind of thing. And then, of course, law enforcement has to come in and try their best to create a safe resolution and try to restore order,” Police Chief Wade Carpenter said in Park City, Utah, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Carpenter is also an officer of the International Association of Chief Police Officers, which has more than 32,000 members in more than 170 countries. The group declined to comment on the new report. But in 2019 it recommended guidelines on crowd management.
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Pepper spray, or oleoresin capsicum, can be used against “specific individuals engaging in illegal behavior or actively resisting arrest, or as necessary in a defensive capacity,” the guidelines state. “OC spray should not be used indiscriminately against groups of people where bystanders would be unreasonably affected, or against passively resistant individuals.”
But the internet is full of cases where pepper spray was used against people who didn’t resist, including Tire Nichols, who was beaten to death by Memphis police in January.
Tear gas “can be deployed defensively to prevent injury when lesser force options are unavailable or would likely be ineffective,” the IACP guidance states. Bullets that are expected to strike a surface such as a road before hitting a person “may be used in civil disturbances where life is in immediate danger or the need to use the devices outweighs the potential risks involved.”
Direct-fire impact munitions, including bag ammunition, “may be used during civil disturbances against specific individuals who engage in conduct that poses an immediate threat of death or serious injury,” the guidance says. Protesters were blinded and suffered brain damage from the bag projectiles.
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Numerous lawsuits have been filed over the use of force by police during the protests.
In November, the city of Portland reached a $250,000 settlement with five protesters in a federal lawsuit over police use of tear gas and other crowd control devices during racial justice protests.
But last month, a federal judge dismissed a charge of excessive force against an unnamed federal agent who fired impact munition into protester Donavan La Bella’s forehead, fracturing his skull, as he held up a music speaker during a protest rally. racial justice in Portland in 2020. Bella continues to struggle with a severe head injury.
Haar, who is a medical adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, said the number of injured is far higher than what he compiled from medical reports.
“Basically, we knew we were catching some kind of the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “This is just a small fraction of what the world is experiencing on a daily basis. The vast majority of injuries, even serious ones, go unreported.”
