Police, Protestors, Violence, and Tear Gas (Tear Gas Is Illegal in Warfare, but Legal on Protestors)

 As this note is being written, organized protests have broken out in Los Angeles against Trump’s immigrant deportation activities.  These protests are far from being the biggest and the most contentious that that the LAPD has ever had to deal with.  No request for assistance was made, yet Trump decided to inflate the affair by sending in federal National Guard troops.  In addition, several hundred marines were ordered to go to LA and assist the National Guard troops.  Whatever one might think about the legality or intention of what Trump is doing, one should be questioning the wisdom of sending in people trained to use lethal force against enemies of the state to do duty controlling fellow citizens staging a protest.  The LAPD knows it will face these situations and has plans for how to deal with them.  Marines and National Guard soldiers do not. 

Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have produced an interesting collection of essays by noted historians in the book Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.  One is titled Police Violence, by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale professor of history.  According to her, the myth that police are merely doing their duty when using force against protestors produces a dangerous misunderstanding of our history.

“…officials and much of the American public have widely assumed that police violence primarily occurs as a reaction to community provocation.  The myth holds that the fires and the looting of the immediate post-civil rights period, and in our own time, began with disaffected groups themselves; the police were ‘merely doing their jobs’ in reacting to a dangerous situation with force.”

“Contrary to the fearmongering rhetoric of politicians, history reveals that police violence very often inflamed community violence, not the other way around.  Although protestors are often blamed for creating violent situations where the police are forced to respond in kind, from Miami in 1967 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, law enforcement officials were the instigators.  Indeed, protests have grown more peaceful since the fiery post-civil rights era, but the police response to them has escalated in its violence.  Dominant narratives have confused where the responsibility lies, in part because of the police’s increased reliance on tear gas and other chemical weapons that tend to be regarded as relatively benign riot-control tactics.”

Tear gas is not the only “benign” crowd control weapon available to the police, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, and stun grenades are also available.

That premature violence was counterproductive in crowd control, was well known back in the 1960s.

“The widely distributed 1967 FBI manual called Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots recognized that the application of force was a delicate matter, for its premature use ‘would only contribute to the danger, aggravate the mob, and instill in the individual a deep-rooted hatred of the police.’  Likewise, in it 1969 report the National commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence concluded that ‘excessive force is an unwise tactic for handling disorder’ that ‘often has the effect of magnifying turmoil not diminishing it’.”

Tear gas was invented during World War I for use in rendering an enemy incapable of fighting back and requiring him to retreat, but to not kill him.  In 1925, the international community banned its use in warfare, but for reasons of convenience nations decided it was okay to use it against their own misbehaving citizens.

“Tear gas had been intended for the battlefield, to harm enemy forces for a brief period of time without leaving a trail of blood.  The chemical weapon produced immediate effects, attacking the senses of its intended targets, leaving them incapacitated anywhere from ten seconds to ten minutes and causing, as the army manual Military Chemistry and Chemical Agents described it…’extreme burning of the eyes accompanied by copious flow of tears, coughing, difficulty in breathing, and chest tightness, involuntary closing of the eyes, stinging sensations of moist skin, running nose, and dizziness or swimming of the head’.”

“The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention upheld the international prohibition of tear gas and other chemical weapons in warfare, but they are still regarded as humane alternatives to violently arresting or shooting into crowds of people, and law enforcement officials around the world are still permitted to apply the devices at their discretion.”

The summer of 2020 with its numerous protests following George Floyd’s murder gave Donald Trump opportunities to demonstrate his feelings for his fellow citizens.

“One of the most egregious incidents of that summer involved US Park Police and Secret Service agents who used tear gas, riot batons, and other weapons against nonviolent protestors in Lafayette Square near the White House to make way for a photo opportunity for Trump in front of the nearby St. John’s Church.”

Let us hope that the people in charge of dealing with the current protests, and the many future protests, against the current immigrant deportation activities realize that tormenting people who attended peacefully with chemical weapons because a few troublemakers angered you is not a good strategy.  The anger, as well as the number of troublemakers, will only increase.

Trump may or may not understand this dynamic.  He probably doesn’t care.  He is acting as though he sees a benefit from inducing violence.  Yes, things can get much worse.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.