Tear Gas

Tear Gas

From the Battlefields of World
War I to the Streets of Today

Anna Feigenbaum

For those who cannot breathe

First published by Verso 2017
© Anna Feigenbaum 2017
All illustrations © Minute Works 2017
minuteworks.co.uk

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-026-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-028-9 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-027-2 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Feigenbaum, Anna, author.

Title: Tear gas : from the battlefields of World War I to the streets of today / Anna Feigenbaum.

Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017022066 | ISBN 9781784780265 (paperback) | ISBN 9781784780272 (UK EBK) | ISBN 9781784780289 (US EBK)

Subjects: LCSH: Police—Equipment and supplies—History. | Tear gas—History. | Tear gas munitions—History. | Gas industry—History. | Weapons industry—History. | Chemical arms control—History. | World War, 1914–1918—Chemical warfare. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Civil Rights. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Violence in Society. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century.

Classification: LCC HV7936.E7 F44 2017 | DDC 363.32/30284—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022066

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Press

Introduction

The defiant protester. The running crowd. The chaos. You may have seen so many shots of tear gas smoke that these images have come to feel like stock photography. A poison cloud that has become a lazy signifier of troubled times, a metaphor that has lost its power through repetition. You turn the page. You flick the channel. Your thumb scrolls down the Twitter feed. After all, they say it’s safe.

On February 14, 2011, two weeks into the Arab Spring uprisings, people in the tiny Gulf state of Bahrain called for their own day of action. Peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators flocked to the streets. Young people, Sunni and Shia, gathered at the capital city of Manama’s Pearl Roundabout, many carrying Bahraini flags. They called for a new constitution that would end the royal family’s rule. As they marched, the government retaliated with a violent crackdown. Rubber bullets flew and tear gas saturated the streets. The police killed two protesters that day. The BBC reported that the Saudi and US governments might soon intervene.

As the protests continued, the police shot tear gas into cars, homes, and mosques. Hundreds went to the hospital with head trauma, lost eyes, miscarriages, and respiratory failure. Bahraini civilians and independent journalists used social media to distribute and circulate images of canisters bearing the logos of the US companies Federal Laboratories and Combined Systems Inc., along with Brazilian exports from Condor Non-Lethal Technologies. The New York Times wrote of “systematic and disproportionate use of tear gas” in Bahrain, drawing international attention.¹ Amnesty International condemned its use and Physicians for Human Rights released a report after the first eighteen months of protests that documented thirty-four tear gas–related deaths.² Among the victims were babies, children, and the elderly.³

While Bahrain’s “weaponized” use of tear gas exceeded that of its neighbors, 2011 came to be known as both the Year of the Protester and the Year of Tear Gas. Sales executives reported that tear gas purchases had tripled. Excessive use in Egypt made headlines. Deployments in Occupy protest camps in the United States, including repeated close-contact pepper-spraying of unarmed protesters, often in confined locations, drew controversy. In Chile, police use of tear gas on student protestors was so excessive that the medical community intervened, putting pressure on the government to change its policies toward tear gas use, with some success: a study released by Chilean researchers on the effects of tear gas on pregnant women caused a temporary halt in the government’s deployment of the weapon.

Since 2011, tear gas remains the international weapon of choice for riot control. Sales projections are still up, with business booming in the Middle East and markets growing in Africa and South Asia. Hundreds more around the world have died from its effects. People have lost eyes and limbs. They have suffered brain damage, third-degree burns, respiratory problems, and miscarriages. Their animals and their crops have been poisoned.

How much damage has tear gas caused? How many lives has it harmed? Nobody knows, because nobody counts. In fact, there is no legal obligation in any country, anywhere in the world, to record the number of deaths and injuries from tear gas. Likewise, there is no legal obligation to record its deployment, its export, its purchase, or its environmental damage. For nearly a hundred years now we have been promised that tear gas is safe. It’s just clouds of smoke that make you cry—no need to record its harms. The deaths are just accidents. After all, would you rather they shot you for protesting?

In 2013, our research team at Bournemouth University began to attempt to map mass tear-gassings around the world. Limited as we were by language barriers and flooded with new reports, our numbers were far from precise. But certain trends began to emerge.

In the first twenty days of Turkey’s Occupy Gezi protests, police used 130,000 gas canisters of tear gas—the equivalent of a year’s supply—before quickly ordering more stock. Hundreds of these canisters sent protesters to the hospital with muscular, eye, and head injuries. On May 31, 2013, a tear gas canister hit Lobna Allami in the head during a violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in Taksim Square. A dancer with a master’s degree who spoke four languages and engaged in volunteer work from litter collection to animal rescue, Lobna was known for speaking out about injustice. After twenty-five days in a coma, two brain surgeries, and months in intensive care, Lobna survived. The tear gas canister had fractured her skull, causing bone fragments to pierce her brain. “I am grateful that I am alive,” Lobna told reporters from the newspaper Hurriyet after her recovery. “But I cry a lot because a lot of me, my abilities and my knowledge, are gone. I cannot read, I cannot write. And worst of all, I cannot speak the way I want to.” Lobna was one of more than eight thousand people injured by police use of force during the 2013 protests in Turkey (more than two hundred of them with head or brain trauma).⁴

On June 15, 2014, in Rio de Janeiro, two hundred marchers faced tear gas and stun grenades on their approach to Maracanã Stadium, host of the World Cup. Their campaigns against austerity measures, government corruption and wealth inequality were met with an arsenal of less lethal weapons. Employing tactics imported from US SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams in the early 2000s, Brazilian police clad in riot gear released chemical agents supplied by Rio’s homegrown company, Condor Non-Lethal Technologies.

Just months later, the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, following the lethal police shooting of Mike Brown, became a tipping point in public debate around police militarization.⁵ After getting tear-gassed for a couple of days in Ferguson, protester Tory Russell told a reporter for the BBC, “You no longer feel American.” He realized:

It does something to you first mentally before it even hits you. You smell the tear gas, as it goes in. It’s not even air when you breathe it in, so you are actually choking. Right? And then you don’t know and you panic. Mentally, you don’t know what to do. It takes away your reasoning, instantly. You don’t know what to do. Then you try to scream, you can’t breathe. It goes into your lungs, your chest, it constricts. You can’t breathe … And all this is in like ten seconds. Then you just start crying. Tears just flow down, you start sneezing, coughing. If you don’t get out of that five-yard ratio, then you’re instantly going down to the ground.⁶

The protests in Ferguson went on for months. Late at night on November 24, 2014, after giving an order to vacate the area, police began to fire tear gas canisters indiscriminately into a crowd. Panicked, many ran into a nearby coffee shop which then filled with gas, creating a dangerously toxic atmosphere within the confined space. In December 2014, six plaintiffs—including four Ferguson protesters, the shop owner, and a legal observer—filed a complaint. Following a settlement reached in March 2015, police officers from three Missouri agencies agreed to give proper warnings, adhere to minimum force guidelines, and refrain from using tear gas against lawful protesters.⁷

The protests in Ferguson were quickly followed by protests in Hong Kong, where the yellow umbrellas people used to shield themselves from tear gas became a transnational symbol of defiant resistance. In January 2015, police in Nairobi fired tear gas on schoolchildren who were protesting the destruction of their playground. Weeks later, twenty-two people died in a stampede at an Egyptian football stadium, set off when police fired tear gas at a fenced-in crowd.

In India and Pakistan, tear gas is both manufactured and regularly deployed. Where it was once used by British security forces to quell colonial uprisings, it now suppresses protests for fair wages and working conditions. India also supplies much of the world with organic peppers that get synthesized into doses of oleoresin capsicum—pepper spray—that are strong enough to kill. In Thailand, Buddhist monks protest in robes and gas masks. Neighboring Indonesia often turns to tear gas to quell protests in its profoundly unequal cities: Whether Jakarta is faced with residents reluctant to leave their flood-prone homes, or Muslim citizens calling for an apology after a Christian leader allegedly insulted the Koran, tear gas is the capital city’s go-to suppression system. Likewise, in recent years both South Korea and China have become players in the Southeast Asian riot-control market as well as making sales to African governments. China is also a leading export supplier, providing the base chemicals used to create tear gas compounds around the world.

The Occupied Territories of Palestine are well into their ninth decade of continual tear-gassing; its children breathe in tear gas regularly. Fired into schools, homes, mosques, hospitals, it not only affects the air but seeps into crops and food supplies. Where Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) patrols are frequent, like around the community center in Aida Refugee Camp, tear gas can come two to three times a month, for hours at a time.⁸ This constant use keeps both US and Israeli riot-control weapons manufacturers in good business.

Less reported on is the growing use of tear gas in East Africa. Both Ugandan and Nigerian police use excessive amounts of tear gas to quell disputes over electoral processes, cuts to education, high food and gasoline prices, and other issues. In Kampala, reporter Will Monteith writes that the phrase tear gas is frequently heard in everyday conversation. Customers’ online reviews of businesses sometimes read, “Safe place, no tear gas or rioting.” Jokes about the government’s use of tear gas populate Twitter feeds and a police rugby team adopted the name “Jinja Police Teargas Rangers.” Inspired by his government’s obsession with tear gas, in 2016 twenty-three-year-old Ugandan university student Mugarura Samuel made his own concoction. After clashes between student protesters and riot police once again left tear gas canisters strewn around his campus, Mugarura picked one up, took it home, and studied its composition.

What Is Tear Gas?

Tear gas is actually not a gas at all. Rather, the chemical compounds referred to as “tear gas” are lachrymatory agents (from the Latin lacrima, which means ‘tear’). Tear gases include, CS (2-chlorobenzylidene malonitrile), CN (chloroacetophenone) and CR (dibenzoxazepine). These are irritants that can be released as a fine particulate smoke, a vapor or a liquid spray. Pepper spray or OC (oleoresin capsicum) is an inflammatory agent that also falls under this umbrella term for chemical weapons that induce tearing.

Tear gases are designed to attack the senses simultaneously, producing both physical and psychological trauma. In medical terms, tear gas operates on multiple sites of the body at once, primarily affecting the mucous membranes and respiratory system. It can cause excessive tearing, burning, blurred vision, redness, runny nose, burning of the nostrils and mouth, difficulty swallowing, drooling, chest tightness, coughing, a choking sensation, wheezing, shortness of breath, skin burns, rashes, nausea, and vomiting. Tear gas has also been linked to miscarriages, and to long-term tissue and respiratory damage.⁹

While in photographs it looks like a cloud of smoke, most tear gas operates as moisture that sticks to and covers everything it touches—the skin, the soil, the surrounding architecture. The toxicity level of each type of tear gas is determined from the ratio of toxins released per square meter. This means that only a certain number of canisters are meant to be set off in any given space—the smaller the space and the more gas is released, the more toxic it becomes. Protocols for firing tear gas attempt to standardize the distance from which grenades are fired at crowds, accounting for the direction and strength of the wind as well as the locations of barriers and structures that might trap the chemical substance in the air. Firing tear gas into an enclosed space significantly elevates the risk of serious injury and death from inhalation. It invokes trauma and anxiety in choking people in poorly ventilated spaces where there are no clear exits, which can lead to trampling and asphyxiation.

Tear gas causes harm in two other important ways. First, tear gas is stored and fired through canisters or grenades that are often made out of aluminum, plastic, or other combustible materials. A major cause of injuries from tear gas is the canisters themselves striking people, particularly on the head. Since the earliest “peacetime” uses of tear gas, there has been a steady stream of reports of lost eyes, cranial damage, and deaths due to direct hits from tear gas canisters. Many of the grenade launchers and rifles used to fire tear gas were originally designed and promoted for use as short-range firearms. Early models were called “tear gas guns,” and today’s euphemistically named “multi-launchers” were the “tear gas machine gun” of the early twentieth century. The most famous of these was made by Manville Manufacturers, the company responsible for bringing the “street-sweeping” Manville machine gun to the market in the Prohibition-era United States.

Another way that tear gas canisters or grenades cause harm is through their pyrotechnic devices or flammable components. For the tear gas chemical compound to heat and disperse, other substances must be present. The use of these incendiary forms of tear gas has caused damaging and sometimes lethal fires in homes, vehicles, and agricultural fields. Recent reports on SWAT team raids in the United States document these fire hazards. For instance, in April 2011, a Virginia SWAT team sent a Defense Tech triple chaser grenade (which separates into three parts) inside a trailer using a bomb-squad robot. The house immediately went up in flames, leaving its residents homeless. In other cases, a substance like alcohol mixed in with the tear gas compound, or the propellant in a spray, such as butane, might be flammable. Tear gas can also mix with household items to cause fires, as reported by fire inspectors in Vallejo, California, in 2012 after a SWAT raid caused sixty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to a home and killed two dogs.¹⁰ Public pressure has forced many companies to stop manufacturing tear gases that contain flammable components; however, there is no comprehensive national or international set of regulations to monitor or enforce this.

Of course, as with all weapons, there are different scales of violence used in deployments of tear gas. If I toss a CS grenade on the ground in front of a crowd where there are clear exit points (as protocol suggests), it is less likely that someone will die than if I lob that same grenade into a car or a prison cell or a subway station. Likewise, if I shoot you in the foot you are less likely to die than if I shoot you in the head. However, this does not mean that the bullet shot into the foot is a “humanitarian agent” and the head bullet is a violent weapon. Unlike other objects that are not normally weapons but can be weaponized (for example, baseball bats or frying pans), tear gas has no alternative, “normal,” or everyday use. And—contrary to what Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly told Bill O’Reilly in 2011—pepper spray is not “a food product, essentially.” It is, in fact, 1.3 million heat units hotter than the hottest pepper you could eat. As this book will discuss in detail, tear gas was designed as a poison that causes physical and psychological pain. For the past hundred years it has been modernized to be both more effective and more efficient.

Tracking Tear Gas

Over time, both the meaning and the making of tear gas have changed. While corporate and military manufacturers are most responsible for its proliferation, toxicologists, pathologists, general physicians, chemists, lawyers, inventors, marketers, import-export logisticians, government representatives, United Nations delegates, and human rights monitors, among others, are all engaged in the social, economic, and ethical terrain of tear gas. Through these individuals and organizations, war gases were transformed into a poison used in times of peace. Their policies and patents, advertisements and expos, toxicology reports and clinical trials made tear gas what it is today.

In the chapters that follow, I track down some of the stories of this transition and trace the century-long process that made tear gas into the policing technology it is today. From the trenches of World War I to the streets outside Trump’s inauguration, this book is a journey through declassified reports and witness testimonies, military laboratories and committee rooms, union assemblies and protest camps. As we go on this guided tour of science as military and protest profiteering, I try to bring you behind the scenes of the committee meetings and expo showrooms where policing with poison is bought and sold—often beyond the legal threshold and away from the public eye.

An Overview of this Book

With this book I aim to put tear gas on trial: to show what happens to our notions of safety, security, and harm when medical knowledge is covered up in the pursuit of ulterior motives. I interrogate the role of tear gas in police-public relations. Most of all, I set out to expose those who profit from the violent control of other people. Whether in a Nairobi schoolyard or a Bahraini car, an English university sit-in or a US prison cell, the streets of Hong Kong or the squares of Athens, the use of tear gas should raise more than just a liberal eyebrow or a radical fist in the air.

While the military, governments, and police continue to contend that tear gas is safe, studies in major medical journals—including the publications of the World Medical Association, the British Medical Association, the American Medical Association, and the Turkish Medical Association as well as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—all conclude that more research must be conducted into its health effects. Even NATO admits that there is limited medical understanding of its effects in real-life deployments.¹¹ Very little data exists on the long-term health effects of tear gas or its effects on fetuses, as the Chilean doctors noted.¹² Its use is particularly troubling for populations that face attacks over a sustained period of time, as is the case in Palestine and in refugee camps, detention centers, and prisons around the world.

When thinking about riot control weapons, we so rarely ask: Who turns a profit? These pages shine the spotlight on some of the salespeople, scientists, military buyers, arms dealers, patent attorneys, police suppliers, and defense magazine editors currently enlisted in the worldwide effort to sustain the fiction that tear gas is safe and humane. Chapter 1 begins with a brief look at the early history of poison gas in World War I, the first war to call on chemists for large-scale weapons development.

In the second chapter I delve into the postwar period, when tear gas transformed from military equipment into a policing and personal security device. Here we see the modernization of domestic warfare and the advancement of what came to be known as the military-industrial complex. As postwar military and university research teams paired with private laboratories to sell gas products to prisons and private strikebreaking services, new, technologized formations of public-order policing emerged. General Amos Fries led much of this in the United States. As head of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) through most of the 1920s, General Fries was determined to turn this war technology to everyday use for controlling crowds and criminal elements. General Fries enlisted public relations experts, lawyers, and financiers to help market tear gases to protect private profit and property, appealing to its “nontoxic” nature to legitimize its deployment. How better to safeguard capital interests than with a “safe” weapon?

Chapter 3 travels back across the Atlantic to look at how the British used tear gas to help maintain control of their vast empire. The rise of passive resistance, the engagement of women and children in protest, as well as local tensions around religion and ethnicity, made policing the colonies challenging. The British needed to keep the everyday social and often profitable economic operations of their colonial territories functioning, using only as much force as the public would tolerate. Bullets and blood were best avoided; the only thing standing in the way of poison gas was the debatable Geneva Protocol.

The fourth chapter takes readers back to the United States to look at the role tear gas played in the turbulent 1960s. From Freedom Riders to the Free Speech Movement, from Selma, Alabama, to Chicago, Illinois, civil disobedience in the 1960s was often met with violent force. The police, finding themselves out of their depth, called in National Guard troops for reinforcement. More and more protests were put down with the aid of military personnel, tactics, and equipment, including helicopters and tear gas grenade launchers. On occasion, so much tear gas was used that journalists reported that the streets were like “open-air gas chambers.” The rise of televisual reporting put the police under pressure to maintain control while being seen to use just the right amount of force. By the end of this tear-gas-filled decade of protest, police-public relations were in tatters and riot-control handbooks were being rewritten.

In the fifth chapter I draw from medical reports and recently declassified documents to raise questions about the role of human rights in medical research. Despite tear gas’s widespread use for over fifty years, little public research had been conducted into its effects prior to 1970. Following a popular outcry over the mass deployment of CS gas in Northern Ireland, the first wide-scale medical assessment was conducted by the government-funded Himsworth Committee. Its report gave tear gas a safety approval, going on to serve as the key justification for the international community to continue its deployment and development for domestic use—despite its continued illegality in international warfare. In fact, former Attorney General Janet Reno cited the Himsworth report during her testimony over the 1993 FBI siege at Waco, Texas in which over 80 rounds of military-grade tear gas were fired into an enclosed compound housing twenty-five children, many infants and toddlers. The Himsworth report, she testified, was handed to her by government officials seeking permission to use the gas.

Chapter 6 follows the development of new aerosol tear gas and pepper sprays, which were dispatched to police in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, among other countries, in the early 1990s. It didn’t take long before numerous legal cases arose. Sprays were being misused during arrests and to harass protesters. In one controversial case, US police used Q-tips to apply pepper spray directly to the eyeballs of environmental logging activists peacefully protecting Headwaters Forest in Eureka, California. In 1997, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference (APEC) protests in Vancouver marked the beginning of a new age for the broad deployment of tear gases against alter-globalization protesters. “Sergeant Pepper”—the Mountie at APEC who doused protesters in pepper spray at close range—came to signify police abuse for a new generation. (His image echoed eerily in memes of Sergeant Pike, the 2011 anti-Occupy “pepper-spray cop” at the University of California, Davis.) From the Battle of Seattle to the streets of Genoa, alter-globalization activists found themselves swallowed up in streets full of tear gas. As activists began to develop and share modes of resistance—from makeshift goggle gas masks to lemon wedges—police use of tear gas become ever more militarized.

Since 2011’s uprisings around the world, countless people have faced floods of tear gas and manufacturers’ sales have tripled. Many of these deployments have gone against procedural protocol, bringing criticism that this “pacifying device” is being “weaponized.” Chapter 7 looks at the global riot-control marketplace and investigates the interconnections of tear gas as a high-profit export, a policing strategy, and a control agent in a time of worldwide unrest.

Resistance to these chemical agents can be found in many forms, from Anonymous hacks of manufacturers’ websites to Amnesty International exposés. With interviews and participatory research, chapter 8 provides an overview of current initiatives to monitor, regulate, and ban tear gas, addressing how existing campaigns might be developed in light of the systematic and historical critique this book offers. In this final chapter, I ask: What now? What next? As the group Facing Tear Gas put it in their 2012 storytelling campaign, which demanded accountability for global manufacturers and police departments, “Tear gas and other chemical munitions are part of the state’s arsenal of weapons.” All too often, these weapons are used to wage war on the people.

1

Chemical Warfare in World War I

The industrial revolution heralded advances in science and healthcare. It gave rise to a radical optimism in political thought but at the same time created a new intensity of human exploitation. With the arrival of vaccines, there also came workhouses. Alongside more civilized technological advances, the nineteenth century witnessed a marked increase in the sophistication of weaponry. It was the century of the first modern wars—where rifles replaced muskets and ironclads took over from wooden warships. Early chemical weapons had been used in ancient societies around the world, but in the mid-1800s the rise of modern chemistry brought more complex ethical discussions surrounding chemical weapons and their use in warfare.¹

Advocates of chemical weapons, eager to make use of new scientific discoveries, put forward their case that gas was as honorable a way to kill as a sword or cannon. During the Crimean War a well-respected British chemist, Sir Lyon Playfair, proposed using cyanide shells against the Russians. When the War Office rejected this proposition on ethical grounds, Sir Playfair’s response foreshadowed the position of military chemists of the early twentieth century:

There’s no sense to this objection. It is considered a legitimate mode of warfare to fill shells with molten metal which scatters upon the enemy and produces the most frightful modes of death. Why a poisonous vapor, which would kill men without suffering, is to be considered illegitimate is incomprehensible to me. However, no doubt in time chemistry will be used to lessen the sufferings of combatants.²

Proposals to use chemical warfare were also presented and rejected during the US Civil War. Writing to Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, a New York schoolteacher, John W. Doughty, proposed the use of chlorine shells, arguing that although these weapons had horrid effects, their use could bring about a faster resolution to the conflict. Early efforts to ban the use of chemical weapons in warfare were brought to the table at the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Delegates sought to put in place some restrictions on the use of biological and chemical weapons. However, these agreements were bound together by ambiguous phrases and offered few practical guidelines for enforcement. The ambiguity of these international agreements would come to the forefront, as poison gas filled the trenches and the international media stage during World War I.

Gas in the Trenches

Nestled into trench dugouts on both sides, soldiers couldn’t fire on opposing troops; trenches were at once protective hideaways and traps. The close proximity of each side’s trenches to each other caused artillery shells to backfire, injuring one’s own men. Trench warfare was often an endless stalemate, as neither side could advance enough to end the war.

While the “who hit who first” debate remains open for historical interpretation, it is generally held that French troops fired tear gas grenades, filled with methylbenzyl bromide, into German trenches in August of 1914.³ While the exact details of this first tear gas launch are fuzzy, leading historians mark the Battle of the Frontiers as World War I’s first deployment of modern tear gas. A much larger and more lethal attack by the Germans followed in 1915, with the first mass chemical chlorine gassing in Ypres in April 1915.⁴

“The weatherman was right,” wrote Willi Siebert, in his later rendition of that sunny day at Ypres that would change the face of the weapons industry forever. A German gas pioneer of the First World War, Siebert was studying chemistry and pharmacology when the war broke out. Like so many young men, he traded in his studies, along with his day job selling paints and varnishes, to serve in an infantry regiment. And like many other men, Siebert looked back on Ypres with more lament than heroics: “We should have been going on a picnic, not doing what we were going to do.”

On the other side of the battle, French captain Joseph Clément thought he would spend the bright spring day recuperating in Woesten, away from the trenches. “I inspect the kitchen where the dinner simmers all gently,” Clément recalled,

It is perfect! I leave with the second lieutenants when suddenly, a bombardment bursts out. These gentlemen pricked up their ears. I reassure them by telling them that the occurrence is rather frequent. Suddenly, our guns start to roar too; then I conclude that the enemy is attacking. It is currently 4.50pm on my watch. I am in the garden of the notary listening to the infernal din of the shooting and the bombardment. At this point a smell comes upon us, which affects the throat and eyes and makes us cry. What is happening? Everyone is surprised. One looks up and we note, approaching over the canal, a greenish yellow cloud. No doubt: these are the asphyxiating gases.⁵

“As a novel technological development,” Jean Zanders Pascal writes, “no longstanding customary taboo on its use existed.”⁶ It was only after news from the trenches trickled out into the press that a broader public debate around war gases began to take shape. At first tentative and exploratory, after the Ypres bombing news and editorial headlines in the London Times read, “The Disregard of Conventions”; “The Most Damnable Invention”; “The New Phase”; “Incredible Sprits of Savagery.”⁷ War propaganda proclaimed the Germans savages, poison gas proof of the extent of their inhumanity. Yet it was not long before the British began their own experiments with chemical gases, as chemical retaliations for Ypres soon came. The race for more effective chemical weaponry—and defenses from it—was waged on the battlefield and in the laboratory. German innovations in chemical weapons were largely led by Fritz Haber, who began as a scientific advisor to the Kaiser before being appointed a captain in the German army, bypassing standard progression on royal dictate. At the height of perfecting poison gases, Haber had 2,000 employees working below him, 150 with chemistry degrees.

The Allies would soon follow the Germans’ lead. “The story of chemical warfare is one of imitation,” Fritz’s son Ludwig Haber later surmised in his history of gas warfare. In the United Kingdom, academic institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, were all enlisted to work on aspects of gas warfare. “The French,” historian Gerard J. Fitzgerald writes, “took a more direct approach to chemical weapons research by militarizing the chemistry, pathology, and physiology departments in 16 leading medical schools and institutes. Additionally, they essentially absorbed the University of Paris in order to direct, coordinate and research all aspects of chemical warfare.”⁸

As new gases were developed and trailed on the battlefield, their physical and psychological effects tormented soldiers and terrified the public as they encountered news of poison warfare. Historian Patrick Coffey writes, “Soldiers in the trenches found themselves constantly sniffing for gas, and a soldier in a gas mask, even if it were functioning, was half blinded, unable to aim properly or to see peripherally. And when a gas attack occurred, and the concentration of gas became so high that it began to overcome the filter and to be felt in the throat, the desire to rip the mask off and breathe deeply became almost irresistible, and some did succumb to the urge.”⁹

Songs and poetry recorded these horrors of gas warfare. As they circulated, they brought back home glimpses of the emotional, lived experience of suffering a gas attack. Belgian soldier-poet Daan Boens captured the grisly atmosphere in his poem “Gas,” published in 1918:

The stench is unbearable, while death mocks back.

The masks around the cheeks cut the look of bestial snouts,

The masks with wild eyes, crazy or absurd,

Their bodies drift on until they stumble upon steel.

The men know nothing, they breathe in fear.

Their hands clench on weapons like a buoy for the drowning,

They do not see the enemy, who, also masked, loom forth,

And storm them, hidden in the rings of gas.

Thus in the dirty mist, the biggest murder happens.¹⁰

As militaries scurried to engineer better protection from these poison gases, the gas mask quickly evolved. World War I soldiers used much the same ramshackle household equipment as street protesters do today. Mouth pads, helmets of different varieties, and goggles were worn to improvise the function of the gas mask in attempts to keep the poison from the skin, eyes, mouth, and nasal passages.¹¹ Urine-soaked handkerchiefs were a common—though largely ineffectual—preventative measure. Early gas masks were clunky and uncomfortable. Describing the experience of being trapped in one, a British soldier wrote: “We gaze at one another like goggle-eyed, imbecile frogs. The mask makes you feel only half a man. The air you breathe has been filtered of all save a few chemical substances. A man doesn’t live on what passes through the filter—he merely exists. He gets the mentality of a wide-awake vegetable.”¹² However insufficient, these early masks were the only defense soldiers had from poison gas. Historian L. F. Haber estimates that over 24.8 million helmets and pads were produced for British soldiers on the frontlines, along with 17.5 million respirators. For France, there were over 40.6 million helmets and pads and 5.3 million respirators.¹³

The Rise of the US Chemical Warfare Service

With the European chemical arms race mounting, the Americans were not long behind. Then, as now, anxiety and overcompensation defined the American war response. On the very day that the United States entered the war, it announced the formation of a Research Council subcommittee “to carry on investigations into noxious gases, generation, antidote for same, for war purposes.”¹⁴ Headquartered at American University in Washington, DC, research programs included those at MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. By July 1918 more than 1,900 US-based scientists were working on chemical warfare. Historians estimate the total number of university scientists and technicians involved globally in chemical warfare during World War I as over 5,500.¹⁵

After the war, military opinion on war gases was mixed. Many who encountered the gas firsthand argued that the inhumanity of gas had to do with the fear and anxiety it caused. Others proclaimed that gas was more humane than artillery fire as its death count was much lower. Cambridge biochemist J. B. S. Haldane argued for the efficiency of war gases, dismissing those who condemned them as sentimentalists: if one could “fight with a sword,” why not “with mustard gas”? Those who took a more holistic look at the effects of gas argued that these weapons often led men to their deaths by other means, including increased susceptibility to artillery fire. As far as military strategy went, gas warfare could only bring tactical victories. Its dependency on weather conditions left men even more at the mercy of the climate on the battlefield.

World War I historian Jean Pascal Zanders argues that two legacies emerged out of these divisive debates after the war. First, a greater distinction was made between poison gases (debated at the earlier Hague conferences) and the new chemical gases invented during the war. This semantic split would continue in arms conventions around gas warfare, offering up a legitimization for outlawing some weapons, while not others. This line of reasoning allowed tear gas to follow a different (though highly contested) legal trajectory than other poisonous agents.

Second, the commercial interests of the growing chemical industries came under consideration. Banning chemical innovations linked to wartime would hurt these burgeoning industries. With this in mind, arguments around both chemistry and chemical weapons as civilizing forces took center stage in rhetoric defending their continued developments. As the Versailles Treaty and Geneva Convention were signed after the war, the conflicted—and commercially interested—positions of the Allied countries became embedded into international agreements.

Imperial interests abroad also underpinned these justifications for the development and use of chemical agents. Policy makers differentiated between the poison of the savages and the civilized toxins of the Allied elite. Reinforcing the appropriateness for Imperial nations to deploy chemical weapons on subjects abroad, Major-General Charles Howard Foulkes, who was in charge of the British chemical warfare effort after 1915, argued, “Tribesmen are not bound by the Hague Convention and they do not conform to its most elementary rules.” True to American fashion, General Amos Fries was blunter:

Why should the United States or any other highly civilized country consider giving up chemical warfare? To say that its use against savages is not a fair method of fighting, because the savages are not equipped with it, is nonsense. No nation considers such things today. If they had, our American troops, when fighting the Moros in the Philippine islands, would have had to wear the breechclout and use only swords and spears.¹⁶

It was from this position of military superiority that the United States would go on to further develop chemical weapons, under the leadership of the vivaciously opinionated Fries.

As in Europe, in the United States both members of the public and many in the military were reluctant to see research and development into chemical warfare continue after the war. Yet a concerted lobbying effort brought millions of dollars and dozens of staff behind the Chemical Warfare Service. In an architectural as well as an ideological victory, the CWS soon built itself a new home. Edgewood Arsenal began as a modestly sized factory used for filling gas shells and producing protective masks. As the United States’ nascent chemical industry was not yet in the business of producing the chemicals used for weapons, the original military plant was modeled after bottling facilities. Builders laid track to carry in equipment as horses tugged materials across the remote fields that would soon be transformed into a large-scale military base and weapons factory. Within a matter of months, the workers at Edgewood Arsenal were producing two thousand incendiary devices a day.¹⁷

As the demand for better equipment and weaponry grew, the concrete walls and chemical facilities of Edgewood expanded. By 1920 the $35.5 million site boasted a chemical school, research facilities, and a gas-mask factory.¹⁸ The Arsenal was an international showpiece. Foreign delegates and corporate manufacturers toured its facilities. Later to become the scandalous site of LSD tests on “human guinea pigs,” Edgewood Arsenal’s early years focused in large part on developing what the Chemical Warfare Service called “peacetime uses for wartime technologies.”

Chlorine was said to cure colds; hydrogen cyanide led to the invention of the first gas chamber. And then there were the tear gases. Early advertisements in trade magazines sold tear gas as a security solution for home invaders, burglars, bank robbers, prisoners, and most importantly, protesters. One such advertisement claimed, “It is easier for man to maintain morale in the face of bullets than in the presence of invisible gas.” It argued that, unlike bullets, tear gas would “isolate the individual from the mob spirit” and make the mob “a blind stampede to get away from the source of torture.”¹⁹ These trade magazines marketed effectiveness, while at the same time elevating the moral status of chemical weapons. “There are many instances on record in which tear gas could have been used with a consequent saving of human life,” one claimed.²⁰ In an article penned by Theo Knappen for Gas Age Record, tear gas was purported to be as “innocuous and efficacious as the family slipper.” This harmlessness meant that police did not need to wait for orders or hesitate from deploying the weapon until violence broke out. Rather, tear gas could be applied without qualms “the moment the mob appears and begins to form.”²¹

In post–World War I America, early practitioners in the public relations industry mobilized such understandings of “mob psychology.” In fact, some of the earliest uses of public relations can be seen in attempts to secure positive media images for mining companies engaged in violent strikebreaking practices.²² The impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas into a “harmless” weapon for repressing dissent gave governments, police, manufacturers, and the military a way to control both crowds and the public image of ethical crowd control. It was this crucial PR discovery that largely fueled the expansion of what we now call the “less lethal” riot-control market.

With the Great War over, keeping the peace at home—and in colonial territories abroad—rose to the top of the US and European security agenda. At the forefront of the tear gas industry was the CWS and its well-decorated leader, General Amos Fries. In the next chapter I look toward this shift from wartime to peacetime, asking: What made the police turn to tear gas? Where did they get it? How did they even know it existed as weapon for everyday us? To answer this question one must travel to the end of World War I. Then, as now, the public face of policing was a matter of political and economic concern.

2

War Gases for Peacetime Use

With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.”¹ The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.

From Wartime to Peacetime

General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.”² But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.”³ This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career.

To save the CWS from extinction, Fries would need his own army—one that would fight with rhetoric and social capital. On August 9, 1919, Fries wrote anxiously to his friend and colleague Major Charles Richardson, who had also served in the war. After clearing up the issue of a bedroll thought to be lost at their last visit to the Yale Club, the general moved on to more pressing matters: “The Chief of Staff is trying to kill the Chemical Warfare Service.” While Fries wanted to see the military’s new interests in chemical weapons expand, there were others in the military who thought it unnecessary and wasteful to keep the division alive. Now a corporate executive, Richardson responded to Fries with some sound business advice: “Use your utmost endeavours to get engineer societies, lawyers, doctors, or any other professional you wakened to the gravity of the situation.”⁴

William H. Chadbourne, a lawyer and former major in the CWS, joined the campaign efforts. On August 12, 1919, he wrote to Fries, “It is time for all of us to get together who realise the importance of gas warfare and the danger that this country may be caught napping again.” Fries promptly responded by putting Chadbourne to work: “Anything you can do to aid in letting Congress know that a lawyer is considered to have at least as much brains as an infantryman, will, incidentally, help the Chemical Warfare Service.”⁵

Over the autumn of 1919, Fries worked with Chadbourne and Richardson to secure a network of publicists, scientists, and politicians to rally for their cause. They strategically began a full-scale multimedia marketing campaign to promote “war gases for peace time use.” On September 23, 1919, Chadbourne sent Fries an outline of the proposed promotional plan he and Richardson had devised, which included the creation of an association to bring briefs before the Military Affairs Committees of the House and Senate as well as to “get in touch with various scientific and other bodies.” Second, it called for arranging for writers and publishers to cover stories on the benefits of chemical weapons, led by Major Popp, “an enthusiast” and “hard worker” with “good manner and address.”⁶

The trade press provided the first and largest forum for the spread of the tear gas gospel. In the November 6, 1921, issue of Gas Age Record, Theo M. Knappen profiled Fries, the “dynamic chief” of the Chemical Warfare Service. Knappen wrote that Fries had

given much study to the question of the use of gas and smokes in dealing with mobs as well as with savages, and is firmly convinced that as soon as officers of the law and colonial administrators have familiarized themselves with gas as a means of maintaining order and power there will be such a diminution of violent social disorders and savage uprising as to amount to their disappearance … The tear gases appear to be admirably suited to the purpose of isolating the individual from the mob spirit … he is thrown into a condition in which he can think of nothing but relieving his own distress. Under such conditions an army disintegrates and a mob ceases to be; it becomes a blind stampede to get away from the source of torture … Nobody can travel very fast in a narrow street or in the midst of obstacles with streams of burning tears flowing from his eyes … An advantage of the milder form of gas weapons in dealing with a mob is that the responsible officer need not hesitate to use his weapons.⁷

In the future, Knappen predicted, when breaking up a demonstration, tear gas “will be the easy way and the best way.”

This early promotional writing struck a careful balance between selling pain and promising harmlessness. Its psychological impact set tear gas apart from bullets: It could demoralize and disperse a crowd without live ammunition. Through sensory torture, tear gas could force people to retreat. These features gave tear gas novelty value in a market where only the billy club and bullets were currently available. Officers could disperse a crowd with “a minimum amount of undesirable publicity.”⁸ Instead of lasting traces of blood and bruises, tear gas evaporates from the scene. Its damage promised to be so much less pronounced on the surface of the skin or in the lens of the camera.

But the idea of transforming wartime weapons for peacetime use was not without its critics. In a 1922 letter to the New York Times, US Army veteran A. Reid Moir argued that gas was not only inhumane but “hellish.” He wrote, “Is it humane to lie in excruciating pain, with stomach swollen by the expansion of gas, and with lungs eaten by the deadly vapor to cough up one’s life in an agonizing convulsion[?]”⁹ Fries’s team had carefully constructed comebacks for such objections. Borrowing loosely from medical statistics, Fries and his team constructed a trio of retorts. War gases, they claimed, killed only one-twelfth the amount of fatalities caused by bullets. Second, only half of disability discharges were from gas. Finally, they argued that there was no medical proof of permanent injury from gas exposure and that serious injuries were very rare.

Twisting the numbers, Fries and his team dismissed veterans’ testimonies, claiming these were exaggerated tales. They went so far as to publicly declare that “every imposter is beginning to claim gassing as the reason for his wanting War Sick benefits from the government.” This approach provided the groundwork for the decades of legitimizing less lethal weaponry to come.

Never far from Fries’s lenient use of statistics were his colonial rationalizations. Fries’s writing and speeches are littered with references to white supremacy. In his lecture at the General Staff College, Fries told young soldiers, “The same training that makes for advancement in science, and success in manufacture in peace, gives the control of the body that hold the white man to the firing line no matter what its terrors. A great deal of this comes because the white man has had trained out of him nearly all superstition.” It is this training, for Fries, that sets him apart from the “negro” as well as the “Gurkha and the Moroccan.”¹⁰

While it would be easy to write Fries off as an anticommunist, racist, and military extremist, the potency of his views arose from his intellect as much as his ignorance. After graduating seventh in his class from West Point in 1898, Fries had entered the academy by acing an exam held by Congressman Binger Herman and went on to impress his superiors and inspire his army subordinates.¹¹ In the words of his peers, Fries took a situation in which “the entire civilian population,” as well as the army, stood against his pro-gas campaign and ignited in people an “earnest conviction” that these chemicals were the solution to law enforcement and political control in a time of economic depression.¹² Instead of being seen as a form of physiological and psychological torture, tear gas became rhetorically cemented in much of the public imagination as the humanitarian alternative to live ammunition.

Into the next century, tear gas would become the most widely used less lethal technology. It would transform into part of today’s $1,630,000,000 global industry in less lethal weapons, with rapidly expanding markets in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. But for all that to unfold, Fries and his compatriots would first need to build up a commercial market for tear gas.

Tear Gas Demonstrations

Beyond trade publications, radio speeches, and news features, Fries and his network also staged large-scale product demonstrations. On a balmy July day in 1921, Fries’s old friend and colleague Stephen J. De La Noy, brought large supplies of tear gas to a field near downtown Philadelphia. Here he enacted the power of war gases in peacetime by inviting members of the city’s police department to experience its effects. Inviting reporters to record the spectacle of 200 policemen faced with tear gas, De La Noy set the stage for an enticing media story.

A reporter from the New York Times described how the gas “thrice sent [the police] into hasty and wet-eyed retreat.” As the demonstration continued, Philadelphia’s police superintendent selected “a battalion of his huskiest men … with instructions to capture six men who were armed with 150 tear gas bombs.” They fared no better than the first bunch, as “three times they charged, but each time were driven back, weeping violently as they came within range of the charged vapour.” Afterwards, police officials told the Times that the demonstration “undoubtedly proved the value of tear gas in police work.” The gas, they concluded, would likely replace “means hitherto used to subdue mobs and criminals.”¹³

This early demonstration spawned a major national and international campaign for the use of tear gases by law enforcement agencies. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s both the CWS and commercial manufacturers peddled their products to police departments, National Guard, prisons, and private security firms. This marks a turning point in what is today called the “militarization of the police.” “A few police armed with this weapon could disperse a mob easily and destroy the impact of a mass demonstration,” historian Daniel P. Jones argues. “The dramatic increase in the power of police forces in handling mass disturbances certainly meant a loss of power to any group opposing established order.”¹⁴

Supplying Tear Gas for the Masses

Just as demand needed to be secured, so did supply. To jumpstart the commercial market, Fries donated samples from the CWS to friends—many of them former soldiers—who had become entrepreneurial executives in gas munitions companies. Perhaps the most outspoken of these was Colonel B. C. Goss, who had worked in the chemical warfare division during World War I. A respected chemist and decorated military man, Goss founded the Lake Erie Chemical Company in Cleveland, Ohio. As general manager of one of the largest companies in this new industry, Goss knew profits would follow perception. He wanted to be the single manufacturer supported by the US military, and sought to use his wartime credentials to make this happen. Goss solicited help from his old CWS buddies and learned the art of twisting scientific testing into advertising copy.

On April 15, 1926, Goss wrote to Fries requesting that he contact the Chicago Superintendent of Police, Morgan A. Collins, “calling his attention to the fact the there are many possible new uses and new chemicals which are admirably suited for use by police departments [sic], with which you would like to have them made acquainted, and that you would appreciate it if he could arrange to have me give a brief talk to the National Convention of Police Chiefs at Chicago.”¹⁵ Fries, uncomfortable with this request but committed to Goss, delayed his reply. Busy preparing for a confidential show at Edgewood Arsenal, Fries “hesitated about writing to the Chicago Chief of Police for fear of possible unfavorable reaction.” He thought it better if the superintendent could telephone him, at which point he could then recommend Goss as a keynote speaker, making the matter appear more casual. “You know my great personal interest in what you are doing,” Fries reassured Goss. “As fast as your products are available, send them along to us for testing.”¹⁶

Goss wasn’t the only one monitoring his public perception. Fries wanted to keep his special relationships with commercial manufacturers sweet, without causing a stir with the War Department. These exchanges between Goss and Fries paralleled a growing PR industry in the United States. In these still early days of military-industry exchange, what connected state and commercial organizations was not only knowledge and technology transfer but also communications strategies. Building social networks and embedding endorsements into marketing was as important as generating revenue. Goss and Fries were exchanging both profit and perception. In ways that continue today, this concern over public perception functions at multiple levels. At the organizational level, it operates to keep workers in line (seen in Fries’s wariness of upsetting his superiors). On the level of business transactions, it is what shapes a sales personality and branding strategy (seen in Goss’s courting of police chiefs). And on a more public level, it fuels media strategies and shapes rhetoric (as in Fries’s production of the language and concept of humanitarian weaponry).

Within a year, the CWS was providing tests of Lake Erie’s commercial products. The company’s new tear gas weapons were set to undergo scrutiny at Edgewood Arsenal in the winter of 1927. While Goss was soliciting military endorsements, he wanted to make sure the tests were carried out in a way that provided the best possible outcome. This was no ordinary tear gas. “These Shells are intended to be used, namely, for firing directly in the faces of rioters or mobs, at short range by guards,” Goss wrote, checking in with Fries on February 17, 1927, to recommend that testing be done only with the one-inch Very Pistols instead of the ten-gauge. He promised, “These one-inch shells really have a terrific wallop.”¹⁷

On February 25, the CWS reported the results of Lake Erie’s “Blind-X Shell” tests. In the opinion of the board, this tear gas was of no use in the outdoors, as Goss had noted in his letter. Yet the gas “would seriously injure if fired in the face of a person under 20 feet,” making it useful for “warehouses or other large rooms.” The report recommended that “the charge must be received full in the face or on the body to be effective” and that this gas “will be effective against unarmed individuals, but will only stop a determined and armed individual when fired point blank.”¹⁸

While the Lake Erie “Blind-X Shells” tests were just one in a long series of munitions tests to take place at the Arsenal, the results speak toward common misperceptions about how tear gas is handled. Today when canisters are shot at people’s heads or into rooms or cars, it is seen as an accident or against-protocol use. However, these tests show that tear gas was in fact intentionally designed to be shot at point-blank range into people’s faces and bodies and was indeed recommended for use inside buildings and for firing at close proximities. It is important to bear in mind that these Blind-X Shells were not early prototypes of aerosol sprays—those were found in police billy clubs and pen devices that fired tear gas. In these early versions of tear gas sprays, a “secret” nozzle concealed in the object would fire out a short spurt of these chemicals. Far more aggressive than these miniature blasts of liquid, Very Pistols were flare guns adapted to carry tear gas shells. Each shell was a cylindrical cartridge with a one-inch diameter, roughly the size of today’s D battery. This was considered an “excellent” and desirable feature of tear gas because of its ability to cause “walloping” pain.

Second, the test results explicitly stated that the product would be effective against “unarmed individuals.” Again, it was not an anomaly or ethical mistake for police to fire upon unarmed protesters at close range in enclosed spaces. This function was embedded in the very design of these tear gas weapons. Causing injury to unarmed civilians was an intended outcome of manufacturing these tear gas shells.

Today, companies claim to manufacture safer and safer forms of tear gas and less lethal weapons. But what does it really mean to improve on the safety of a device designed to cause harm? Is it truly an accident when a product developed to shoot people in the face is used to shoot people in the face? If you follow the hyperlinked trails of less-lethal-weapons patents into the past, you will see the mystifying language of safety and protocols erode. Yet the design and purpose of these technologies remains the same.

Trouble in the Military-Industrial Tear Gas Complex

As the use of tear gas by law enforcement officials grew, tensions between the roles of commercial manufacturers and the CWS mounted. Just one month after the February 1927 tests, Goss panicked over leaked information. Edgewood Arsenal had purchased hand grenades made by Lake Erie Chemical Company for technical trials. As Edgewood’s technicians consisted of men who, like Goss, where also involved in commercial companies, testing at the military facility meant that competitors gained access to new tear gas developments—including rival company Federal Laboratories.

Colonel Goss could not contain his panic over the prospect that Federal Labs would steal its new noxious formulas. “I should like to point out to you again,” he wrote General Fries in haste, “that this very thing is a source of danger to our interest, if in ‘technical personnel,’ Oglesby and the others who are, I understand, under contract with Federal Laboratories, are included.” A man of science, of war and of commercial interests, Colonel Goss struggled to maintain friendly connections with the CWS and focus on the profits of his budding business. Meanwhile, on the other side of this military-industrial exchange, General Fries grew impatient with Goss and increasingly protective over what kinds of support he could offer from his position inside the Chemical Warfare Service. “I have read and re-read your letter through several times,” he replied to Goss, “and I am at a loss to understand your attitude in the matter of testing grenades … I cannot understand how you can expect to have us put you in a preferred class when we go into the market and purchase your product.” Dismayed that Lake Erie was advertising unpatented products on the open market, Fries wrote, “No reputable firm, in my mind, would build up a market for a product which they were not able to fill indefinitely.”¹⁹

In 1929, Goss again found his interests tangled up with the CWS, this time with General Gilchrist, Fries’s successor. Angry once again at the spread of technical information, Goss wrote Gilchrist, “We have hitherto kept the composition of our Gas a trade secret … [it] was not developed by the Chemical Warfare Service, but in our own laboratories and Dr Clark, chief chemist of the Eastman Kodak Company … told me that in his opinion, the composition was more effective.”²⁰ When Goss later sought copies of another set of technical reports from the Chemical Warfare Service, this fuzzy division between the commercial and military sectors came to the fore. “I regret very much to be compelled to inform you,” Gilchrest responded, “these reports are strictly confidential and cannot be removed from Edgewood Arsenal.” Yet, weaving back into informality, Gilchrest’s ends his letter amicably: “I hope in the spring to be able to go back and then take advantage of your offer to do a little golf out at the Country Club.”²¹ These old-boys’-club connections continue to characterize arms-trade exchanges today. As performed sociability infuses business transactions, partnerships are formed and broken around mutated visions of trust and loyalty.

Goss’s frustration with the CWS mounted. In July 1931, conflicting interests arose once more, this time around the military sale of gas grenades. “It is common practice with these National Guard outfits to give away Grenades to any Police Department or Prison, or almost anybody else that asks for them,” Goss complained, “Which, of course, has an exceedingly bad effect on our business.” Goss’s intervention yielded positive results: the chief of the Militia Bureau issued instructions to the National Guard that the sale of tear gas “for any purpose other than that for which it was issued to the State” was not permitted.²²

Tear Gas on Trial

By the late 1920s, both Lake Erie Chemical Company and Federal Laboratories were deeply embroiled in labor struggles and international conflicts. In addition to their close military ties, representatives from these companies fraternized with industry executives and local police forces. They followed news headlines of strike disputes and sent their salesmen into high-conflict areas.²³ In a 1936 article for the Nation, Frank C. Hanighen explained, “Firms engaging in this sort of business do not wait for strikes to commence. They go after the business before trouble breaks out and persuade industrialists to arm, regardless of the consequences to the workers.”²⁴

Mr. John W. Young, president of Federal Laboratories, wrote to one of his agents that he had seen “a notice in Sunday’s Herald Tribune that they were expecting labor trouble at the Panama Canal.” He advised his salesmen, “This paper lists the Callahan Co., Shirley Peterson, and Gunther as contractors … I think if these people are properly solicited they can be convinced of the importance of carrying tear gas on hand in Panama. I suggest you follow this through.”

In the United States, the use of tear gas to break up political protest was also gaining ground. On July 29, 1932, the largest “practical field test” (as Edgewood Arsenal called it) of new tear gas technologies occurred when National Guard troops stormed the Bonus Army encampments in Washington, DC. A group of veterans lobbying to receive their overdue wartime payments, the “Bonus Army” was living and protesting outside the capitol. During the National Guard’s offensive eviction, tear gas smoke and fire engulfed the encampment. Two men were killed in the bloody eviction and two infant children were said to have asphyxiated from tear gas inhalation. Official reports of the incident claimed otherwise, but the Bonus Army saw this as another government cover-up. Their ballad “No Undue Violence” mockingly testified:

“We used no undue violence”—

So, Baby Myers, be still!

Though it isn’t quite plain

To your little brain,

You were gassed with the best of will!²⁵

For the Bonus Army, tear gas became known as the “Hoover ration,” a further sign of growing economic disparity in America. But for police chiefs, industrial owners, and consulates around the world, the eviction of the Bonus Army was an opportunity to demonstrate the power of their riot-control products.

The Lake Erie Chemical sales team included photos of the Bonus Army demonstrations in its highly illustrated product catalogues. These promotional materials also depicted scenes of smoke chasing away strikers from Ohio to Virginia. Lake Erie’s tagline, “One man with Chemical Warfare Gas can put to flight a thousand armed men,” ran across the bottom of all its promotional communications, as it made promises to provide “an irresistible blast of blinding, choking pain” that would “produce no permanent injury.”²⁶

While manufacturers were busy extolling the harmlessness of their product line, hospitals were filling up with people suffering from tear gas injuries. Reflecting on this gap between marketing and reality, Heber Blankenhorn of the National Labor Relations Board told the Nation, “They say these tear gas bombs do not hurt. I happened to see one of the men hit by one of these and all that could be seen of his face, when I saw him in the hospital, was one eye glaring at me and something like a mouth—when he tried to call for water, more blood and sputum came out than anything else.”

Tear Gas Comes Under Investigation

As the 1930s brought on the Great Depression, the United States saw a heightened use of tear gas to quell economic protests. It was not long before the tear gas industry’s role in strikebreaking drew attention. Government investigations came in the form of two Senate subcommittees. One, chaired by Senator Robert Lafollette Jr., investigated the private sales of tear gas to industrialists for strikebreaking purposes. The other, Senator Gerald P. Nye’s Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, examined the national and international trade in munitions, which included the sale of tear gas by commercial manufacturers, particularly Lake Erie Chemical Company and Federal Laboratories.

As chair of subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Senator LaFollette—or “Young Bob,” as he was often called—was busy investigating corporate corruption and the repression of labor strikes. A progressive Republican from Wisconsin and son of the much-loved and respected “Fighting Bob” LaFollette Sr., Bob Jr. was born into his reputation as an advocate for labor rights. LaFollette’s subcommittee investigation included scrutiny of the use of tear gas and other industrial munitions against strikers. A dedicated bunch, they chased after subpoenaed executives. They glued together the shredded files of tear gas salesmen. And they traveled tirelessly up and down the country gathering testimonial evidence from policemen, guards, and the strikers they had gassed.

Senator Lafollette had been informed by the Department of Commerce’s National Bureau of Standards that the Chemical Warfare Service “had charge of the development of this product and its use for civil as well as military purposes.” Bureau director Lyman J. Briggs, the man in charge of overseeing commercial standards for products, believed the CWS was linked to the commercial manufacture of tear gas. There was little reason to suspect he was mistaken. Briggs, known to be an easygoing man, made no judgment or assertion of value in his brief letter to the senator.²⁷ He simply stated that the CWS was involved “in civil and military” uses of tear gas.

But acting Chief Lieutenant Colonel Haig Shekerjian of the CWS knew better than to admit such intimate relations to a man investigating the repression of civil rights. Shekerjian wrote back to the senator that very same day to assure him: “This understanding is incorrect inasmuch as the Chemical Warfare Service is responsible solely for the development and use of chloroacetophenone for strictly military purposes, and has no information concerning the production of this material in the United States, or cost, thereof, other than the production and cost of the small quantities manufactured by this Service from time to time for military training purposes.”²⁸ Attempting to untangle military and commercial interests, Lieutenant Colonel Shekerjian wanted Lafollette to believe that the CWS had little to do with the production and sale of tear gas munitions.

Shekerjian’s claim was in some ways true. The CWS was not allowed to manufacture gas munitions for public or commercial sale. Its supplies were held primarily for research and testing purposes for war preparation. Only under special circumstances where conflict suddenly arose could they deploy tear gas to the National Guard, federal prisons, or military outposts abroad. The CWS was, in strictly legal terms, a separate entity from the few companies selling tear gas at the time. This was, of course, only the official story. In reality the CWS was deeply embroiled in bringing tear gas from the trenches to the streets.

Senator Lafollette’s investigators traveled around the United States interviewing witnesses, subpoenaing files, and at times even rifling through the trash, ashes, and shredded papers of sales agents’ files. Between April 1936 and July 1937, the committee had taken 333 witnesses’ testimony and amassed hundreds of exhibits, included incriminating letters and images of blood-stained tear gas canisters.²⁹ The subcommittee found that between 1933 and 1937, over $1.25 million (about $21 million today) worth of “tear and sickening gases” had been purchased “chiefly during or in anticipation of strikes.”

Nye’s investigation turned up similar findings regarding the business practices of tear gas salesmen. On Tuesday, September 18, 1934, Mr. Young, president of Federal Laboratories, stood before Nye’s committee. Senator Clark turned to the question of the relationship between industrialists and tear gas manufacturers:

SENATOR CLARK: Is there any limitation on whom you sell that tear gas or sickening gas to, or do you just sell it to anybody who comes along and wants to buy it? …

MR. YOUNG: The limitation has been put on there by ourselves, primarily, Senator Clark. In other words, let us say that there was going to be a local strike in some town. The police department of that town happens to be on the side of the industrialists. They buy tear gas, but the strikers, those on the other side, cannot buy tear gas. Is that the operation as a result of your rules?³⁰

Mr. Young reluctantly admitted that no tear gas had ever been sold to strikers and went on to explain to the senators, much to their annoyance, how mob psychology worked.

But it wasn’t only the tear gas manufacturers who used PR to fight their case. Kiplinger Finance magazine observed of LaFollette’s committee hearings, “Senate tear gas and strikebreaking disclosures will have the effect in Congress next year of promoting federal regulation of traffic in arms, bombs, and other strikebreaking implements. There will be much agitation against corporations using them. Publicity will be the weapon.”³¹

This publicity often worked in Lafollette’s favor, as reporters were drawn to the cover-ups and conspiracies exposed at the hearings. This prompted complaints and personal attacks on Lafollette from those who supported strikebreaking. Lafollette’s investigation team was called “useless” and sometimes told to “close up and shut up”; one particularly enraged citizen deemed it a “communistic programme to steal from those who have $$$ and give to those who have not.”³²

State Secrets and Little White Lies

In the end, the Chemical Warfare Service evaded blame. While the interrogation lights fell on commercial manufacturers, the military’s confidential status shielded them from accountability. This perhaps comes as no surprise. Obfuscation is key to the operation of the military-industrial complex.

In the early 1920s, the value of defense and security industries was a small fraction of what it is today. The smartphones, computerized logistics systems, and high-speed jet transportation that makes business transactions possible today barely resemble the telegrams and forwarded letter chains of the 1920s. Yet the human connections—the friendships, the loyalties, the competitive streaks and little white lies—that created the less lethal market then, remain fully intact today.

These are the human elements that shape market transactions, creating both supply and demand. They are often what get lost in debates surrounding “police militarization” and the political economy of the global military-industrial complex. Undertaking the very important task of showing how larger structures operate all too easily leads us to forget that every system is made up of decision-making parts. Some of those parts are people; others are the policies, prototypes, and patent laws in which people become entangled. In addition to the spectacles and scandals that get revealed in newspapers and courtrooms, it is these everyday secrets and lies that carry insight into how such seemingly benign encounters are precisely what build profit at the expense of human well-being.

Most of these personal elements of the military-industrial complex are intentionally hidden from public view. Uncovering such informal meetings and exchanges in the present is a highly dangerous and difficult task, as the repercussions facing whistleblowers and investigative journalists make clear. But in historical archives, such secrets lay there for the taking. Declassified and “freed,” this once-confidential information tells tales of the friendships and rivalries that have grown into world-changing industries.

The Legacies of Amos Fries

The story of Amos Fries and his entrepreneurial social network is a cautionary tale. It reveals the origins of the dangerous relationship between the escalation of police force and the profitable pursuits of riot-control manufacturers. As true in the 1920s as it is today, protest became an opportunity to “field test” new weapons. Austerity and injustice were mobilized as excuses to sell, research, and develop weapons designed for use against civilians.

In the years since Amos Fries brought military tear gas to the policing of protest, public safety has become ever more dictated by business models for risk and security. Economic interests and the pursuit of private profits fuel these models. Under these conditions, the repression of political communication itself becomes a commodity. It is traded and sold in the weapons advertisements, market reports, and expo galas that feed the less lethal industry. This industry expands so long as protest stays criminal and the police can be persuaded to purchase more and more military-grade goods.

Looking back toward the nascent military-industrial complex of the 1920s and 1930s helps unravel the evasive alliances that work to dehumanize interaction, commodify repression, and elude accountability. While Fries’s power was contested and had its limits, his ideologies shaped the military transfer of tear gas for civilian use. His dangerously myopic visions of “good” and “bad” Americans legitimated the deployment of chemical weapons to crush popular uprisings.

In 1935, Fries testified to Congress, “There is no room in this country for any ‘ism,’ or any word ending in those letters, except ‘Americanism.’ ” Perhaps not surprisingly, tucked among Fries’s personal files is a membership form for the Ku Klux Klan. Although in his archives it is left blank, the form is accompanied by a personalized membership solicitation letter praising Fries’s initiative to ban the teaching of communism in public schools. The letter, typed on “Women of the Ku Klux Klan” stationary, pledges “to support Major Fries and his committee to the fullest extent.”³³

Fries’s militarized, white-supremacist vision saw the duty of a “true American” as “the protection of our country against any foreign dangers whatsoever, whether it is from aliens outside, or not.”³⁴ His campaigning served as a precursor to the era of McCarthyism that followed. As anticommunist sentiment and rallying for World War II spread through the United States, both Nye and LaFollette were trampled in its path. Nye was both a labor rights and anti-corruption advocate, as well as an isolationist—a stance no longer tolerated as the United States entered the war. While many celebrated Nye for his progressive politics, his anti-war sentiments led to accusations of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, LaFollette’s passionate work in the senate also drew to a dismal close. Despite many attempts to distance himself from communist organizations, LaFollette’s fate was sealed by Senator Joseph McCarthy himself, who in 1946 unseated the much-loved Young Bob in a surprising victory. Demoralized and exhausted by accusations against his character, LaFollette took his own life. “According to close associates,” Patrick Maney wrote, “LaFollette had McCarthy on his mind when he committed suicide in 1953.”³⁵

3

Tear Gas and the Benevolent Empire

Bullet holes carved chunks out of the brickwork in the Jallianwala Bagh. Ricocheting off the walled enclosure of the garden in the city of Amritsar, at least 1,650 bullets were fired at protesters by British Army officer Reginald Dyer’s party—in only ten minutes. After their magazines emptied, Dyer ordered the soldiers to reload and fire again, directing them to target the densest part of the crowd. Confined by the architecture and trapped by armed forces blocking the garden’s five exit routes, the 15,000 unarmed people gathered in the Bagh on April 13, 1919, had nowhere to run. They had gathered that day to resist the Rowlatt Acts, an insidious piece of legislation that gave colonial authorities increased powers to detain, incarcerate, and prosecute Indian subjects.¹

By the end of the onslaught, the government’s official inquiry identified 379 dead. Of this, 337 were men, forty-one were boys, and one was a six-week-old baby. Nongovernmental reports put the death toll higher and included women and girls in their count. Indian independence movement organizer Swami Shraddhanand wrote to Mohandas Gandhi that 1,500 had been killed. Those who did not die of bullet wounds were trampled to death. The number of injuries was estimated at three times the number dead.²

In the aftermath of the killings at Jallianwala Bagh, which came to be known as the Amritsar massacre, officials and news reporters struggled to make sense of the scene. Dyer tried to gain support for his actions from the many British who were committed to crushing the Indian independence movement. Ultimately, though, he was forced into retirement, his forces were retrained, and colonial authorities adopted a firm stance against the use of lethal force on nonviolent protesters. By December, 1919, the Associated Press was calling the Amritsar massacre the “Darkest Stain on British Rule.” As recriminations over the bloody incident circulated, a question was on many local law enforcers’ minds: What if the soldiers had used tear gas instead?³

In February 1920, less than a year after the massacre in Punjab, the Punjabi government became one of the first colonial outposts to lobby for access to tear gas. News of the United States’ use of tear gas was spreading across the Atlantic as government and business travelers, along with international news articles, carried stories of its success in suppressing “riotous mobs.” After consulting with a self-proclaimed expert, the Punjab government discussed the possibility of utilizing it to deal with mobs and suggested that a small supply might be maintained at certain centers in the province for use in emergencies. Punjab officials brought their request to the government of India, but in a confidential report circulated within the colonial offices, administrators worried that public opinion would strongly condemn the use of tear gas, which was still thought of as a device of war.⁴ And, these administrators wrote, “The average Constable could not be trusted to handle it successfully.”⁵

In these early years, the United States’ PR rhetoric was not enough to convince colonial authorities or the British cabinet that deploying tear gas against civilians was worth the political risk. In February 1922, Great Britain had signed onto the Five Powers Treaty, which contained Article V, banning gases in war, and the India Office circulated a memo noting that since “the use of gas in war had been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world, it was impossible for the Government of India to contemplate the employment of similar methods in times of peace for the dispersal of unlawful assemblies.”⁶

For the British Empire, it was simply too soon. Importantly, the language of “civilization” was used here to argue against the adoption of tear gas—a line of reasoning actively being countered in the United States by Amos Fries and his associates. While the dominant view in America was that chemical weapons were both the civilized option and a civilizing form of force, in Britain this was still a minority opinion.

This shower of praise for tear gas from the United States prompted a number of enquiries from the colonies to the Metropolitan Police in London throughout the 1920s. Bombay Police commissioner W. C. Holman espoused the promise of this chemical to the Metropolitan Police commissioner. Holman had received newspaper clippings of the tear gas demonstration with police officers in Philadelphia and argued that this new tear gas could “render the rioters temporarily harmless without inflicting physical injury of any consequence.” In 1922, Holman urgently requested information on any experiments the Metropolitan Police may have run using tear gas and requested the names of suppliers and costs.⁷

London did not share Bombay’s enthusiasm. The Metropolitan Police distanced themselves from these new weapons and wrote back to quell any hope Holman had for acquiring a supply or information from the British police.⁸ Three years later, when the inspector-general of police in Madras submitted a similar request, the Metropolitan Police replied with the same letter, maintaining a firm opposition to tear gas deployment in the colonies. Following suit, British police also rejected enquiries from suppliers, turning down a representative from Lake Erie Chemical Company, among others.⁹ By 1926, however, when the Indian government revived the question of tear gas use, sentiment was beginning to shift. Following the United States’ lead, international authorities had begun to argue against the idea that war gases were inhumane, claiming that such views were outdated and did not account for the changes modern chemistry bestowed on the world. Like the United States, colonial administrators began to leverage the loopholes in international agreements.

At the Washington Naval Conference meetings in 1921 and 1922, the Allied countries came together to discuss, among other issues, a potential ban on chemical weapons in warfare. While they realized public opinion—and the experiences of their own soldiers—favored prohibition, they deemed this stance unrealistic on three grounds. First, many traditional weapons also used chemical processes in their explosive mechanisms. This would make it very difficult to differentiate between permitted and banned weapons. Second, they agreed that regulating the research and development of chemical weapons would be an impossible feat. Third, there would be no way to ensure that rogue and untrustworthy nations would follow the treaty. In order to be prepared for chemical attacks, it was important not to create a blanket prohibition. This line of reasoning carried echoes of the colonialist mindset. While the civilized Allied nations could be trusted with chemical development, there was no telling what the “savage” countries might do.

With international regulations eased, it became far simpler to argue for the right to use tear gas. In addition to its realpolitik attitude toward regulation, the treaty made no stipulation about the use of gas in times of peace for civil purposes. As self-proclaimed tear gas experts and marketing materials traveled from the United States into the British colonies, opposition was increasingly countered with this new logic of legitimacy. “So far as was known,” read a memo circulated to all local governments and the Chief Commissioner in the North-West Frontier province of India, “no case of panic among the crowd had ever occurred, nor was it apprehended that the release of gas would cause any more panic than might be produced by a discharge of musketry.” Setting the bar for entry low, the memo also set out experts’ claims about its ease of use: “the gas-gun could be handled by any ordinary intelligent man with little instruction.”¹⁰

The colonial administrators case for tear gas was furthered through appeals to the situation in Shanghai. Tear gas had been introduced to Shanghai by US Marines and by the late 1920s was held in the arsenals of the Shanghai police. There, according to H. O. DeGale, principal of the Police Training School in Phillaur, Punjab, police found that “the mere arrival of this highly trained body of men and their disciplined and precise action would, in the great majority of cases, be sufficient to cause the dispersal of the mob.”

These references to the situation in Shanghai show how the circulation of news stories and gossip about tear gas traveled both between colonies and between the colonies and England. Anecdotal evidence of successful deployments was often coupled with reflections on the humane nature of tear gas and the promises it held for dealing with growing civil unrest. A letter published in the Times of India on April 30, 1930, signed only as from F.R.C.S. (of England), delivered news from South Africa: “A recent disturbance among the coloured population at Durban in South Africa, is reported to have been quieted by the use of tear gas bombs.”¹¹ The author, an ophthalmic surgeon, reported that in his clinical experience, while many veterans claimed that gas exposure impaired their vision, often they were just older and needed glasses. It was only in those cases where drops of irritant liquid had gotten into the eye that the doctor noticed a direct cause of impairment. The surgeon concluded that the advantages of tear gas were “obvious enough.” This “more humane and scientific procedure” should surely replace “older pre-war methods.”¹²

Over time, the PR strategy of enlisting medical professionals in the campaign to legitimize tear gas deployment grew commonplace. What better way to turn a poison gas into a scientifically advantageous toxin than with the recommendation of a doctor? It is quite difficult to imagine a medical professional advocating the health benefits of bullets or batons, yet its status as a chemical meant that tear gas could be measured by different criteria than other police weaponry. It existed not in the realm of tool construction, but in a world of modern chemistry—a science of the civilized world.

Unlike earlier efforts that had tried to distance tear gas from the poisonous chemistry of the Great War, these medical men argued that gases, like drugs, existed on a continuum of harm and risk. Through experiment and examination, by monitoring trials and side effects, scientists could yield insight into gases’ relative safety. As they lent their credibility to tear gas, the wood and metal weapons of the past could not compete.

While this chemical fix-all marketing won over enough public opinion in the United States, the British cabinet was not as quickly convinced that the colonies were ready for tear gas. Over a decade after the United States and other nations had first introduced war gases for peacetime use, why did the United Kingdom continue to hesitate? The mounting protests in the colonies were forcing debate between and within the War Office, Colonial Office, Army Council, and British embassies. To make matters more complicated, staff turnover and political elections meant a rotating set of people were involved in decision-making. As memos and letters bounced between departments, the debate over tear gas appeared to move back and forth in time. There was no centralized news service or collation of opinions, only a string of documents that moved in messy transactions between officials who then wrote more opinions that joined the pile.

This created a winding, start-and-stop conversation that left a long list of questions unanswered. How should international policy be interpreted? Was tear gas a sign of inhumane treatment or the greatest invention to ever grace civilian control? Did the colonies have the skills and resources needed to expand their policing arsenals, or would rolling out tear gas reveal further incompetence in law enforcement?

Still weary, the cabinet turned down a tear gas supply request from Africa for “the suppression of native rebellions” in 1927¹³ and again in 1928 decided that it was not yet the opportune time to open the question of tear gas deployment in the colonies. But the increasing troubles in India demanded further reconsideration, calling on administrators to confront the fears of negative public opinion and international policy violation, which still topped the British Empire’s list of concerns.

Rather than dismiss tear gas requests outright, the British Cabinet drew up a list of suggestions to take forward. Cabinet members argued that the public would require a great deal of education on the nature and effects of tear gas. In particular, they recommended “a different nomenclature should be adopted for the two kinds of gas.” Giving “tear gas” a new name would help differentiate chemicals used on civilians from those used on the battlefield. They further recommended that British delegates bring this nagging question about the exemption of tear gas use on civilians to the next international policy conferences on chemical warfare in Geneva and Washington. With a general election around the corner, Cabinet felt the return to a Conservative government might indeed sway feelings on tear gas in a more positive direction.¹⁴

With an economic depression and unemployment crisis at home and growing movements for independence in the colonies, the 1929 British election brought a hung parliament, with Labour coming into power. But that power would not last long. While the Labour and Liberal parties were divided over how to respond to the Depression, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald formed a coalition government. While this left him at the helm until 1935, Labour lost four out of every five seats, giving the Conservatives a large majority and delaying commitments to work toward Indian independence that had been under way in the Socialist-Labour government of the late 1920s.

Amid this political climate, it was not hard to convince colonial authorities in India of the benefits of tear gas. The practices of satyagraha were developing fast, while colonial authority was slipping away. Translated into English in a few different ways, the Sanskrit word satya refers to seeking truth by trying to understand a situation or conflict from all points of view. This “truth” is not something that one can capture or own, but rather a pursuit or an orientation to understanding conflict.¹⁵ Satyagraha incorporated nonviolent tactics such as noncooperation with tax systems, strikes from work, sitins, peaceful barricades, and, in the words of the authorities, “endeavours to prevent movement of Government officials or forces by prostrating themselves across roads etc.”¹⁶ At the same time, satyagraha also involved fasting and prayer as means of purifying and connecting the individual and collective. During the 24-day, 240-mile Salt March led by Gandhi, protesters practiced satyagraha. An act of economic refusal and rejection of the colonial administration, it drew international media coverage and garnered local support along the way.

These satyagraha tactics left the police in a diplomatic bind: fire on protesters—as they did in Amritsar—and face heightening tensions and damning press coverage, or do nothing and risk the loss of control of a population increasingly engaged in both social and economic acts of noncooperation? In an April 1930 briefing memo, Lord Passfield, the socialist appointee to the role of Secretary for the Colonies, was advised, “Firearms can hardly be used in such circumstances,” which led to “considerable difficulty” for the police.¹⁷ Known to his friends as the prolific Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield was a member of the Fabian Society and a founder of the London School of Economics and the New Statesman. Historian Mary Davis argues that he exemplified the “white man’s burden” approach to colonial rule, which saw it as Britain’s duty to keep order in the colonies—what better tool to do this with than tear gas?¹⁸

Yet, in a May 1930 meeting to (again) consider India’s desire to deploy tear gas, the British government stuck to its prohibition. The fear of “moral disapprobation” was still enough to persuade the Crown that it was not time. While the government conceded that there was evidence for its effectiveness, the potential repercussions outweighed those benefits—at least for now.¹⁹

Calls for Tear Gas in North Rhodesia

India was not the only colony whose requests for tear gas were being refused. In 1930, North Rhodesia was scolded by the British government for putting in a request for forty tear gas bombs and fifty tear gas masks without going through the proper channels. With neighboring South Africa actively deploying and praising tear gas, North Rhodesian police saw no reason why they should not also be able to do so.

With its mining economy struggling due to frequent protests, colonial North Rhodesia’s control over its subjects was slipping; the British Empire, dependent on copper and other resources from North Rhodesia, could not afford to see the mines turn unproductive through strikes or work refusal. Panic braced colonial profiteers and businessmen alike, who turned to the police for support. “There is always a likelihood of trouble in the Mining Areas round about Christmas time,” the quartermaster of the North Rhodesian Police wrote in rushed letter. He urged a speedy response by telegram and noted his preference for the C.A.P. generator tear gas bomb, produced in the United States and recommended by the South African police commissioner.²⁰

North Rhodesia’s request set off a lengthy discussion between the War Office and Colonial Office about the British government’s current stance on tear gas. In the notes on this correspondence, one official wrote that it was the declared policy of Her Majesty’s government not to deploy tear gas on the grounds that, rightly or wrongly, it would be regarded as inhumane, and furthermore, it would constitute a breach of international obligations.²¹ But others felt the case of North Rhodesia was not so simple. In a briefing note prepared by the Army Council for Lord Passfield, the council prompted the British government to accept tear gas: “Since our opponents in Oriental countries do not hesitate to torture and murder any of our men whom they may capture, it seems positively ridiculous to boggle at treating them to, say sneezing or lachrymatory gas.”²²

The Tipping Point

Meanwhile, requests for tear gas began to come in from Nigeria. As a strategy for administering colonial order in parts of Nigeria, the British had put local men in charge as land chiefs, creating an abusive patriarchy that enforced property and tax laws. Women, angry at these acts of gendered and economic exploitation, joined together in protest. A memo updating colonial authorities of the situation read, “Recently in Nigeria a hostile mob was composed largely of women, and the local troops showed the greatest dislike in firing on the crowd when that course became inevitable.”²³ This incident was part of what become known as the Women’s War in Nigeria.

This rising role of women in protest and the frustrating practice of satyagraha (or passive resistance in India) posed a logistical and PR nightmare for colonial authorities. They needed an option that could quell resistance on the streets while placating concern abroad. Tear gas offered a third way—it could change how governments looked without any need for them to change the way things actually were.

But two arguments against the use of tear gas remained as hurdles. First, there was the “moral difficulty” that came from the association of tear gas with other war gases, like the scarring and often deadly mustard gas. As Britain had denounced the Germans’ use of poison gas in World War I and had signed onto the Five Powers Treaty in 1922 and the Geneva Gas Protocol in 1925, the Lord Privy Seal felt a “position that lachrymatory gas may properly be used in the case of civil disturbances but not in war is impossible to maintain.”²⁴ However, the War Office felt this could be mediated by “a declared intention to use tear gas and adequate warning given to the opponents”²⁵—a protocol that would in fact become adopted by the United Kingdom, emblemized in the empire’s large lettered banners reading: “Disperse or We fire Tear Smoke.”

In addition to this moral hurdle, the United Kingdom’s reluctance to open the tear gas market was not only political but financial. With an incredibly limited remit to manufacture tear gas at home, Britain was lagging behind in the innovation and stockpiling of riot-control supplies. While the French and Germans had led the development of lachrymatory agents during World War I, the United States was seen as the producer of the world’s tear gas. The entangled nature of US military diplomacy and entrepreneurial manufacturing dominated the international market, while domestic production continued on smaller scales around Europe. While not yet in the manufacturing game, the British Empire had highly developed chemical industries and could “produce effective gases easily and quickly.”²⁶

However, for the United Kingdom to enter the market, it would need to capitalize on the chemical agents’ economic efficacy. Touted in a briefing document for the British Cabinet as particularly effective for its ability to reach “every member of a crowd, whereas the lethal weapon is individual in effect,” tear gas was positioned as a weapon that could reduce police spending. Drawing on promotional material for tear gas, officials argued that tear gas could be used in an earlier stage of a riot than a lethal weapon, which lessens the burden of responsibility placed on officers. The possibility for developing new exports and trade industry appealed to the business interests of government officials.

By the start of the 1930s, motivated by these arguments, officials were coming around to the use of tear gas in the colonies. J. E. W. Hood noted to his colleagues in the colonial administration that the latest War Office memo made a very clear and convincing case for the use of tear gas. “I must say that I should prefer to use tear gas on a mob rather than shoot at them,” Hood wrote. “Tear gas does no harm but makes the mob look silly.” Hood noted that tear gas was used in the United States and South Africa without “a howl of protest,” reasoning that “if you may use gas on a Hottentot why not on an Ibo.” Hood’s remarks reflected the dominant colonial perceptions of the time, what we would now call an Orientalist view that saw native populations as inferior to white settlers, a population to be managed by the civilizing force of the West.²⁷

Palestine and the Path to Legalization

Further support for tear gas adoption came with the intensification of the political situation in Palestine after the 1929 riots. In November 1933 Sir Arthur Wauchope, the High Commissioner of Palestine made a plea for tear gas. Wauchope, a veteran of both the Boer War and World War I, was stationed in Northern Ireland before being charged with Palestine. Regarded as sympathetic to the Zionist cause of establishing a homeland in Israel, Wauchope was at the same time considered too lenient toward the Arab rebellions. In a letter to the Colonial Office, Wauchope wrote,

I consider that tear gas would be a most valuable agent in the hands of the Police Force in Palestine in dispersing illegal assembles and riotous crowds, particularly in the tortuous and narrow streets of the old quarters of the town, where if firearms are used the prevalence of ricochets leads to disproportionate loss of life. If its use had been permitted during the clashes which took place recently between Arab demonstrators and the Police in Jaffa, Haifa, Nablus and Jerusalem, it is possible that the Police would have been able to break up the crowds without the use of firearms and that no lives would have been lost.²⁸

Like many other politicians’ scientific claims, Wauchope’s plea displayed a very limited understanding of how tear gas actually works. The narrow architecture of streets was in fact one of the reasons why police in India were concerned about the harms of tear gas. When fired into an alleyway or a crowded strip of market, the intensity of its effects would increase, endangering bystanders, seeping into homes, and risking a stampede if people became panicked. This is why the release of tear gas in confined spaces or in places where there is no clear escape route to clean air is now formally against UN guidelines for the proper use of force. Whether it was misinformation or malice that led colonial administrators to promote tear gas, the results were the same—civilians suffered and manufacturers made a profit.

Wauchope’s requests for tear gas to be made available before the Arab Executive’s planned strike and demonstrations on January 16, 1934 were met with the now-stock response that tear gas was outlawed in war and therefore not available for civilian use. Letting Wauchope down, the secretary of state for the colonies, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, advised that he prepare for the protests on the assumption that tear gas would not be available.²⁹ Appointed as part of the newly elected Conservative majority, Cunliffe-Lister was far more willing to concede the value of tear gas than his predecessors. Sentiments were shifting and news that India had plans to begin implementing “experiments” with tear gas on bandits was spreading.

While upholding the official line in public, Cunliffe-Lister sent word to Wauchope that the tide might indeed be turning. On the morning of December 14, Cunliffe-Lister dispatched a telegram to Wauchope stating that Palestine’s proposal for tear gas would go to the Cabinet for an early decision. Meanwhile, Cunliffe-Lister inquired into known suppliers in the United States and requested information on the amount of gas that Wauchope might need.

Wauchope wrote back, “My dear Philip … If demonstrations take place on Bairam, which is a religious festival, and rioters are shot, religious feelings will be strongly excited. Should religious as well as political cries be raised, a number of the fellaheen, many of whom are landless and many very poor, will join.” The administrative power the British held over the Arab population was slipping away. “It does not seem possible to me that the present hostility and widening breach between the Arabs and the British rulers can remain as they are to-day,” Wauchope wrote. “Either we find means to bring ruler and ruled more in sympathy, or the separation and hostility will grow deeper and more permanent each year.”³⁰

Impressed by the High Commissioner’s persuasive case, Cunliffe-Lister brought the decision to the Cabinet. In a memo, the secretary of state for war provided five points in favor of adopting this new form of riot control: to prevent martyrdom, to reach every member of a crowd, to lessen the chances of calling in the military, to enable officers to disperse crowds early on, and to reduce the number of officers needed for policing protest. Through this mixture of humanitarian gesture and cost-effective planning, the Cabinet was finally won over. The medical and scientific accuracy of these propositions about tear gas was barely addressed.

Over and over again officials perpetuated the marketing myth that tear gas was harmless, ephemeral, and incapable of causing lasting injury. Likewise, while international treaties were deemed worthy of debate, there was no discussion of police officers’ possible abuse or excessive use of tear gas. Instead, like a mantra, the British government maintained that tear gas could absolve colonial authorities from blame and turn the repression of civil dissent into a propaganda piece showcasing the empire’s benevolence.

On December 20, 1933, the High Commissioner of Palestine received his approval. The Cabinet decided to allow the use of tear gas in Palestine to control mobs when the alternative force option was firearms. It upheld the American exception to international law against war gases that permitted tear gases for use by law enforcement in matters of civil disturbance. The approval came with instructions in the use of British-made Lachrymatory Generators No. 2 mark II—a product that would later be taken out of distribution as a result of its deadly effects.

Tear Gas Spreads Through the Colonies

The decision in Palestine soon spread around the British Empire. In 1935, requests came from Sierra Leone, where colonial administrators were trying to quell strikes for wage increases. Colonial authorities in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) were also scampering for tear gas. The new secretary of state for the colonies, Malcolm MacDonald, was given the task of sorting out an overarching policy on tear gas. He was supplied with a laundry list of successful tear gas deployments, including in Germany (used effectively against strikers in Hamburg in 1933), Austria (to dispel Communist rioters in 1929), Italy (police were now armed with tear gas bombs as part of their standard equipment), and France (where permission for use had already been granted). The memo also featured South Africa, attaching a clip from the November 14, 1929 edition of the Evening Standard:

Hundreds of police officers today raided the native barracks in Durban, and searched 6,000 natives for poll-tax receipts. The police were equipped with tear gas bombs, gas masks, machine guns rifles and bayonets. One gas bomb was used, with immediate effect, on a group of defiant natives. Six hundred natives were arrested, either for non-payment of the poll-tax or truculent resistance to the police.³¹

Under MacDonald’s tenure, South Africa’s and the United States’ aggressive approach to tear-gassing protesters would become a benchmark for success rather than a cause for concern. By the end of the 1930s, tear gas was considered the humane weapon of choice. The cautious rhetoric that first suggested it only be used in extreme cases when firearms were about to be drawn no longer applied. Instead, colonial officers were advised to fire gas early, to use it in large amounts, and to protect the police through keeping distance and donning gas masks. Tear gas proved to be effective as a propaganda tool. Its great “moral effect” could put down striking workers and dissenting minorities alike.

During this period, tear gas became intimately bound up with the state’s ability to refuse to respond to demands for change. Its dual function as a physical (dispersing) and psychological (demoralizing) force meant that a certain amount of civil resistance to new rules and regulations could be easily contained. Further, because these weapons could now be legally used against peaceful or passively resistant demonstrators to make them “look silly,” authorities were no longer as threatened by new nonviolent forms of collective action. Tear gas became a go-to tool—not only for suppressing the masses but for calculatedly undermining acts of civil disobedience.

Supplying the Demand

While Britain underwent this ideological shift on tear gas over the course of the 1930s, it had not yet prepared to produce tear gas products. The inspector-general of police in Singapore wrote to Crown agents, “I am in possession of particulars of American made equipment (gas guns, truncheons and grenades) but am anxious to explore the possibilities of the home market.” What good was the right to use tear gas without manufacturers to supply the demand?³²

Britain was also unequipped to train colonial police forces in the use of tear gas. In 1934 three eager Palestinian police officers visiting the United Kingdom wrote to all Metropolitan Police requesting tactical lessons. “With regard to your enquiry,” the Met had to respond, “I am afraid we know nothing about this here.” The officers from Palestine were instead told that “the New York Police may have some information on the subject.”³³

This deferral of policing expertise caused both economic and military concerns for Britain. “Some of the larger Indian States have shown interest in the subject of tear gas but have, as a matter of policy, not yet been given facilities for obtaining it,” J. A. Thorne, secretary to the Viceroy of India, wrote. “Stocks of gas equipment in Provinces are small and the only reserve available is a small stock at Phillaur. Fresh supplies have to come from the United States of America.”³⁴

With little assistance from the UK War Office, entrepreneurs saw a perfect opportunity. In India arsenals fell into the hands of prominent businessmen. Messrs. Govan Brothers and its managing director, R. E. Grant Govan, were given permission to open a depot in Bombay for storing tear gas to supply to the provincial governments.³⁵ An avid pilot and entrepreneur with an eye toward colonial industry, Govan incorporated Govan Brothers, Ltd. in 1922, setting up Delhi Flour Mills and Gwalior Sugar. Govan also established Indian National Airlines and later a travel agency. Serving as the founding president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Govan’s links to the colonial elite through travel, sport, and exports positioned Govan Brothers at the intersection of policing, colonial authority, and industry.³⁶

With the start of World War II, managing riot-control imports and training became even harder. The colonial authorities tried to set up a system wherein provinces would send information on the amount and type of supplies needed to Govan Brothers, which would then import from the United States. But this was not an adequate solution in the long term. Civil disobedience in India was mounting once again. While provinces now had trained gas squads and enough tear gas for immediate use, a larger problem remained. Tear gas, like other chemical substances, has a limited shelf life. The ammunition deteriorated fairly rapidly and could not be relied on for a period of more than three years. Stocks had to come in regularly and reserves could not be stored for long periods.³⁷ Expired stock could either be used as practice ammunition or would need to be destroyed. Both options put additional pressure on the British to establish an infrastructure for riot-control manufacturing and distribution.

In efforts to solve this problem, during the war years, colonial authorities and business elites continued to lobby for more tear gas. The governor of Punjab, Henry Duffield Craik, was at the helm of this call. Craik wrote to the Viceroy of India,

I suggest that it would have a most reassuring effect on public opinion if the Premier could announce at once that it is the intention of his Government to set up complete, fully-equipped and trained tear-smoke squads in several of our big cities as soon as the necessary equipment and material can be obtained … I do not think that in this matter financial considerations should stand in the way of what is obviously a humane measure.³⁸

Craik knew that getting the public to accept tear gas required careful persuasion. Following the Americans’ lead, he pointed out the importance of referring to tear smoke and not tear gas. Tear gas, Craik wrote, “is a much more alarming term, as it suggests something resembling the poison gas used by the Germans in the last war.”³⁹ His appeals to expand tear gas programs made no mention of any dangers. While it was on occasion acknowledged that tear gas “does not eliminate the need for other forms of force,”⁴⁰ this was mentioned as a caveat to an increasingly resounding agreement that tear gas was the perfect PR policing solution for the modern colonial age.

The Lethal Nonlethal Weapon

This willful blindness to the harms that tear gas could pose came to the fore in the mid-1940s. Answering the call for further British manufacturing, the War Office sent its limited war supplies of the 92 grenade out to the colonies for trials. While most police forces in India were still using US-made tear gases, the 92 grenade was stocked at Peshawar Central Jail. In May 1947, on a hot sultry day with still winds, it was deployed in the prison’s crowded yard.

Conflicts over the treatment of Muslims in Peshawar had come to a head. Acts of dissent ranged from civil disobedience, including marches, strikes, and sabotaged transport, to stabbings, arson, and attacks on police. By the end of April 1947, the police had detained nearly five thousand Muslim activists. Jails overflowed, forcing authorities to create temporary accommodations for the record number of political prisoners.⁴¹ On May 20, 1947, the enclosed courtyard of the Peshawar jail contained 1,100 men. Prisoners crowded together near the railings. Hostility between them and the Peshawar police festered in the heat. Stones and shouts of abuse filled the stagnant air. Then the police fired tear gas grenades. The first round filled the entrapped space with smoke, making it impossible for the prisoners to stay along the railings. They moved, choking and stumbling to other spots. Then more grenades were thrown, forcing prisoners to flee back into their cells.

During the altercation, prison guards threw thirty-eight British 92 Series grenades. Without wind and in a confined space, the toxic smoke persisted for four to five hours, with lingering effects causing discomfort for sixteen hours after the attacks. Shards of the grenades were judged to have exploded in a twenty-five- to thirty-yard radius. Nearly all of the prisoners in the courtyard were affected. Many were overcome by the fumes and had to be carried out.⁴²

In a medical report on the incident, Peshawar’s civil staff surgeon outlined three sets of clinical effects from the gas. First, there were those affected by the vapor alone. They suffered from lachrymation, conjunctivitis, cough, giddiness, nausea, vomiting, mental depression, and unconsciousness of short duration. The surgeon noted that the effect “varied with the dosage of tear gas received.”⁴³ Second, there were twenty-eight cases of wounds, “either multiple ‘peppering’ or cleanly incised or punctured wounds of little depth.” Shards likely caused these wounds. The surgeon noted that the largest deep wound ran 2.5 inches long across the back of a patient’s calf. In addition, there were six cases of “retained foreign bodies” in which thin metallic fragments became lodged into people’s flesh.⁴⁴ The third set of injuries described thirteen cases of skin lesions with first- and second-degree burns.

Then came the description of one man’s death. When he arrived at the hospital, the patient “had extensive second degree burns on the lower limbs, especially the right leg below the knee: and first degree burns on the trunk and upper limbs.” These burns included “small peppered wounds” that covered about 30 percent of his total body surface. While being treated for these wounds, the patient showed no signs of severe distress. Two days later, at around 7:30 PM on May 23, the man collapsed in prison. Vomiting blood (hematemesis) and passing tarry black stools (melena), he died four hours after being taken back to the doctor. But before the surgeon could perform a postmortem, the body was “seized by unauthorized person, so the cause of death was not precisely determined.”⁴⁵

Reviewing the police and surgeon’s reports, the War Office determined that, contrary to reports that tear gas could cause no lasting harm, the 92 grenade was indeed “dangerous, possibly lethal, in its effect.”⁴⁶ Supplies were halted and a quest for alternative tear gas equipment began.

The Birth of Modern CS Gas

Back at Porton Down, the United Kingdom’s premier military development and testing facility, tear gas was being trialed in simulated tropical and arid climates to examine storage conditions and potential for leaking.

By the early 1950s these trials yielded success in the form of the new No. 95 tear smoke grenade. With field testing set for August and bulk production planned to commence in October, this “extremely simple to operate” grenade was expected to be rolled out by the end of 1953. To avoid the grave injuries inflicted by the shrapnel of the 92 grenades, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) designed the 95 to be nonfragmenting and able to avoid throwback with “quick emission, a small frightening explosion,” and a fear-inducing hissing sound that accompanied the release of dense smoke.⁴⁷ Perfect for quelling uprisings in the colonies, this grenade could last six years in temperate climates and two years in the tropics. In Cyprus, further trials were under way. Scientists experimented with the addition of a dye that could mark protesters in addition to emitting smoke and sound.

As predominant sites of expertise and invention, the laboratories of the British Empire served as hubs of knowledge exchange and transfer for this early riot-control market. Porton Down’s tear gas trials offer an early example of war-based weapons that could be transferred to use by police forces for civilian control.⁴⁸ In the postwar period, scientists made many more advancements in “nonlethal” chemical weaponry at Porton Down. During the Tripartite Conference in 1958, the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada made a shared commitment to developing new forms of non-lethal weapons and tear gases.⁴⁹ In addition to nerve agents and vesicants, scientists at Porton Down ran more than ten thousand chemical tests with riot-control agents. These trials were carried out on veterans—often, as it would later come to be known, without their consent.⁵⁰ These tests included lachrymatory agents (tear gases) as well as incapacitants and irritants. Between 1943 and 1985, the number of recorded trials using the more modern CS variety of tear gas on veterans totaled 2,694 tests using 1,328 veterans. Scientists tested the more potent tear gas compound, CR, on 1,175 veterans for a recorded total of 4,081 trials between 1962 and 1979.⁵¹ These figures would come to public light when the Porton Down experiments became the subject of legal battles in the 1990s.

In 1965, the United Kingdom announced the release of a “modernized tear gas”—a redesign of the CS compound: “The superiority of CS is due [to] its more pronounced and more extensive irritant effect … It is to be expected that an increase in the demand for CS, leading to production on a larger scale, would result in a reduction in the cost.”⁵² By this time the British Empire had established a nascent portfolio of foreign markets. Between 1962 and 1964 the United Kingdom made more than £10,000 (around £200,000 today) in export sales to Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Portugal, Singapore, and Rhodesia.⁵³

While Britain’s domestic production of tear gas never exceeded the commercial output of the United States, the United Kingdom took on a prominent role in the 1950s and 1960s as a site of riot-control research and development. Through its temperature trials and experiments with different forms of chemical release, this British form of modernized CS remains the tear gas compound most widely used today. Unlike its American competitors, however, the market for British tear gas remained its colonial outposts. Instead of transferring products to its police at home, the British exchanged scientific information and civilian-control strategies abroad. This British expertise turned up on the streets of the US during the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.⁵⁴

4

Tear Gas and the Rise of
Modern Riot Control

“The effects of CS are impressive,” wrote the author of a 1967 Edgewood Arsenal public report praising the new formula for tear gas. “CS produces immediate effects even in low concentrations. The irritating effects of the compound are felt immediately and the duration of effects is 5 to 10 minutes after the affected individual is removed to fresh air.” This gave a large enough window for police to break up a gathering, destroying the collective spirit of the protest—or, as the report put it, “During this time, affected persons are incapable of effective concerted action.” The new formula caused “severe burning sensation in the eyes with copious tears, coughing and difficulty in breathing with tightness of chest. The eyes close involuntarily, the nose runs, and moist skin stings.” With this new form of CS scientists had found a tear gas that was more effective and less temperamental than earlier varieties of CN.¹

In 1959, the United States Army made this modern CS gas its standard riot-control agent. In the years that followed, it replaced previously used CN stockpiles. CS was distributed to National Guard units and available to law enforcement authorities from commercial suppliers. Its power over a disobedient crowd was unmatched. For those in the business of suppressing protest, it came out just in time.

From civil rights struggles to antiwar protests, throughout the 1960s the United States saw uprisings and civil disobedience. These episodes were met with riot control on a scale not seen before. The National Guard was repeatedly called in for reinforcement while police borrowed tactics, equipment, and personnel from the military to repress dissent, often with spectacular violence. The experience of protest policing in the 1960s went on to shape the future of law enforcement, both in the United States and abroad. Tear gas played a large part in this new era of riot control. It served not simply to disperse a crowd by creating physical and psychological distress, but to act as what arms-control advocates call a “force multiplier.” With its ability to disorient, debilitate, and cause panic, tear gas weakens an opponent. This increases or multiplies the effectiveness of using other kinds of force, such as baton beatings, birdshot, and police charges. Just as tear gas was used in World War I to pull enemy troops from the trenches, and later in the Vietnam War to pull people from underground tunnels (smoking them out), during civil unrest in the streets, tear gas works in conjunction with other weapons to help police win physical control of a given location.²

From the Freedom Riders of 1961 to the Resurrection City protest campers who gathered in wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, those who fought for civil rights were shot, beaten, and berated with tear gas. While on occasion tear gas would be deployed on its own to break up a demonstration, more often than not it served a much more violent function. Instead of moving people from the trenches, it tore them from their sit-ins and locked-arm blockades. It pulled them out from behind barriers and inside protest tents. It emptied meeting halls and occupied offices, followed by a rush of baton beatings and, at times whips, jabs from bayonets, and even live ammunition. Tear gas also served a psychological function. In escalating force and arousing derision from onlookers, tear gas implicates protesters, and often bystanders, in a violent and chaotic scene. It turns civilians into criminals.

In January 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became icons of the civil rights movement when a federal judge ordered that the University of Georgia admit them—a decision greeted by a crowd of angry white students, local residents, and Ku Klux Klan members that grew to 2,000 people. Hunter’s dorm was set on fire. Rocks and racial insults were hurled at its walls—aimed at Hunter, Holmes, and the fear of integration. Eventually authorities came with tear gas and fire hoses, breaking up the crowd.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault has written of the incident:

One night, students and others gathered outside my dormitory and shouted, “Nigger go home.” The town police threw around tear gas, ostensibly to disperse an already-thinning crowd. By the time the state troopers arrived, the protesters were long gone. The university suspended me for, they said, my own safety. (Hamilton, who lived with a black family a few blocks away, was also suspended.) As I left the dorm that night, a group of girls who had been told to change their sheets, so as not to be affected by the tear gas, formed a semi-circle, and one threw a quarter at me and yelled, “Here, Charlayne, go and change my sheets.”³

Throughout their time at the university, Hunter and Holmes bore continued daily hostility and moments of intense violence from fellow students. Charlayne writes, “Although ‘nigger’ was their preferred shout-out, the students would also use other words they thought would be hurtful. They didn’t realize they were complimenting me when they yelled out ‘Freedom Rider.’ ” Like Charlayne, the Freedom Riders regularly faced tear gas. It was the atmospheric accompaniment to the beatings and taunting that violently marked the Freedom Riders’ mission to challenge ongoing racial segregation in the Southern states. Tear gas was hurled into their buses and it seeped into their meeting windows, poisoning their brief moments of sanctuary. “Imagine,” Shermika Dunner writes, “being so afraid for your life that you can’t leave your seat. Angry mobs await with tear gas, baseball bats and, even worse, guns. Racial epithets are hurled, and instead of state or governmental protection, you are at the mercy of the mob.”⁴

Many of these acts of violence were carried out in small towns and on back roads, with little media presence. But on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, scenes of tear gas and beaten bloody protesters filled the television screens of the nation, sending thousands of supporters down south to support Alabama’s Voting Rights campaign. Led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Voting Rights movement fought for the right of black residents to register to vote. After the police killing of twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, civil rights organizers planned a march from Selma to Montgomery.

John Lewis, coordinator of SNCC and veteran of both the Nashville sit-ins and Freedom Riders, helped lead the march. No stranger to tear gas or the police baton, at twenty-five Lewis had already been arrested dozens of times. Like other young black civil rights leaders, he carried the scars of numerous beatings and organized with the knowledge that death might be the price of his activity. On the Edmund Pettus Bridge that Sunday after church, Lewis’s life nearly came to an end.

“Before we left a little church called Brown Chapel AME, we knelt and joined together in prayer,” Lewis recounts. There were about six hundred demonstrators gathered outside the church. As they approached the bridge, they walked in careful, orderly rows. When they reached the crest of the bridge, they saw up ahead “a sea of blue”⁵: more than fifty troopers wearing steel helmets emblazoned with the Confederate flag. The troopers were surrounded by three dozen khaki-clad posse men, a group of white volunteers armed with whips and clubs who served as part of Sheriff James Clark’s “posse.” Some of the men were mounted menacingly on horseback.⁶ Sheriff Clark was adored by segregationists and reviled by civil rights activists. At six foot two and 220 pounds, he was known to stride around town, his double chin jutted out, with a billy club, a .38-caliber pistol, and sometimes even a cattle prod swaying from his belt. A gunner during World War II, Clark often dressed in military garb.⁷

In the lead-up to the Selma march, troopers and posse men had been instructed to make sure the marchers could not pass. A sea of blue, they blocked all four lanes of the highway. Along the outskirts of the roads white spectators gathered, eyes glued to the scene like they were watching a sporting event. Three television crews were also positioned by the bridge, along with newspaper reporters from all over the country. The demonstrators, young and old, carrying blankets and bedrolls for their long march to Montgomery, slowly proceeded up the bridge. They were singing church hymns, eyes straight ahead, trying to keep each other brave as they had done so many times before.⁸

“This is an unlawful assembly. The demonstration will not continue,” Major Cloud of the Alabama state troopers bellowed into his bullhorn. “You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church.”⁹ The demonstrators did not retreat. At the front, march leaders knelt in prayer. Other protesters stood still on the bridge in the crisp breeze, unsure where to turn as tension and fear rippled through the crowd. Before the two minutes were up, the troopers charged.

“It’s the screams I remember the most,” says Selma resident Joanne Bland, drawing up her childhood memories of being on the bridge. “People just screaming and screaming. The gunshots turned out to be tear gas. They were shooting tear gas canisters into the crowds. All you could do is scream, and they were beating you … You couldn’t outrun the men on horseback.” Only eleven at the time, Joanne was one of many children trampled and chased that day by the Alabama troopers. “Blood was everywhere on the bridge,” she remembered. “People were laying on the street as if they were dead and we couldn’t even stop to see if they were alright.”¹⁰

Over the course of about thirty minutes, troopers shot forty canisters of C-4 tear gas, twelve canisters of smoke and eight canisters of nausea gas. The marchers began crying, screaming, and vomiting.¹¹ The gas attack provided a smokescreen for escalated police violence. New York Times journalist Roy Reed recalls,

The cloud began covering the highway. Newsmen, who were confined by four troopers to a corner 100 yards away, began to lose sight of the action. But before the cloud finally hid it all there were several seconds of unobstructed view. Fifteen or twenty nightsticks could be seen through the gas flailing at the heads of the marchers.¹²

Those few moments were captured on camera and broadcast to more than 48 million viewers on ABC. In the background, Sheriff James Clark’s voice could be heard egging his colleagues on: “Get those goddamned niggers. And get those goddamned white niggers.”

In a strange alignment of past and present, the scheduled movie on ABC that night was the premiere showing of the Academy Award–winning Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), starring Spencer Tracy, which includes documentary footage of concentration camps and explores the question of ordinary Germans’ responsibility for Nazi atrocities. Just moments into the broadcast, ABC interrupted with a breaking news report about the violence in Selma.

Media scholar Aniko Bodroghkozy argues that “because ABC broke into an already highly rated entertainment program, the ‘Bloody Sunday’ report garnered an otherwise unheard of number of viewers all at one time and all in one place.” With Selma, the civil rights movement had made it to prime time.¹³ As NBC news anchor Brian Williams describes it, the violence “spoke to a voice that some Americans had suppressed. That some Americans had denied. You didn’t have to be in the movement to believe in civil rights, but those pictures you couldn’t turn off.”¹⁴

Afterward, the policing of the Selma March was put on trial. Civil rights activists Hosea Williams, John Lewis and Amelia Boynton brought a suit on behalf of other protesters against George Wallace, Governor of Alabama and Al Lingo, the director of public safety for the state. The trial transcript, more than a thousand pages long, contains testimonies from protesters and authorities at the demonstration that detail behind-the-scenes decisions and little-known actions that contributed to the escalation of violence.¹⁵ Two of the incidents documented in the trial highlight the shifts in riot-control policing that came to characterize the 1960s; yet their newness reveals more about the rise of televisual media than about any major shifts in the administration of state power through policing. First, there was the use of tear gas in offensive operations played out on the street, often against nonviolent demonstrators. Second was the use of tear gas as a punitive device, in proto SWAT-style attacks on civilian homes.

Tear Gas as an Offensive Operation

One of the first men called to the stand in the Selma trials was Colonel Albert Lingo. As director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety from 1963 to 1965 under the notoriously segregationist governor George Wallace, Lingo oversaw some of the most violent years of policing in Alabama. Selected for his commitment to segregation, Lingo was publicly known as a friend of the Klan, bullish and quick to use force against peaceful black demonstrators. But as blame for the widely broadcast events fell into his lap, his loyalties were tested. “You know as well as I that my original plan was to permit the demonstrators to march,” Lingo wrote in anger to Wallace’s biographer. “You and I both know orders from the Governor’s office changed my original plan … And we both know it was the Governor who went on state-wide television to announce to the people of Alabama that the march would be stopped.”¹⁶

Whatever Lingo’s culpability in the decision to deploy force on the bridge, his testimony points toward one of the key troubles with tear gas. While intentionally producing chaos can make protest crowds appear seasick and silly, creating a suffocating atmosphere of smoke that neither protesters nor police can see through can also affect the authorities themselves—particularly if they are poorly trained. “The reason I did not want to use tear gas,” Colonel Lingo told the court, was because in Oxford, Mississippi, he had seen “what it caused” and did not want to use it unless he “absolutely had to.”

What had happened in Oxford was a race riot at the University of Mississippi. On September 30, 1962, lashing out against the enrollment of black student James Meredith, a former Air Force pilot, hundreds of angry white people armed with bottles, rocks, and chains took over the campus. Governor Wallace had dispatched Lingo to observe the event. That night Lingo watched as state troopers and local police withdrew early, reportedly leading to the influx of white rioters. Some state patrolmen later resumed their posts on campus, but were ill prepared for this escalation of force. A tear gas canister fired by a marshal seriously injured one officer. Others found themselves unable to cope with the amount of tear gas that hung in the air all around and withdrew, claiming their gas masks were ineffective.

The military was not impressed by how Mississippi law enforcement handled the situation.¹⁷ Thousands of National Guard and military police were brought to shut down the riots. By the end of fifteen hours of fighting inside thick clouds of tear gas, two civilians were dead and more than 245 people were injured.¹⁸ According to George Wallace biographer Stephen Lesher, Wallace and Lingo resolved that what had happened in Mississippi would not happen in Alabama. Instead, they would take the vigilante ethos into their own hands. Cracking down hard on civil rights demonstrators could spare them from having to face angry white mobs. As anti-integrationists with close links to the Klan, Alabama troopers would carry out offensive acts of vigilantism under the cloak of law and order.¹⁹

Tear Gas as a Punitive Measure

While journalists usually focus on the main protest sites, smaller scenes of tear gas violence often take place away from the media. Some such acts were documented during the Selma trials. A few hundred yards from the church, Early Butler’s home was tear-gassed. Mr. Butler participated in the march that day and drove children with injuries to the hospital, then took others back to the church to regroup and be among family and friends. Then he returned home to his family, including his daughter, granddaughter, and two elderly sisters-in-law. All of sudden there was a commotion at Mr. Butler’s door: “People were running from the posse men.” Mr. Butler had the boys come inside and shouted for them to shut the door behind them. He looked outside and saw more people running from the church, chased by Sheriff Clark and his posse men. “They were beating the children,” Mr. Butler testified. “One was bleeding from the head.”

Soon, two of the Sheriff’s posse men were at his front porch. “Don’t come in. Stop there,” Mr. Butler told them, shutting the door. As he did, he heard one of the posse men holler back to the sheriff, “Send me one of them cans of tear gas.” Clark reached into a satchel and tossed a tear gas grenade over to his posse man. The deputy ran over to a window at the side of the house, grenade in hand. “Don’t throw that gas in that window,” Mr. Butler shouted, knowing his sisters-in-law were inside. The posse man threw the grenade. Then a shot came from a tear gas gun into another bedroom window, setting fire to a mattress. Mr. Butler ran back to the bedroom and he and his wife helped move the older women and children outside.

In 1965, as now, using tear gas to punish protesters was common, yet rarely captured by the media or officially documented. The use of tear gas in an enclosed space is extremely dangerous: it intensifies toxicity levels as well as panic levels, which can lead to serious lung damage or death by suffocation. As in Mr. Butler’s case, it can also cause fires. While manufacturers have made efforts to reduce flammability and better regulate the devices used to explode grenades, mattress and other house fires remain a dangerous outcome of firing tear gas into homes. As later chapters will show, from the Waco events of 1993 to the victims of ill-planned SWAT team raids today, children and infants are often the victims.

While guidelines for proper force escalation with tear gas were already in place by 1965, senior officers often disregarded protocol, believing instead in the right of the police to suppress demonstrations by whatever means they deemed necessary. In a rare 1986 interview, Sheriff Clark showed little repentance. “I’m against all public protest, demonstrations in the street, anything that violates the law,” Clark said. “It makes targets of law enforcement and puts them at a great disadvantage because they … have no way of handling it without violence.”²⁰

This language echoed justifications for riot control in previous decades and foreshadowed more such claims to come. Likewise, while tear gas had been used as a force multiplier and a form of punishment prior to the 1960s, the growth of televised news brought these images of brutality into living rooms around the world.

The Whole World Is Watching

While delegates made their way to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, tens of thousands of protesters were set to converge in the city for a week of civil disobedience. Yippies, hippies, clergy, veterans, student activists, civil rights groups, Black Panther Party members, and moderates against the war were all on their way. From their office on the Loop, thirty staff members of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, known more casually as “the Mobe,” organized housing, legal defense, first-aid squads, and alternative media publishing. To top it off, a garbage strike had just ended and a taxi strike, was just beginning, to be followed by a wildcat bus strike. Temperatures and tensions were rising.

It had been just over four months since Chicago was rocked by riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. On the South Side, twenty city blocks had been lost to fires. Break-ins, looting, arson, and property damage were widespread, and whites and business owners were fleeing the neighborhood. Daley had called in the military to put down the rioters. Twelve thousand army troopers and 6,000 National Guardsmen took over the streets. By the end of the unrest, 500 people were injured and nine dead.²¹ “They were all black men, ranging in age from 16 to 34,” writes journalist Christopher Chandler, evoking their memory beyond these lifeless figures. “Four were married. Eight were employed. Seven had been shot to death. Another died in a fire and the ninth bled to death from a cut on his leg.”²² Mayor Daley had given remit to “shoot to kill,” and shoot to kill some had.

Now Mayor Daley was making his own preparations. He was not about to let the city fall out of his control again. Chicago’s 12,000-strong police force was placed on twelve-hour shifts and a curfew was put into effect. Six thousand National Guard and 6,000 troopers were called in for reinforcements, all loaded with the newest military-grade riot-control equipment.²³

On Monday night, protesters in Lincoln Park were prepared to resist eviction come curfew time. They assembled a makeshift barricade out of garbage cans and park benches. Hundreds of officers were on hand and equipped to stop the demonstration with force if necessary, periodically giving loudspeaker announcements for the remaining protesters to leave. An estimated thousand protesters remained. Some prepared for tear gas by smearing Vaseline on their faces and covering their mouths with wet clothes. Others held rocks and small projectiles to throw back at police lines. Trash fires burned along the barricade and occasionally a rock was hurled against a police-car window.

The protesters’ chants mocked the police. Their anger floated on the summer air along with the sound of trashcan drums and Allen Ginsberg’s group chanting om. A police car entered the park from the back and protesters pelted it with stones. Tensions were rising and at 12:30 the police issued their final warning to evacuate the park. Then came the tear gas:

Tear gas canisters were plummeting everywhere behind the barricade, through the trees. A huge cloud of gas rolled over the barricade, and cops with gas masks came over the barricade in an assault wave, with shotguns and rifles and using the butts as clubs on anyone in sight.²⁴

Protesters, passersby, and even residents out on their porches were beaten. The chasing, swinging, and clubbing was indiscriminate. Journalists, denied any special treatment, were battered and taunted, at times even targeted.²⁵ The tear gas kept coming:

Gas! Gas! Gas! was the cry, as if poisonous snakes had been loosed in the area … Thousands streamed across the park toward Clark Street, and panic started, headlong running, the sudden threat of being trampled by your own people … The tear gas was catching up with us, a sharp menthol sort of burning on the cheeks and burning in the eyes, but though some people ran from it, most of us kept on just walking … Now the tear gas began really burning, making the eyes twist tightly closed, and if you rubbed it the burning got worse, as if your eyeballs were being rolled in fire.²⁶

Tear gas seeped into homes, cars, and restaurants. It covered whole city blocks, taking over the air. The following night, tear gas was once again used to clear demonstrators from the park at curfew. Historian Frank Kusch writes that a sanitation truck joined the police lines. “The bed of the truck held a tear gas dispenser and a large nozzle for dispensing the gas—all requisitioned from the army. Two police officers manned the nozzle.” Additional gas was fired into the remaining crowd as officers in gas masks forced protesters onto neighboring streets. Some fought back, throwing rocks and bottles.²⁷

Wednesday brought tear gas to the Hilton, the temporary residence of many of the conventions delegates and journalists as well as some Mobe members. A rally by the Grant Park bandshell was the only permitted protest event of the week. It drew a crowd of ten thousand. At the end of the rally demonstrators wanted to march to the bandshell, but the police and National Guard blocked off the rally at three exit points, following orders to contain the protesters or disperse them away from the convention sites.

Then came the incident with the flag—a moment reported and recorded in a variety of versions. What witnesses seem to agree on is that news came back from the convention hall that the antiwar candidate for the Democratic nomination, Eugene McCarthy, had been defeated by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, despite the popular vote favoring McCarthy. Disappointed by the vote, protestors called to lower the park’s flag to half-mast. In the commotion another flag was raised—and it was red. Whether it was a Communist flag or a pair of Yippie trousers depends on who you ask. Either way, it went up, and violence erupted as police fought their way into the crowd, beating people as they went. This sent the thousands of people in the park looking for a way out, but police and Guardsmen blocked the exits. Volleys of tear gas were fired into the crowd:

Eyes burning, lungs filling with this corrosive stuff, throats feeling as though we had swallowed steel filings, hundreds of demonstrators streamed north until we found a blessedly unguarded bridge and cross over onto Michigan Ave, where the gas was still thick but at least it was possible to run.²⁸

Night fell and tear gas still hung in the air. Tensions swelled outside the Hilton. Television cameras were everywhere, capturing scenes of excessive violence. There were beatings with fists, gun butts, and nightsticks. Mace was sprayed directly into people’s faces while police pushed them against walls and contained them tightly in cordons. At one point, protesters were pushed so hard against the outside of the Hilton that they went through a plate-glass wall, leaving shards of shattered glass buried deep in people’s skin. Upstairs, the fifteenth floor of the hotel turned into a temporary makeshift hospital as people tore bedsheets into bandages and rinsed out burning eyes. A reported four hundred people were treated for injuries from Mace and tear gas.²⁹

The official record of the violent events that unfolded in Chicago is referred to as the Walker Report, produced by Daniel Walker, director of the Chicago Crime Commission (in a bid that later helped him become governor of Illinois). The Walker Report produced 20,000 pages of statements drawn from 3,437 interviews, 180 hours of film, and more than 12,000 photographs. The report called the violence at the convention a “police riot”:

Demonstrators attacked too. And they posed difficult problems for police as they persisted in marching through the streets, blocking traffic and intersections. But it was the police who forced them out of the park and into the neighborhood. And on the part of the police there was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest.³⁰

In distributing blame to the escalated tensions and to stressed-out individual police officers working too-long shifts in the sweltering heat, the Walker Report detracts attention from those authorities—like Mayor Daley and the Democratic Party—who sanctioned the use of force to control the protesters. Likewise, it obscures the coordinated, collective actions of riot police, who were drawing from the military and National Guard tactics spreading across US police forces throughout the 1960s. Journalist John Schultz argues, “What happened in Chicago during the last week of August 1968 was not a police riot. The result was chaos, but the cause was a premeditated disposition to subdue protest by whatever means necessary—a planned offensive.”³¹

Part of this deliberate and planned offensive involved the mass use of tear gas as a dispersal mechanism. In addition, tear gas served as a force multiplier and a punitive measure. The Mace sprayed in the face of protesters trapped in a small area outside the Hilton hotel was done not to de-escalate or disarm them but to punish them. At the same time, military-issued tear gas was intentionally deployed as a means to take over the city. From the military-issued sanitation truck to the adapted flamethrowers used to volley tear gas into crowds, new tactics and equipment were brought in to release tear gas in greater strength and quantities. So much was used that it entered cars, office building, homes, and even hotel rooms. It became an environmental weapon, a method of policing not only people but the atmosphere itself.³² This upgraded, offensive approach to tear gas deployment has since become standard in riot-control policing.

Sproul Plaza

Months after Mayor Daley showed what tear gas could do in his city, over in California Governor Reagan was about to get in on the action. Perhaps the most iconic scene of mass tear-gassing to come out of the 1960s is the image of a helicopter flying above the University of California at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza spraying tear gas on hundreds of unarmed people below. This event took atmospheric policing to a new level. The police were spraying CS gas from the sky onto university students from the same style of military helicopter being used to gas people in Vietnam. “It seemed the war really had come home,” writes Eric Leif Davin in his memoir. “Students like me were now the Vietnamese, to be gassed and shot by the occupying American army.”³³ For many young white students like Eric, this was the first time that the violent force of the state turned against them.

In the early 1960s, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement fought against a ban on political activity on campus. In December of 1964, Mario Savio stood on the Sproul Hall steps. Savio had spent the summer down in Mississippi as one of hundreds of volunteers from northern universities working to support the fight against segregation led by black activists. More than sixty thousand black residents of Mississippi participated in Freedom Summer, putting their lives at risk to fight for basic rights. In addition to witnessing the harrowing violence against black Americans, Savio emerged from his time in Mississippi with leadership and organizational skills garnered from working for black activist organizations like SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).³⁴ A few months later, emboldened by his new worldview and encouraged by the media to take up the spotlight, Savio delivered his now famous speech to a sprawling audience of fellow students:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop!³⁵

While this line of Savio’s speech now appears in songs, films, and Anonymous hacker videos shared around the world, it was the following lines that really sparked fear in the heart of a state grasping to maintain its legitimacy amid growing protest:

That doesn’t mean—I know it will be interpreted to mean, unfortunately, by the bigots who run The Examiner, for example—That doesn’t mean that you have to break anything. One thousand people sitting down some place, not letting anybody by, not [letting] anything happen, can stop any machine, including this machine! And it will stop!!

Like the satyagraha protesters in 1930s India, the mass nonviolent resistance of the Free Speech Movement posed a serious policing challenge. Not only were authorities faced with the strong collective will of thousands of young students, but many among them were the white, middle-class children of the nation. They could not just be beaten and bloodied into submission without risking public outcry.³⁶

Over the next few years, Berkeley’s campus activism sprawled into both local and global issues. Amid a growing counterculture, students campaigned around homelessness, housing rights, access to public space, and education. Meanwhile, the international antiwar movement took root at home, with direct-action protests against military recruitment targeting military offices on campus. Within this climate, marked by heightened tensions between student groups and increasing violence between protesters and police, the People’s Park took shape.³⁷

A plot of land purchased for $1.3 million by the university for proposed housing expansion in 1967 was demolished and then cleared by July 1968, leaving a large, empty plot in a prime location.³⁸ “Ruts, garbage, weeds, old foundations, rotting automobiles, and the randomly parked cars of numerous students filled the site,” writes Berkeley architect Peter Allen.³⁹ In the spring of 1969, some students repurposed the land, turning this empty space into a neighborhood recreation and resource center. A flyer described their initiative: “The People’s Park is an attempt to satisfy some basic needs of the people in this community … In 5 weeks, with hard work and generous contributions from the community, we have transformed this empty lot into a park built by the People for the People.”⁴⁰

The People’s Park brought together thousands of people from all across the Berkeley community and beyond. Movement historians argue that this occupation of the land without permission was an intentional challenge to the university. Allen argued, “Just as early student radicals in the free speech movement were inspired by their volunteer efforts in Southern civil rights campaigns, student radicals of the late 1960s adopted tactics from radical black power movements in a struggle against the business and political elite.”⁴¹ In the case of the People’s Park, this tactical adaptation from the nearby Oakland Black Panthers took the form of grabbing unused land and turning it into a community resource that would reflect back to those in power the inadequacies of state care. “In an area devoid of community recreation centers,” organizers wrote, “we are working together to answer our social needs.”⁴²

The threat this project posed was not lost on university authorities. While a community park could seem benign and harmless, it served as a physical manifestation of the state of California’s loss of control over its counterculture. This assertion of autonomy was an outright rejection of the university and its pursuit of power and profit. Organizers connected the violence America deployed abroad with the violence of the state and the university.⁴³

In the early-morning hours of May 15, 1969, a hundred California Highway Patrol officers surrounded the land and evicted those sleeping in the park. After arresting three people who refused to leave, the patrolmen erected an eight-foot-high chain-link fence to keep people out. In response, organizers called for a rally on campus. Among the scheduled speakers was Dan Siegel, incoming student government president, who suggested the crowd should “take back the park.” In an action some argue was planned and others insist was spontaneous, the thousands assembled at Sproul Plaza headed down Telegraph Avenue toward the People’s Park. On the way, some opened fire hydrants and a few threw rocks toward police lines.

The tear gas hit first. Grenades fired out of long metal launchers burst open in the streets as the CS dispersed in thick clouds that hung in the air. The Berkeley Daily Gazette later described the intersections as “open door gas chambers.” There were rows and rows of police officers on the street, clad in riot helmets and gas masks, batons out and tear gas in hand. Some held rifles. The air was dense with tear gas. People were scattering, screaming, and choking, some dragged away by police while others fought back with bricks and bottles. Then the shooting began. At first the police used birdshot. Then the more lethal buckshot came out—pellets the size of marbles and “tough enough to penetrate a steel car door.”⁴⁴

Police fired both indiscriminately. Buckshot ricocheted off lampposts and buildings. Some targeted unarmed people directly, shooting as they ran down side streets. Some protesters retaliated from the roofs, throwing rocks and concrete down at police lines. At one point tear gas was fired onto campus, away from the commotion, sending students eating their lunches at an outdoor terrace café running in panic. Reports put the number of people admitted to the hospital at 128, with buckshot wounds, head trauma, and other serious injuries. The real injury count was likely higher, as many refused to go to the hospital out of fear of arrest or police retaliation or reluctance to have their details recorded. One young man, Alan Blanchard, was blinded by buckshot; another, James Rector, died four days later from injuries caused by the buckshot. While the authorities claimed that Blanchard and Rector were abusing police, journalists, onlookers, and protesters reported that they were bystanders watching passively from the rooftops.⁴⁵

After “Bloody Thursday,” Governor Reagan declared a state of emergency, called in 3,000 National Guardsmen, and enacted a curfew. On May 20, 1969, after James Rector’s death, thousands gathered to commemorate him at a vigil in Sproul Plaza. National Guard troops got into formation, bayonets out and gas masks securely fastened. They formed lines blocking routes through the plaza. Those already inside were trapped; those outside were not allowed in. From behind a bullhorn on a building’s balcony, an officer gave warning: “Chemical agents are going to be dropped in the next five minutes.” The sound of helicopter propellers grew louder and louder. Flying just sixty feet above the plaza was a military helicopter. Tear gas streamed out in thick billows of smoke, sinking quickly down into the crowd, who were trapped, panicked, choking, vomiting. Some police beat people as they tried to get out, their batons lashing out at legs, backs, heads.

Journalists trying to cover the events were also gassed, clubbed, and shot, sometimes intentionally. Their vehicles and equipment were damaged by both police and protesters.⁴⁶ Reflecting on his experiences, Peter Barnes wrote for Newsweek after the National Guard’s seventeen-day occupation of the campus came to an end:

In many ways, the violence of the past few days in Berkeley is more frightening than the violence that exploded in Chicago last August. In Chicago, as the Walker Report concluded, the police erupted into a riot. But at least no one was killed, the national media told the story to the world and, among his critics and defenders alike, Mayor Daley was held responsible for the cops’ behavior. In Berkeley, under cover of Governor Reagan’s three-month-old “state of extreme emergency,” police have also gone on a riot, displaying a lawless brutality equal to that of Chicago, along with weapons and techniques that even the authorities in Chicago did not dare employ: the firing of buckshot at fleeing crowds and unarmed bystanders, and the gassing—at times for no reason at all—of entire streets and portions of a college campus.⁴⁷

Like Chicago and Selma, Berkeley was marked by a combination of crowd control and repression tactics that combined military strategies (as well as personnel and equipment) with punitive and offensive uses of tear gas. Also like in Selma, many of those who authorized the use of force showed no regret. California National Guard commander Major-General Glen C. Ames told the press that using a helicopter was a “perfectly logical means of delivering gas under the proper condition.”⁴⁸ Reagan justified his actions by framing the protesters, once more, as violent troublemakers bent on destroying society:

It should be obvious to every Californian that there are those in our midst who are bent on destroying our society and our democracy and they will go to any ends to achieve their purpose—whether it be a so-called park or a college curriculum … I now urge—more deeply than before and more fervently than it is possible to express—that those relative few who are seeking to destroy us by turning one against the other must be dealt with firmly, swiftly and with the justice they deserve.⁴⁹

When asked if this justice should include the use of firearms, like the buckshot that had killed James Rector days before, Reagan cited the injuries police suffered at the hands of protesters and argued, “I think it is being very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter. He’s got to have weapon.”⁵⁰ Invoking the right to self-defense, framing protesters as enemy combatants, and arguing for more lethal weapons, Reagan’s vision of military-trained riot control forces would soon become the norm.

While those at the top mainly supported this vision of “any means necessary” protest policing, some found Reagan’s escalation of force disturbingly out of proportion. Earl Cheit, then vice-chancellor at Berkeley, recalls that “the campus and other academics were appalled that the Guard came in, that tear gas had been sprayed on campus from a helicopter … To the outside observer, it might have appeared justifiable. To those of us who were trying to control the situation, it seemed to exacerbate it.”⁵¹

As in the decades before, at Berkeley those in power strugglled to keep control of a civilian population demanding basic rights. The state risked the public appearance of brutality for the benefits of appearing strong. Adhering to the military logic of fight, flight, posture, or submit, the form of riot control that emerged dominant in the United States out of the 1960s valued winning control through offensive strategies rather than reaching compromise or attempting consensus with civilians.⁵² While the police have long been the violent arm of the state, the watchful eye of the media would promote a battleground mentality. The policies and behind-the-scenes deals that legitimize police violence faded further into the background out of the media glaze. With cameras always at the ready, the scene itself would need to be more carefully managed, the act of protest policing better choreographed.

Military Influences on Riot Control

This televised unrest led to escalated calls for repression, with more and more military modes of crowd control brought in to contain civil disturbances. Following the highly televised 1967 Detroit race riot that left forty-three dead, many at the hands of white police and National Guardsmen, military leaders decided it was time to intervene. Looking into the events they found that while there were problems with individual troops, overall a lack of training was largely to blame. In an internal survey conducted by the National Guard, “only 11 per cent … felt well trained for a riot while 31 per cent felt they had no training at all.”⁵³ The Guard began developing training, including an update of the FM19-15 Civil Disturbances and Disasters manual.

Building on established principles, National Guard leaders sought to include better training on, among other things, “the detection and apprehension of snipers, the use of chemical weapons, the control of ammunition and the operation of a message center.”⁵⁴ Part of the new training would include an overview of new chemical weapons and related equipment. The formal tone of the 1964 edition, with a guide to tear gas that focused on CN, was replaced in 1968 with a focus on CS gas, which “acts quicker, takes less agent to do the job, and its effects are more severe.” The 1968 manual also emphasized deploying tear gas promptly and making it available to a greater number of troops. The claim that CS gas was safe was accompanied by warnings about deployment in bad weather conditions, enclosed spaces, or places where a grenade could start a fire.

The added tactical detail also points toward expanded research and development. The updated manual advises commanders “to consider courses of action, select riot-control agents, and determine munitions requirements.”⁵⁵ Here, marketing logic and military repertoire intertwine; the manual serves both to promote new products and to train troops in their use. The more nuanced the differences in tactical situations were, the more need for specialized weaponry and equipment. A rise in military policing of civil disturbances became deeply entangled with the boom in new riot-control technologies. What the military used and approved got passed down to the National Guard, and what the National Guard brought into the streets often made its way into the arsenals of city police forces. Real-life riots and mass civil disobedience were the best marketing demonstrations that manufacturers could hope for.

In 1971, it became clear that these new transfers of equipment and expertise from the military to the police were no coincidence. In fact, they were part of a major Pentagon strategy to align tactics and improve communication between the army, National Guard, and city police in order to control civil disturbances, codenamed “Garden Plot.” The Garden Plot’s remit was to draw up plans to pre-empt dissent in more than 120 cities, organized into four priority groups. Working with governors and local authorities, including Ronald Reagan (an active participant), Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, New York, and San Francisco were among the top-priority cities to be organized first. The plan would enable a minimum of four thousand and a maximum of twenty-five troops to respond to any one disturbance. Using a personal letter system, troops would be instructed to use “the minimum necessary force” and “to avoid appearing as an invading, alien force.” To accomplish this, emphasis was put on the large diversity of riot-control chemicals and equipment to be deployed before recourse to live ammunition. The Garden Plot focused on making targeted arrests, while being courteous to civilians and allowing the news media freedom of movement—so long as they stayed out of the way.

While, on paper, Garden Plot warned against treating civilians as enemies, the civil disturbances of the 1960s were largely blamed on “dissident elements, those who were dissatisfied with the nation’s policies on civil rights and the Vietnam War.”⁵⁶ Particular mention was made of SNCC, as well as those who had traveled to Cuba, Eastern Europe, and North Vietnam as influenced by Communism, which could then influence their followers. The problem, from this perspective, was “un-American” subversives and radicals rather than underlying social and economic inequality.

When Garden Plot was investigated in the 1973 report Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, compiled by the US Congressional Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, this logic came under fire for its lack of detail, a failure to differentiate between types of disturbances, and absence of evidence for claims that subversives and outside influencers could take control of existing nonviolent antiwar and civil rights groups. These movements were listed under “Dissident Elements” rather than “Friendly Forces,” a category reserved for military personnel. Criticizing the way large-scale peace and civil rights marches were treated, the report contended that “the fact that some of these events were the product of sincere beliefs on the part of hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens was overlooked.”⁵⁷

A report from the President’s Commission on Student Unrest, released in 1970, also criticized these emerging trends in protest policing and the use of military tactics by law enforcement officers. Commissioned after the Jackson and Kent State University shootings, this report relied on interviews and evidence gathered through numerous campus visits and meetings with law enforcement across the country. It also pointed toward the dangers of conflating different kinds of protest, arguing that “university and law enforcement agencies find themselves under pressures to stifle even peaceful and legitimate forms of unrest,” which could lead to “confusion and injustice.”⁵⁸ Condemning protesters’ arson and rock throwing as well as the brutality of Guardsmen and officers, the report recommended that authorities on campus be unarmed and that the only shoulder weapons carried be tear gas launchers. The report also called for nonlethal weapons development, particularly for “something more effective than tear gas and less deadly than bullets.” Pointing out that the Kent State actions were not in line with military codes of practice, the report argued that low availability of tear gas and the commotion caused by tear gas canisters being lobbed back and forth between Guardsmen and protesters contributed to the unwarranted act in which twenty-eight Guardsmen fired sixty-one rifle shots of live ammunition at students, killing four people and wounding nine.⁵⁹

After the 1960s, law enforcement practices on the ground remained largely influenced by the new training and technology transfers that occurred during this period between the military, the National Guard, and the police. Like the Chemical Warfare Service veterans turned entrepreneurs, this period of riot-control modernization in the 1960s gave rise to military experts who became celebrities in the policing sector. In direct conflict with the printed advice of operations manuals, but in line with broader military and policing cultures, many of these experts saw all protesters as rioters and all rioters as enemies. In his summary of lessons culled from the 1960s, army veteran Major-General Anthony Deane-Drummond writes that Mayor Daley in Chicago “clearly won a military victory.” While the police lacked finesse and were disadvantaged by the media, Dean-Drummond argues that Daley deserves credit for getting through it without a death count. In his book Riot Control, Deane-Drummond also takes aim at Marxists and the far left, which he contends seek to gain power and destabilize society.⁶⁰

Deane-Drummond, one of the “architects of the modern SAS” (special forces of the British Army), was commissioned to write his book by riot-control equipment purveyors Schermuly Ltd.⁶¹ In 1960, Schermuly entered the business of selling CS gas munitions and, later, baton rounds and rubber bullets. Schermuly worked internally for the Ministry of Defence, filling the Ministry’s weapons with CS mixtures, as well as filling shells and casings and shipping them to police forces abroad.⁶² In June 1968, a protest by peace activists from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament drew public attention to Schermuly by marching to its arms facility in Surrey. This brought the company under scrutiny. In response, Schermuly released a lengthy statement claiming that “anti-riot grenades and cartridges have been used effectively for years without any evidence of harm to anyone.”⁶³

Influential military veterans like Deane-Drummond offered a much-coveted stamp of approval to manufacturers. If a product was good enough for the special forces of the world’s most elite military squads, then it was certainly good enough for a police officer out on the streets. Through the use of such experts, commercial riot-control companies like Schermuly act as a bridge between the military and civilian law enforcement by facilitating exchanges of riot-control equipment. Buying a product approved by a military expert also transfers to police units the symbolic power, or cultural capital, of the elite armed forces. This marketing process can be clearly seen in today’s riot-control industry, where products are explicitly sold as military tested and military grade.⁶⁴

Perhaps the most important riot-control expert to emerge out of the 1960s was Rex Applegate. Like Deane-Drummond, Applegate was a seasoned military man and an expert marksman. He was in charge of hand-to-hand combat training at the Military Intelligence Training Center and had undergone British commando training, studied with the Shanghai police and US Marine Corps, and served as a bodyguard to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1943 Applegate published Kill or Get Killed, a user-friendly guide to hand-to-hand combat. Links between military and police training can already be found in the publisher’s foreword for the 1943 edition, which posits that after the war “the world will be faced by criminals who will take advantage of their military training in offensive combat to run riot in a postwar world ripe for trouble.” In 1964 an updated edition of the book was released, under the new title Crowd and Riot Control Including Close-Combat Techniques for Military and Police. Applegate, now a consultant to police departments around the world, included new chapters on dealing with riots and protests. A more widely marketed and updated 1976 edition drew further lessons from the 1960s: “Race riots, intolerance, Communist inspired mob violence, and nationalism emphasize the importance of mob control by the established forces of law and order.” This edition featured chapters such as “Chemical Munitions for Control of Mobs and Individuals” and “The Professional Riot Control Unit.”⁶⁵

In 1969 Applegate published Riot Control-Material and Techniques. Through a series of photos and informational graphics, the book translated techniques from the military’s Civil Disturbances and Disasters guides for a wider law enforcement audience. More than a hundred pages were dedicated to new tear gas equipment and techniques. Applegate advised:

Ideally, each squad should have one gas officer assigned as an integral part of the formation; more than one may be indicated. Others can be held in the reserve to meet the demands of larger riot situations. Generally, the smaller the size of the riot unit, the greater the need for gas officer specialists to be assigned or available to make up for lack of numbers.⁶⁶

Other strategies included crowd infiltration for when tear gas supplies were running low:

Have persons in civilian clothes enter the mob and move to previously-determined locations. At a given time, have these individuals drop tear gas grenades among the crowd and begin to run towards previously selected exits, shouting and inciting panic by yelling, “Gas, let’s get out of here,” etc.… When mob members see other people running in panic, the panic spreads and they follow.⁶⁷

This strategy was best accomplished with new forms of invisible gas. Made of micro-fine particles, this style of gas only creates a cloud when it first emerges from the grenade or canister. After the initial cloud dissipates, protesters can no longer see the gas. This makes it harder to avoid but maintains its “psychological panic-producing effect.” Applegate also recommends the “line of release” method, which involves firing the tear gas so that “the individual grenade clouds merge into a large concentration, covering the entire street to achieve dispersal.” When pockets are left between clouds, protesters can easily find holes to escape into and have an easier time spotting grenades to throw back toward police lines.

While this advice reiterates the need for clear escape routes and favorable wind conditions to keep people safe, the aim is to blanket entire streets in clouds of chemical weapons—preferably invisibly—which can lead to gassing bystanders and gas seeping into nearby buildings or homes. Likewise, despite procedural guidelines, this method is frequently used when there are no escape routes. Because other riot-control strategies can include cordoning off streets with police lines or tactical obstructions (like fences or bollards), protocols can come into conflict with containment strategies and people can become trapped in areas densely saturated with tear gas. This can bring toxicity levels up to lethal dosages and cause death or injury from panic and trampling.

By assuming ideal conditions and perfect operation, these manuals relegate error to individuals. Likewise, they treat injury or death as accidental or the result of incorrect use. Moreover, these guides and the experts who write them are in the business of selling more riot-control weapons (along with more of their own expertise), so they have an incentive to urge readers to try out new tactics and toys.

Applegate also boasts of the benefits of specific name-brand products, such as Chemical Mace, manufactured and sold by General Ordinance Equipment Corporation (GOEC). This liquid spray first used a .9 percent solution of CN when it was introduced in 1965, then switched to CS in 1968.⁶⁸ Both formulas caused severe pain. “When even a small percentage of the droplet burst pattern strikes the face,” Applegate explains, “an intense burning and tearing action takes place.”⁶⁹ While versions of tear gas sprays appeared as early as the 1920s, Mace was the first to gain popularity across police forces.

Mace was not originally intended for police use and was brought onto the commercial market with limited testing.⁷⁰ There were a number of gaps between military protocol, independent scientific testing, commercial marketing, and police practices; experts on the payroll of tear gas suppliers, like Deane-Drummond and Applegate, attempted to fill those gaps under the guise of military expertise. Law professor Joseph Page writes, “Police departments often staged demonstrations with the sprays, but these were more in the nature of public relations performances than scientific experiments and took place only after the decision to adopt the sprays had been reached.”⁷¹ A long list of medical studies and lawsuits brought this problem to the fore.

In addition to Mace, GOEC’s Pepper Fog, trademarked in 1968, claimed it “seals off or clears out streets, squares, building or benches in seconds—without contamination!” Applegate praised its ability to “safely but non-violently evacuate” passive sit-ins—so long as there are clear exits. “This tactic,” Applegate wrote, “can many times avoid ‘manhandling’ with consequent ‘police brutality’ charges when such situations occur.”⁷² Like Deane-Drummond, Applegate knew that how riot-control policing looked was as important as how effective it was. New products that could reduce the “gas look” while keeping the effects were highly desirable. As Deane-Drummond argues that the employment of tear gases “immediately provides insurgents with a ready made anti-establishment propaganda weapon and the cry of ‘gas’ has always been emotive.”⁷³

Despite public inquiries, congressional subcommittees, lawsuits, and even army manuals that all advised against offensive, combat-style approaches to policing civil unrest continued. Riot-control practices continued to intertwine with military training, turning the streets into battle zones, casting civilians as enemy combatants. New tear gas chemicals, munitions, and a wide array of devices to disperse them were gaining popularity and new developments were on the horizon. While the United Kingdom was largely spared from tear gas during the 1960s, residents of Northern Ireland were about to get their first taste of new and improved CS gas. Irish civil rights protests provided a perfect opportunity for the United Kingdom to get back into the game of modern riot control. Making up for lost time, the country quickly became an industry innovator and home to the world’s leading medical experts on CS gas.

5

The Science of Making CS Gas “Safe”

Derry—or Londonderry, depending on which side of “the troubles” your sympathies lie—is located just beside the border that cuts the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland. As residents will tell you, “The split name says it all.” While road signs inside the Republic will point you toward “Derry,” those in Northern Ireland direct you to “Londonderry.” Both are constantly defaced, leaving visible layers of the city’s contentious past.

The city’s colonial architecture and unique landscape have shaped the political struggles of its inhabitants for more than four centuries. Between 1614 and 1619, King James I erected city walls of thick lime, earth, and local stone to protect (and partition) Protestant settlers from Irish Catholic rebels—financed by the London businessmen of the Irish Society, chartered in 1613 for economic development via colonial expansion in Ireland.

Outside the city walls was the area now known as the Bogside. Originally underwater, this area gained its name when water levels fell and the river became a stream, eventually allowing structures to be built along the bog’s side. The 1700s and 1800s saw impoverished Donegal families move into the area. They are thought to have been in transit, seeking passage out, but limited finances and few job skills left them stuck in the Bog, in poor conditions.¹ Over time, the population grew younger and the area’s infrastructure older. By the mid-1900s, overcrowding was commonplace throughout the Bogside. Three generations of family could be found crammed into two rooms. “Allegations of discrimination in housing allocations,” a 1967 Royal Commission report read, “exist on a wide scale, particularly where a dispersal of the population would result in a changed political base.”²

To keep their seats, members of Parliament tried to secure districts by forcing Irish families to remain in the Bogside. A new housing estate, the Rossville Flats, went up, standing ten stories high and housing 178 families. The building’s red, yellow, and blue décor and flat, railed rooftop made it a pillar amid the area’s sunken landscape. Yet this mega-estate was not enough to solve the housing shortage. Plans for more home construction in other wards encountered challenges from the Unionist Corporation, which continued to block progress and to maintain political and economic control of Derry.

Inspired by struggles overseas, particularly in the United States, Palestine, and South Africa, Bogside tenants and local socialists began to organize, forming, among other groups, the Derry Housing Action Committee. “There was high unemployment, no housing program at all, electoral boundaries which hadn’t been expanded, and there was no such thing as one man one vote—there were all sorts of things wrong,” committee member Dermie McClenaghan recalls.³ The organization began by disrupting housing council meetings. A direct-action campaign soon followed in the flurry of worldwide uprisings across the spring of 1968.

On an unusually clear January day in 1969, unarmed civil rights protesters marched under blue skies from Belfast to Derry. At a bridge crossing just outside Derry’s city center, they were met by loyalists carrying rocks and sticks, who beat them as the police watched, doing nothing. This led to rioting in town, followed by retaliation as loyalists smashed Bogside windows and harassed people in their homes. A few months later, on April 19, threats of violence from loyalist militants persuaded civil rights organizers to call off a scheduled march. Civil rights supporters gathered together in the city square to recuperate, but loyalists pelted them with rocks. This time, the police did not stand by doing nothing. Instead, they charged at the civil rights supporters, batons swinging. Back at the City Hotel, the organizers’ hub, panicked residents were rushing in with reports that Bogside boys were being beaten and unlawfully arrested. Then came the news of Sammy Devenney.

A well-respected middle-aged man in the Bogside, Sammy Devenney was uninvolved in political activity; his home was in the pathway of young rioters. Devenney’s eighteen-year-old daughter Ann remembers the anger in the policemen’s voices as they approached the house: “I could see them, banging at the windows with their batons … about five or six of them were at the window and they said, ‘We’ll break the effin’ door down.’ ” The police stormed in. Ann used her body to shield her younger sister, who was recovering from an appendix operation. Out of the corner of her eye, Ann watched as the police attacked her father. “There were three of them at my daddy with batons … and they kicked him in his stomach and his back and they were just hitting him everywhere.”⁴

News of the attack spread through the Bogside. Men rushed from the hotel to the Devenney’s home. They found the door kicked in and the sitting room covered in spatters of blood—walls, chair, floor, ceiling, even across the face of Sammy’s four-year-old son.⁵ According to an inquiry report, Devenney was “left lying on the floor with blood pouring from a number of head wounds and with his dentures and spectacles broken.” Less than two months later, the injury killed him.⁶

The Battle of the Bogside

Shortly after Devenney’s death came the controversial Apprentice Boys march, an annual commemorative march that carried the legacy of British force in Northern Ireland, complete with loyalist songs, “done with the utmost arrogance and bravado to show once again who won the battle many years ago.”⁷ The parade’s drum and fife bands celebrate Protestant settlers’ defeat of an Irish- and Scottish-led siege on the walled city in 1689.

In the lead-up to the march, a Derry Citizens’ Defence Association formed and met with senior figures of the Apprentice Boys to request the parade be rerouted. Their request was refused. Fearing the troubles to come, some older and younger residents sought refuge outside the Bogside. Barricades went up and calls went out for able-bodied men to come and defend the community. They wove piles of wood and wire modeled after the 1968 barricades of Paris’s boulevards. Young community leader and local MP Bernadette Devlin became a central strategist of the street, directing how to build and where to fortify structures.

On the day of the march, Derry was on edge. Loyalists rounded the city walls, taunting Bogsiders and throwing pennies as insulting symbols of poverty.⁸ The Bogsiders stood firm at their barricades. By afternoon, the taunting on both sides turned to stone throwing. As evening fell, the police pushed through the Rossville Street barricade trailed by loyalists, looking like the vanguard of the Protestant militants. Loyalists smashed up windows of the towering Rossville estate, breaching the borders of Free Derry. The Bogsiders shortly regained momentum and, in crowds of a thousand strong, drove the loyalists back to the edge of the neighborhood.⁹

At 11:45 that night, Rossville Street became the first UK site of civilian CS gassing. On advice from the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) sought out CS supplies. “We originally had the CN variety,” explain RUC deputy inspector Shillington, “but we have been advised that CS is the more modern and humane type, which in fact is used by the services.”¹⁰ The RUC quickly telephoned the Minister for Home Affairs. While driving from Belfast the Minister approved the deployment. Supplies of CS were brought in from nearby military storage. According to the RUC, the police responsible for discharging CS in the Bogside had received some, “but not enough,” training.¹¹ Officers were issued 1.5-inch Verey pistols with a seventy- to eighty-yard range for “defense,” as well as canisters to use when withdrawing. All day August 13, they fired CS intermittently in attempts to disperse the crowds. The gas kept coming until 4:30 in the afternoon on August 14.¹²

Throughout this bombardment, the Bogsiders retaliated with petrol bombs, stones, and, when available, returned CS cartridges. On the second day of fighting, a group of Bogsiders positioned themselves atop the Rossville Flats. “The high flats was wonderful,” a Bogsider recalls. “But they needed ammunition, so you had to climb eight stories with a bin bag full of stones.”¹³ With men and boys perched defensively on the rooftop, older residents gathered in their homes below, creating milk-bottle-bomb assembly lines, stuffing rags, sugar, flour, and wicks into bottles. The flat roof and periphery railing of the Rossville Flats provided an ideal tower-top defense in this otherwise sunken territory: From this perch, the elevated city walls that daily marked Bogsiders’ social and economic exclusions were for once on lower ground. But the Bogside’s depressed landscape also meant that the air could stagnate, CS hung in the area for hours. At other times the gas traveled, rolling with even the lightest breeze. It eased up into the broken windows of Bogside flats. Police also tried to launch CS atop the Rossville estate in efforts to quell the milk-bottle aerial attacks, but few, if any, of the cartridges made it up those ten stories. Instead, they smashed through the windows of residents’ homes.

One of these windows led into the room where a sixteen-month-old infant, Martin, slept. Hearing his baby cry and cough, Martin’s father ran in. He found the room filled with gas. His son was gasping for breath, tears running down his cheeks. His face had gone pale. Martin’s father felt his child might die without attention.

Derry resident Dr. Raymond McClean found himself baffled by the gas’s effects: “Not only were their eyes inflamed and watery, but many of them weren’t able to breathe to such an extent that several were carried in. I didn’t know what we were dealing with.”¹⁴ People didn’t know how to respond. Were they better off opening windows and doors to clear it out, or should they shut them tighter to prevent another round getting in? As its inventors were well aware, gas causes as much psychological fear as it does physical pain.

Those in Derry who had any experience of mass gassing associated the CS with wartime bombings. People dug through their cupboards for old gas masks and distributed them around the streets. However, the old masks offered little protection. Their filters no longer worked and gas often got trapped inside them. In fact, many of the filters were made with asbestos, which is harmful to the respiratory system. Even after they were found to be ineffective, children took to the masks like toys. “We knew they didn’t work,” a Bogsider confesses, “but we liked the way they looked.”¹⁵ These days were full of excitement and fear. “I never slept,” remembers Bernadette Devlin. “For three days and three nights, I was on an adrenaline high.”¹⁶

As the gassing went on, coping tips began to trickle in. A US Army veteran who happened to be in Derry at the time offered advice, typed up in a leaflet that circulated around the Bogside streets. French students in the area are also reported to have taught locals how to flush their eyes out with water and hold vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces. Devlin recalls, “The whole air was saturated … and we’d not a gas mask between us … So we made do with wet blankets, with cotton wool steeped in vinegar, with handkerchiefs soaked in sodium bicarbonate.”¹⁷ One elderly resident stood out on her stoop with a bottle of brown vinegar. As Bogsiders passed by, she poured a drop onto their outstretched handker-chiefs—which in many cases were not handkerchiefs at all but scraps of fabric, and in one boy’s case, an old pair of ladies’ underpants.¹⁸

By the end of the thirty-six hours of CS gassing, a total of fourteen 50-gram grenades and 1,091 cartridges containing 12.5 grams of CS had blanketed the Bogside. This brought a flurry of media attention, with stories like baby Martin’s causing moral panic to ripple through the country. Facing a PR disaster, the Home Office had to act quickly, setting up yet another tribunal to look into Northern Ireland’s most recent disturbances and announcing that a full medical investigation would be conducted into the effects of CS gas in the Bogside.

The Chemical Defense Establishment

Sir Harold Himsworth, a physician in London, was appointed to lead the medical investigation. Himsworth, an advocate of fusing the skills of politicians and scientists, had served as secretary to the Medical Research Council and presided over the Section of Experimental Medicine at the Royal Society of Medicine. In 1952 he was knighted into the Order of Bath for his contributions to civil service.¹⁹ A 1958 New Scientist article profiling Himsworth’s accomplishments called him a man of undoubted authority, “receptive, courteous and decisive.”²⁰

On September 1, 1969, Himsworth and his team arrived in Belfast. Their first stop was the Ministry of Health, where they were briefed on events in Derry by a group of Belfast doctors and government officials. They headed to the GOC Army headquarters for an “off the record” interview with Sir Ian Freeland, director of operations in Northern Ireland, and a briefing on the situation from a brigade commander. This was followed by another press conference in which Himsworth insisted that “there was nothing sinister in the use of CS gas.”²¹ Himsworth was “kindly loaned” the Army’s Public Relations Officer, and by the end of the evening the team had additionally secured help from Colonel Millman, who “proffered any assistance within his power.”²²

On day two, Himsworth’s committee ventured into the Bogside. Picking their way over rubble and through the ruins of barricades, they were quickly surrounded by locals anxious to tell their stories. They questioned a girl clutching a teddy bear as her mother explained the persistence of her sore eyes and lips. Derry doctor Donal McDermott related that “scores of people had suffered from vomiting, diarrhea and nausea.”²³ A fifty-five-year-old resident reported that her pet budgie had died in its cage; others shared stories of how children’s suffering appeared more acute than adults’. Confused, scared youngsters often rubbed their eyes, worsening the effects. The committee canvassed the area, examining the Rossville Flats and CS cartridges saved by the Citizens’ Association. Himsworth expressed skepticism over media claims that there had been sixty to a hundred cases of gastroenteritis and diarrhea. If this were true, he argued, it should have been officially classified as a major crisis; illness at this scale required government notification. What he didn’t see was that, in the middle of a riot, people’s fears of arrest and the frenzy of the commotion bar many from seeking hospital treatment. Even under normal conditions, people in impoverished areas are reluctant to go to hospitals or doctors for digestive problems, preferring to tough it out or use home remedies, but in a city divided along religious, political, and economic lines, seeking formal medical care was even more contentious. This city of two names was also a city of two hospitals: The nearest was staffed by Unionist doctors, and many Bogside residents avoided it, opting instead to cross the border into Ireland and receive treatment there.

Most medical treatment during the Battle of Bogside happened in the Candy Corner shop at the top of Westland Street. Off-duty nurses and medics set up a treatment post inside the store. Dr. Raymond McClean’s wife Sheila drove over the bridge to the hospital for antiseptics, dressings, and suturing supplies. The Candy Corner first treated casualties from stone throwing and street fights. After the gassing began, the makeshift medical staff treated lacerations, concussions, and head injuries from CS cartridges, including a young man whose nose was nearly severed off his face. They worked without adequate space or equipment. As gas casualties poured in, volunteer nurse Attracta Bradley recalls, “We really were at a loss on what way to treat it because we’d really been taught basic first aid. We’d never been taught how to manage tear gas.”²⁴ The staff spent over twenty-four sleepless hours tending the CS victims. Then tear gas crept into the Candy Corner as the police advanced, forcing the medical team to relocate. Supplies in hand, they carried the sick up the hill to Creggan, where they re-established the first-aid center in the local Boys’ Club until the gassing finally ceased.²⁵

Amid these riotous conditions it is difficult to imagine how standard hospital notification procedures would be carried out. But Himsworth, a man of record, sought statistics. He was after authorized laboratory reports, not regular people’s tales of gassed babies or dead budgies. Throughout his diary of the visit, he records residents’ stories of their experiences and effects with suspicion and occasionally derision. For example, a physician at Altnagelvin hospital reported the case of chronic asthmatic Charles Coyle, age fifty. The committee recorded in their notes that the man:

had been getting steadily worse for some years. His story (typically Irish) was that on the night of 12 August he was on the city wall when CS gas was dropped some two or three hundred yards in front of him—he walked up to it and sniffed it. Feeling ill he went into the O’Range Hall where we stayed for a while. He then came out and got another whiff of the gas but walked half-a-mile home. For four days afterward he stayed at home, but didn’t see a doctor.

While it is unclear whether it was Himsworth, his secretary, or the doctor who found this case to be “typically Irish,” the comment’s documentation in a formal log signifies the disposition of the “independent” British investigation toward the civilians whose health and well-being they were documenting. Such prejudices matter. Himsworth’s rationalist approach and determination to keep questions of human conditions apart from scientific observations significantly shaped his findings. While personal details like Martin’s father’s fear that his infant might die were quickly dismissed, here the personal was placed in support of a medical description. If Himsworth’s observations had been explicitly acknowledged as military research, these biases could be traced to their root, making accountability easier to map. The problem lies in the claim that this enquiry was independent. The rhetoric and “off the record” meetings masked the team’s deeper connections to the government and military from public view. Their medical research was financed and authorized by the Home Office; the majority of guidance coming in on the ground in Derry was supplied by the military and police. Later, the Ministry of Defence’s Chemical Weapons branch became the key source of experimental data. This kind of scientific bias leads to partial pictures: People’s experiences get cut up and rearranged into government-sanctioned shapes. As with the chemists of World War I, who perfected their poisons to gain prestige, when clinical tasks trump human accountability, atrocity—however unintentional—often follows.

Himsworth’s committee traveled directly from Northern Ireland to Porton Down, the MoD’s chemical testing facility. Nestled within sixteen acres of countryside, Porton Down was a top-secret station for military research and weapons development, running throughout World War II and the Cold War period and continues to be so in the present day. An estimated twenty thousand military “volunteers” went through the facility, many as subjects in experiments on chemical agents. Told that the military was testing treatments for common colds, volunteers were guaranteed safety and given shillings for participation. As Rob Evans uncovered in researching his book Gassed, “They wanted to get away for any type of break, just anything … But sadly very few actually knew what Porton Down was, or what they were letting themselves in for.”²⁶

Some of the chemical agents tested on these young men and women included the nerve agent sarin, different mustard gases, and lachrymators—tear gases—as well as other kinds of chemicals, like smoke bombs and dyes. There were skin tests, oral tests, tests of irritants on the eyes, behavioral tests, and gas-chamber tests, among others. “It was hideous,” according to retired officer Patrick Mercer, “a hutted camp, where it seemed to do nothing but rain. There were a series of bunkers to which you were thrust from time to time to be gassed with CS and to go through ghastly exercises underground wearing a gas mask.”²⁷ Between 1941 and 1985, approximately 8,850 tear gas tests, mostly of CN, CS, and CR agents, were conducted on more than 2,800 veterans.²⁸ The development of CS as a riot-control agent began in the 1950s and increased in the 1960s as unrest in Northern Ireland grew.

When Himsworth arrived at Porton Down in 1969, the facility was known as the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, shortened the following year to the Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE). This secretive testing site has undergone eight name changes and numerous structural re-organizations in its near-century of operation. Today it is called the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. In the late 1990s, a large-scale probe was launched into the human experiments at Porton Down. Veteran Gordon Bell, supported by others, initiated the enquiry. Between 1959 and 1960 Mr. Bell had undergone three tests, including one with sarin and another with CS. His multiple requests for information regarding his records were refused. Determined to hold the government accountable, Bell continued to pressure law enforcement and government authorities to hold a formal investigation.

At a late-night House of Commons session in 1998, South Sutherland MP Chris Mullin raised Bell’s concerns before the Minister for the Armed Forces. “Not for the first time in matters of this nature, there is a feeling that the Ministry of Defence is being economical with the truth,” Mullin said. Citing similar claims brought forth to the House by Bournemouth veterans in 1996, Mullin insisted that Bell was not alone in his recollection of the experiments at Porton Down. This was not a case of retrospective blame, he argued. Rather, it suggested an intentional cover-up:

Many of those experiments and the manner in which they were conducted would have raised concern even by the standards of the 1950s—more so, in fact, as the experiments carried out by the Nazis that prompted the Nuremberg code were fresh in the public mind in the 1950s … I put it to the Minister [for the Armed Forces] that those who were the subject of the experiments at Porton Down were not told the truth precisely because it would have been unacceptable even by the standards of the time.²⁹

But in 1969, when Himsworth visited, all of this had yet to be exposed; the chemical testing facility was running business as usual, operating on what Grimley Evans describes as “wartime ethics.” In an atmosphere of perceived imminent attack, utility reigns supreme and military secrecy often overrides informed consent. On top of this, Porton Down was run by a mixed civilian and military staff. This created levels of secrecy and security clearance that made it difficult to practice any one protocol. It was hard to determine fault when things went wrong.³⁰ Such claims to layers of organizational complexity tend to evaporate accountability in what Linsey McGoey has called “strategic ignorances.”³¹ The atrocity at Porton Down was not only the procedure, but the value system. What—and who—made it an issue of scientific importance to directly apply known poisons to people’s skin, lungs, and eyeballs without consent?

The results of the Porton Down experiments played a key role in the Himsworth Committee’s report. Between October 1969 and March 1971, Sir Himsworth and his team held a series of meetings at Whitehall in which they shared scientific findings, correspondence with medical professionals, and laboratory evidence. Their priorities included finding evidence of CS’s effects on the young, the elderly, and pregnant women, as well as people with previous illness. Himsworth also asked the committee to investigate cases of chemical manufacturers repeatedly exposed to CS and to gather “full details of the Vietnam experience.”³²

Conspicuously absent from the agenda was any reference to the United States’ widespread use of CS and other tear gases to combat civil protests. Himsworth was silent on the crushed labor strikes, civil rights struggles, antiwar protests, and even the helicopters that sprayed CS over thousands on the Berkeley campus just four months before the team’s first meeting, all of which were heavily publicized in the United States and discussed at UN meetings on the Geneva Protocol.

The Geneva Protocol bans the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in war. The United Kingdom and the other European Allies had signed onto the agreement in 1925. While the United States was instrumental in bringing the protocol forward and President Roosevelt made appeals to it during World War II, the United States did not ratify it until modifications were made in 1975. This position garnered international attention during its widespread use of chemical weapons in Vietnam. In 1966, the Hungarian delegation, backed by other Eastern European nations, put the matter back on the UN’s agenda. “The hollow pretexts given for using riot-control gases in Vietnam,” the Hungarians argued, “have been rejected by world public opinion and by the international scientific community, including scholars in the United States itself.” Appealing to the Geneva Protocol, Hungary called for the use of chemical weapons to constitute an international war crime.³³ One prominent US scholar who rejected the use of riot-control agents in Vietnam was Nobel laureate and Harvard professor George Wald, who attested that “under combat conditions, tear gas is part of a thoroughly lethal operation.”³⁴ But the US delegation continued to argue that the Geneva Protocol should not prohibit riot-control agents, a position that garnered UK support.

Tear Gas as a Drug

Amid increasing counterinsurgency efforts in Northern Ireland and in light of these international debates, in February 1970 British foreign secretary Michael Stewart drew on the Himsworth Committee’s interim report to announce a new stance: “CS smoke is considered to be not significantly harmful to man in other than wholly exceptional circumstances; and we regard CS and other such gases accordingly as being outside the scope of the Geneva Protocol.”³⁵ This announcement led to uproar from members of Parliament, NGOs, antiwar groups, and UN delegates.

In June 1970 Sir Alec Douglas-Home took over as Foreign Secretary. While he had reservations over this policy change, the MoD was adamant that CS fell outside the Protocol’s restrictions, which deal with substances that were “significantly harmful or deleterious to man—an argument which it rejected.”³⁶ In addition, if the government were to deem CS deplorable in war, it would be difficult to justify its domestic use as a means of crowd control. The MoD appealed to the “smoke’s” pacifying powers: “CS has saved innocent lives and gave the police and army a much more humane option than batons, bayonets and bullets or bombs.”³⁷ This position would soon be validated by the Himsworth Committee, which posited that the effects of CS should be considered “from a standpoint more akin to that from which a drug is regarded than from that from which we regard a weapon.”³⁸ This framing worked to partition the team’s enquiry from concurrent debates over international law happening in Parliament; it was crucial that the public not be led to translate the ethics of combat to the domestic “troubles” in Northern Ireland. These guidelines, given by the Home Office, delineated a particular relationship between humans and tear gas. It asked the scientists to find a way to calculate safety, to measure it in doses. With drug tests in mind, the Himsworth Committee proceeded to consider CS’s effects with the ultimate aim of authorizing its use.

The government, like a drug company trying to push its product to the market by funding its own research, had employed Himsworth and his team as stakeholders; its members had vested interests in the research and development of this chemical agent. Dr. John Barnes, the committee’s technical advisor, worked in a research capacity for the Ministry of Defence throughout his time on the independent enquiry team. At the very first committee meeting Dr. Barnes raised the issue, “to be quite sure that it was appreciated that he was the Chairman of the Biology Advisory Committee of the Chemical Defence Advisory Board.” Sir Himsworth promptly reassured him: “The Committee is an independent body charged to make an independent investigation and to report to the Home Secretary.” The committee members were “to have no special relations with any other advisory bodies.” Requests for evidence should be made in the same way, whether from government departments or private individuals.³⁹ Moving between abstract independence and practical allegiance, Himsworth’s attempts to remain above bias were questioned by his own team.

In the final committee report, the team drew attention to some of the problems arising from their task: What did it in fact mean to consider a weapon as a drug? How could safety be measured medically? Investigating CS as a “druglike” substance required two key considerations. First, they had to determine what distinguished a safe dose from a dangerous dose; and to ask whether the difference was great enough that the drug could be certified as safe. Second, they had to examine the side effects. Were they too great to outweigh the drug’s benefits?, “CS is usually used not in relation to a particular single individual, but in relation to a population,” they noted; during a civil disturbance, it is not only “healthy young adults” who face gassing. CS can affect anyone in the vicinity, including “children, the old, pregnant women and the ill, who are exposed inadvertently.”⁴⁰ Determining safety and risk in these circumstances, the committee pointed out, was both medical and political.

Unlike most drugs, CS is not administered in a controlled oral or topical dose. It is no antibiotic tablet or eczema cream. Deployed as a fog or smoke, CS consists of tiny droplets that are absorbed through the skin and inhaled through the lungs. Its effects vary with weather conditions, topology, spatial structures, pre-existing medical conditions, and personal tolerance levels. These factors make it difficult to determine the exact level of a “dangerous dose.” But “by Command of her Majesty,” Himsworth and his team accomplished just this.

The Himsworth Report

The committee presented clinical, experimental, and observed evidence, doing their best to bracket off any “element of emotion” from their presentation of findings. Extrapolating from animal experiments, since human experience could not be trusted, the Himsworth Committee listed and refuted side effects, detailed dangerous doses, and offered operational guidance. In the end, CS got its clearance for use during civil disturbances. It was labeled safe for the young and old, as well as pregnant women; some warning was given that it should be used with strict guidance in enclosed locations.⁴¹

Derry doctor Raymond McClean, a prominent figure in Derry’s nascent civil rights struggles who went on to become mayor, met Himsworth during the committee’s whirlwind tour of the Bogside. They dined at the Broomhill Hotel, accompanied by McClean’s wife Sheila, a local art teacher, and Himsworth’s secretary, Major Snowden. Sheila spoke with Himsworth at length about literature and politics. While Raymond found Himsworth affable, he sensed that Himsworth was a “grey areas man”—a feeling that later proved all too true.

McClean wrote to Sir Himsworth, “I have discussed your taste in literature with my wife Sheila on many occasions since our last meeting. Apparently she has some understanding of how an intelligent, educated, sensitive person can be interested in injustice and brutality only on some higher plane. I must admit that this understanding has not been given to me.”⁴² The two men corresponded during the production of the committee’s report. At the Candy Corner medical station, McClean had treated CS patients with epilepsy who were “carried into the medical centers in a state of collapse and rigor.” Himsworth’s team declined to look into CS’s effects on epilepsy, concluding instead that “during the period of excitement [epilepsy patients] may have omitted to take their drugs.” Furious, McClean wrote in haste to the British Medical Journal objecting that this claim had no scientific merit. Privately, he wrote to Himsworth, “I was ashamed for you when I read the committee’s comments on epilepsy.”⁴³ He also challenged the report’s evaluation of CS as a drug, questioning how the political situation in Northern Ireland could be reduced to a set of side effects and insubstantial sociological factors. Drawing on his own experiences of increasingly violent repression and internment in Northern Ireland, McClean spread word that “the real purpose of this report must remain in serious question.”⁴⁴

McClean was far from alone in his objections. Two years before the final report was released, the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) preemptively criticized the enquiry, arguing that it was important for the committee to look beyond the clinical and include social scientists’ perspectives “if it is to make the necessary inquiries about the effects of the use of CS gas—not merely on the eyes and lungs of those who consulted doctors, but on the whole group of people affected.”⁴⁵ In 1970, the magazine New Society published a very different picture of the effects of gas in Derry. Unlike Himsworth’s team, the BSSRS sought to understand the informal medical care provided during the Battle of the Bogside. While for Himsworth Derry residents’ lack of hospitalizations was evidence that few people needed medical care, the BSSRS researchers recognized that at times “there were too many causalities to count” seeking treatment at makeshift first-aid stations that had to be repeatedly cleared from CS contamination.⁴⁶

Himsworth had rejected the prospect of carrying out an epidemiological investigation like that proposed by the BSSRS, arguing that widespread questioning “would certainly cause alarm and the retrospective replies obtained would be of very dubious value.”⁴⁷ He arranged for BSSRS representatives to give evidence at a committee meeting, but ultimately dismissed their reports as unsubstantiated sociology.⁴⁸ Indeed, over the course of the investigation Himsworth created doubt around a number of findings and observations, including those of Professor Francis Kahn from the Sorbonne. In 1966 and 1967 Kahn had traveled to Vietnam to investigate the effects of chemical gases on the civilian population and brought back samples from Tay-Ninh that he had collected from an 801b barrel “with a mask and many troubles.”⁴⁹ During his travels Kahn had been shown footage and told anecdotes by Vietnamese doctors and local people of deaths resulting from tear gas. CS grenades were being fired into shelters and tunnels where Vietnamese families were hiding.

While the US Army claimed to be using only CS, many questioned that this chemical agent alone could cause death. The final Himsworth report also raised doubts, noting that Professor Kahn “had no first hand contact with cases there” and that death by asphyxiation could not be directly faulted to CS. The committee suggested that the Vietnamese people’s behavior had led to their own deaths: burrowing into makeshift bomb shelters in efforts to escape the poisons shot from the sky, some ended up starved of oxygen while hiding inside.⁵⁰

In addition to his research in Vietnam, Kahn also investigated the use of CN and CS (called CB in France) during the May 1968 uprisings in Paris. Kahn was a member of the Union of University Teachers and stood on the front lines during the student protests. From within the crowd, he observed cases of panic, eye lesions, and unconsciousness. Professor Kahn also shared the case of Madame Macina, an older woman with a respiratory condition who had died after being caught up in clouds of tear gas. No autopsy was done and she was legally declared to have died of natural causes. Unsatisfied, Professor Kahn attempted to discover more; however, as he explained in a letter to Himsworth, “when we tried to go on in the study of this case, we faced problems since the witnesses, including her doctor, the drivers of the ambulance and her own family did refuse to give us further details.” The professor presumed this was because of “hard pressure from the police.”⁵¹

The Himsworth Report noted this case, but made no mention of Kahn’s comments on the difficulties of obtaining evidence:

The subject was an elderly woman who was known to suffer from a chronic illness that caused shortness of breath. Despite this, she took an active part in the disturbances of the 6th May … Toward the end of the day she got increasingly breathless and in the evening become so ill that she sent to hospital. She was dead on arrival … in view of her previous illness, death was certified as due to natural causes. Clearly the medical man concerned felt justified in believing that her death was related to her pre-existing condition. In the absence of further evidence, we can only accept this.⁵²

Sterilizing the enquiry process from emotion, politics, and personal experience helped Himsworth construct a tidy report, but the scientific method alone could not be trusted to sift through all the laboratory results. The team needed to make sure the press did not get hold of any unappealing experimental data before the publication of the report. During the committee’s eighth, ninth, and tenth meetings, a number of experiments arose showing more severe effects of CS. With mounting pressure to deliver the final report, the chairman had to decide how to handle these unpublished experiments, which became known as the Porton Papers. The committee agreed that the Porton Papers would not be sent out for publication in scientific journals until three to six months after the report was published, as the papers “could be used by hostile parties to confuse the lay public.”⁵³

Ultimately, the Himsworth Report trumpeted experimental results over medical observations and continually downplayed the significance of personal testimony. Personal details on patients were only included when it served to mitigate the ill effects of CS, as in the case of Madame Macina, Vietnamese peasants, and the Bogside father of baby Martin. Likewise, social scientists’ claims that CS effects must be considered in their economic and political context were bracketed at the very outset from debate. Suggestions that the psychological conditions of riot situations could have physiological impacts were brought up in the final report, only to be separated out from the “real effects” of CS. The report treated bodily reactions as side effects; as if they were the result of personal dysfunctions or rare allergies to an everyday product, rather than human bodies responding to poisoned air.

Domestically, the Himsworth Report’s stamp of approval freed Britain to further develop more deadly riot-control agents, counterterrorism technologies, and counterinsurgency tactics—using Northern Ireland as a testing ground. Throughout the 1970s, tensions, between the military, police, loyalists, and Irish protesters escalated. CS gas became so commonplace that families lined their front doors with towels to stop it from seeping in. It was frequently fired at close range and into enclosed spaces. On one occasion police fired CS into a bus full of people.⁵⁴ Political prisoners were frequently gassed, with rights groups claiming that the stronger lachrymatory agent CR was sprayed during the Long Kesh riots in 1974, causing lesions and permanent scarring. In many ways the birthplace of modern notions of “nonlethal” weapons, Northern Ireland was also home to the first use of rubber-coated metal bullets. The year 1978 brought the use of plastic baton rounds (also called plastic bullets), which were made available to police and soldiers. During the 1981 political prisoners’ hunger strike 29,601 rounds were fired at demonstrators, resulting in seven deaths. Eight years later the official death toll from this “nonlethal” technology reached seventeen.⁵⁵ Now deployed around the world, different kinds of impact munitions, commonly referred to as rubber bullets, are frequently fired through clouds of tear gas.

The Himsworth Report continues to be used by governments around the world to justify the use of tear gas. In 1989 the US State Department invoked it to defend exporting $6.5 million worth of tear gas guns, grenades, launchers, and launching cartridges to Israel. This tear gas was thrown into Palestinian houses, clinics, schools, hospitals and mosques, often in residential areas, by IDF forces in the Occupied Territories. Human rights groups recorded up to forty deaths resulting from tear gas, as well as thousands of cases of illness. The State Department, facing criticism, cited the Himsworth finding that “the margin of safety in the use of CS gas is wide” and concluded that suspending tear gas shipments “would be inconsistent with US efforts to encourage the use of restraint by Israel and could work to the disadvantage of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories.”⁵⁶

In 1993, the Himsworth Report surfaced again, making its way into hearings on the FBI and military siege of the Brand Davidian religious complex in Waco, Texas, which left dozens dead. Congressman Sonny Bono stared down his gold-rimmed glasses at Attorney General Janet Reno: “Your decision to approve of gassing the Davidians with the CS gas was based on Dr. Salem’s advice on the report prepared by the British research team?” “I believe it’s referred to as the Himsworth report,” Reno replied.⁵⁷ After hours of intensive scrutiny by the congressional committee. Reno, who had been a chemistry major at Cornell University, sanctioned the deployment of CS gas over a forty-eight-hour period in efforts to end a fifty-one-day standoff between the religious sect and law enforcement.

Strategists hoped the gas would cause leader David Koresh and his followers, who had twenty-two children among them, to exit the compound. But instead of clearing people out, the gas brought returned gunfire. The women and children barricaded themselves even deeper inside. Within hours, the entire structure went up in flames. Seventy-six people were later found dead inside.⁵⁸ The effects of CS gas on those who died at Waco were obscured by the flames; autopsy reports listed the cause of death in most cases as asphyxiation or falling debris. The ethical questions surrounding the FBI’s use of CS against protocol were briefly raised by media critics and members of the congressional committee, but in the end were largely eclipsed by the fire in the public memory.

Despite a long trail of reports of CS harms that came throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, it was Himsworth’s report that remained the technical trump card. Every major inquest or “independent enquiry” conducted in the decades to follow re-established its prominence through processes of expert testimony and citation. These official inquiries worked to maintain dominant structures of scientific knowledge production, affirming the central authority of military research centers and handpicked, government-approved scientific experts. In this system of scientific capital, researchers are encouraged to exchange stamps of safety for professional prestige. With government safety clearances in place, it was time to roll out tear gas in England.

6

Policing with Poison

In July 1981, the streets of Toxteth, Liverpool, exploded in riots protesting the excessive force Merseyside police dealt out to the local black community. Gideon Ben-Tovim, a former member of the Community Relations Council, told the BBC, “There were a lot of incidents of harassment, drug planting, people being criminalized for trivial reasons, heavy-handed policing.” Issues went beyond race relations alone, with tensions around unemployment, housing, education, and equal rights that affected working-class youth and in particular black youth, who were disproportionately at the intersection of race and class.

Police officers’ memories of the riots are infused with fear and adrenaline. Officers were reportedly “banging on their shields and making monkey noises.” Tim Keelan, then a young PC, recalls, “We had no protective equipment, just these round shields and an ordinary copper’s helmet with a flimsy plastic visor. We had no tactical awareness or skills in riot control.” The decision to use CS gas against a crowd for the first time on English soil was made in this climate of fear and distrust.¹

In the early hours of July 6, 1981, police fired at least twenty-five rounds of CS gas at protesters, including “ferret” grenades. Intended to penetrate barricades, these US-manufactured grenades were designed for armed hostage or siege situations. Firing them at distances less than the 250 yards they were designed for could lead to serious injury. That was what happened in Toxteth: “Egg-sized holes” were carved out of Southport footballer Phil Robins’s chest and back.

After Toxteth, the public became gravely concerned over the amount of force used by police to quell a riot that had erupted in response to police brutality. But the socioeconomic inequalities and racism underlying the Toxteth protests, as well as the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival disorder and the 1985 Brixton and Bristol riots, were not the focus of the government-commissioned reports that followed. Instead, these inquiries focused on the inadequacy of existing riot gear and tactics to protect officers from harm. While the public debated police-community relations, law enforcement vowed never to appear so vulnerable again.²

The Merseyside police review of the public disorder in Toxteth upheld the view that “the decision to use CS gas was a correct use of the minimum force which was necessary and available.”³ Scotland Yard agreed and recommended more than seventy additions and improvements to policing equipment, tactics, and policies. This included techniques to advance on rioters, the procurement of armored Land Rovers, and permissions to engage further with CS and rubber bullets. In addition, training in public-order policing would become available to all units, not just senior officers.⁴

As noted in the previous chapter, the British had been using Northern Ireland as a testing site for riot-control innovations researched and developed at Porton Down. By the mid-1970s, London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, was praising the new tactics “developed and used by the army and the RUC SPG, a special police force in Northern Ireland”: not only CS gas and rubber bullets but snatch squads, wedge formations, road blocks, and random stop-and-searches.⁵

Suppliers were already lined up. Dr. Steve Wright, an expert in the history of policing and security, makes sense of these changes in relation to the increasingly neoliberal and business-minded approach to governing that was widespread in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: “A fundamental assumption motivating the use of advanced crowd-control technology,” Wright wrote in 1981, “is that they increase policing capacity and power, in other words, a cost-effective criterion. The idea is that the more force a policeman is permitted to use, the more efficient he becomes in distributing corrective responses into a crowd.”⁶

This risk-assessment model of policing spends little time considering the intricacies of weapons technology or the long-term effects of their use. Just as Sir Harold Himsworth and his committee dismissed emotions and psychological trauma, here police reviews of riot control bracket out both the factors that lead to urban uprisings and the consequences of using a violent force to crush them. With this capital-driven approach to training, it comes as no surprise that the Scotland Yard review found “misunderstandings among police about how law enforcement tied in with sensitive policing.”⁷

By 1989, the United Kingdom was already in the process of procuring new versions of CS for riot control. International Defense Review reported that the MoD and Home Office required 1,500 new guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.⁸ A year later, prison officers joined the call for CS gas and new equipment to quell disturbances. The Prison Officers’ Association claimed budget cuts had left some operations in a state of “unsupervised anarchy.”⁹ These calls for cost-effective light arms solutions were often coupled with a move away from mediation-oriented models of policing. “Coffee with community leaders” came off the agenda after the Brixton riots, while the West Yorkshire prison union secretary argued, “In recognizing the need for reform in the Prison Service let us not forget the need for control.”¹⁰ But of course, as with all shiny new devices, the demand for CS resulted from perceptions of need rather than from real material conditions.

The CS Trials

Over a six-month period from March to August 1996, the Police Research Group documented trials of CS sprays. During this time a total of 3,818 officers from sixteen forces were involved in the trials under review. In addition, 3,122 officers formed a control group unequipped with the spray. During the trial period, officers reported 726 “incidents where CS was drawn and used, and 381 where CS was drawn but not used.”¹¹ Most were filed as public disorder or domestic dispute.

The study surveyed the public and officers, interviewed officers, and compiled civilian complaints relating to CS use. Its conclusions were resoundingly positive, finding that 67 percent of the public was in favor of police carrying CS; while the vast majority of officers made positive comments. “It had boosted their confidence even more than when the batons had been issued as a replacement for truncheons,” the study’s authors reported. The findings also fell in line with the Himsworth Report, declaring, “We have no indication of long-term harm from CS and there is nothing in the reports from police surgeons to indicate that, in their view, CS has caused serious injury to those sprayed or otherwise affected.”¹²

However, while officers perceived “a marked reduction in assaults in trial locations versus control locations, and a sense that CS spray greatly improves their safety, force data on formal reports of assaults shows little difference between trial and control sites.”¹³ In other words, although police felt safer when carrying CS, there was no empirical evidence to suggest that they were any safer. The report also explains that while police felt CS spray was less lethal than the baton, they did not deploy it in place of the baton. Home Secretary Michael Howard assured constituents that he had closely followed the street trials and confirmed that “all scientific evidence shows that CS presents no serious risk to human health.”¹⁴

Absent from this report was any mention of the two high-profile cases of CS-related injuries that occurred during the trial period. The first serious complaint about CS came from within the police force and led to a delay in the trials that were originally scheduled to begin in the spring of 1995. During training, officers fired CS directly at each other at close range, aiming for the eyes, in efforts to simulate operative use on the streets. Several officers were injured. One suffered 50 percent burns to his eyes, experienced “severe pain for several hours after being sprayed,” and went into shock. In attempts to downplay the injury, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and Home Office referred to the burned officer’s injuries as “an allergic reaction” and asked him to go in for examinations as to why he was so susceptible to harm. The officer saw these attempts to transfer blame from the CS spray to his body as “pitiful and unprofessional.” Informing reporters that he had only been subjected to a small dose of CS, the officer asked, “If I got burns to my eyes and head from that amount what could be the implications for people who get more full in the face with their eyes open?”¹⁵

Fearing lawsuits, the ACPO decided to change its training procedures. Rather than have officers spray each other directly in the face, as they would do to the public, in training, police would now use indirect spraying. According to less-lethal-weapons expert Brian Rappert, this meant using a 3 percent rather than a 5 percent concentration spray; “trainee officers [would] walk on a patch of ground that has been sprayed.” This lighter formula and intensity would reduce the number of injuries. But, as Rappert argued, “While these steps might reduce hazards associated with the sprays, they also reduce the likelihood that possible problems associated with exposures to CS sprays would become obvious to central police management.”¹⁶ In other words, protecting cops from injury came at the risk of endangering civilians. While CS spray was deemed not safe enough to spray into officers’ faces, everyday people, supposedly had nothing to fear.

This pattern of preferential treatment for the safety of police over the safety of the public became clear in the case of Ibrahima Sey. Husband of Amie Sey and father to two infant daughters, Sey was a Gambian asylum seeker who was suffering from mental illness. Police were called to the Sey’s home on March 16, 1996, after erratic behavior prompted Amie to search out help. A friend of the Seys, Mr. Paebou Ndimbalan, was also phoned and arrived to accompany Ibrahima Sey and the officers to the Ilford Police Station in London. However, once they arrived, the police refused to allow Mr. Ndimbalan to go in. Instead, he was escorted away. Sey was set upon by six officers, “one of whom grabbed him in a bear hug from behind while others grabbed his arms and legs so that he was brought down to the ground, and he was then rolled onto his stomach for his hands to be cuffed behind his back.”

Taken into custody, Sey died at the police station. The inquest into his death went on for a year. Testimony established that Sey had been sprayed with CS while on his knees with his hands cuffed behind his back in the secured yard of the police station. Upon being brought inside, he was restrained facedown on the floor for at least fifteen minutes until he was found to have stopped breathing. The provisional cause of death was listed as “hypertensive heart disease.” This was officially replaced with “acute exhaustive mania,” a form of sudden death resulting from mental illness. The inquest found that “there was no evidence that the CS spray contributed to the death in any way.”

Unconvinced, the Sey family called for further analysis. Three medical consultants gave evidence that the role of CS could not be dismissed outright: As CS is designed precisely to cause respiratory problems, it likely had played a role in the positional asphyxia that they concluded killed Sey. In other words, they argued that being forcibly held down by multiple officers while handcuffed and then sprayed in the face with CS was what killed Sey—not his mental illness. The doctors told the inquest that there was neither experience nor reported literature to suggest that mental illness can lead to “sudden death.”

In addition to the absence of these two cases from the final report of the CS trials, the trial reviewers also carried undeclared conflicts of interest (echoing the Himsworth Committee’s hand-selected experts). The independent assessor of the CS police trials was Peter Waddington, described in the acknowledgements as a member of the University of Reading’s Sociology department. But Peter Waddington was not a social statistician or an epidemiologist trained in assessing the social and long-term risks of chemicals; he was a former police officer who had already expressed his support for the adoption of CS sprays.¹⁷ Waddington, who is also credited with the invention of kettling, a tactic in which protesters are encircled by police officers and prohibited from leaving an area, sets himself apart from other commentators on policing, to whom he called “the orthodoxy.” Waddington’s orthodoxy refers to nearly every critical voice of the time that supported civil liberties, including the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science and the Greater London Council. At the 1995 British Criminology Conference—just one year before the CS spray police trial review came out—Waddington dismissed these groups as “pessimistic” and unfamiliar with the realities of everyday policing.¹⁸ Painting their critical positions as methodologically and analytically unsound, Waddington advocated increasing police powers. In 1996, at the peak of the CS trials, he argued in Police Review that counterterrorism legislation should be used to increase officers’ stop-and-search capabilities.¹⁹

While independent assessors cannot be expected to be entirely neutral or free from opinion, hiring experts with obvious partisan views and direct links to the police force surely raises some ethical flags. Yet journalists reporting on tear gas rarely make any reference to its contested medical history. This pattern is far from unique to CS spray. More recently, the UK rollouts of both Tasers and water cannons repeated this scientific whitewashing process, picking and choosing its experts and medical findings from among its ideological allies and business networks. Members of the review committees tasked with advising the Home Office on what weapons should hit the streets remain secret, sealed beyond the reach of Freedom of Information requests.²⁰

With the CS trials report published, on August 21, 1996 Home Secretary Michael Howard announced to the British public, “I fully support any chief police officer who wishes to issue CS to officers on the beat.”²¹ He assured that “all the scientific evidence shows that CS presents no serious risk to human health.” Howard, a member of the “Cambridge Mafia” of young conservatives that rose to political power in the 1980s, made his mark on British policing with the 1993 “prison works” policy package, which aimed to increase imprisonment rates and jail young offenders.

The official reason for rolling out this new policing equipment was police officer self-defense. CS was perfect, Howard said, because it “does not require strength to use—and is therefore especially valuable to female officers who are sadly sometimes targeted for attack by criminals.”²² In the lead-up to the release of CS sprays in the United Kingdom, images of Vanessa Greening, a twenty-two-year-old police officer, were splashed across the papers. Greening had come to the rescue of a colleague, who had been knocked unconscious with a sledgehammer during a Birmingham burglary, and was hit over the head with an iron rod. Photos of Greening lying in a hospital bed with a black eye accompanied pleas for CS spray from her West Midlands police chief, Sir Ron Hadfield. “Officers face injury and danger every day,” Sir Ron (as the locals called him) explained. “We need something that’s going to stop people attacking us without giving us guns.” Like the Home Secretary, Sir Ron appealed to science to reassure civilians; CS sprays carried “the same health warning as Tipp-Ex,” a popular brand of white-out correction fluid.²³

Greening’s plight provided excellent leverage to the government’s claim that vulnerable officers needed more equipment for self-defense. Speaking in Parliament in January 1996, Minister of State David Maclean argued that “attacks on the police … demonstrate the need for the best available protection. West Midlands’ chief constable is keen that his officers should be able to use CS spray for self-defense, and CS is an effective incapacitant.”²⁴

Yet not everyone saw things through Howard’s safety-colored lenses. Between 1996 and 1998 the National Schizophrenia Fellowship campaigned to ban the use of CS spray in hospitals and advocated for better training and understanding of severe mental illness. With cuts to services and inadequate help for those with mental illness, police were often called upon to help. In one such case, Louise, mother of a teenage boy, Joshua, rang the police at two in the morning at the request of the family physician’s night service.²⁵ The police arrived wearing riot gear. Louise recalls standing in their crowded flat with the police and her three children, all of mixed European-African descent: “We were very scared and my son straightaway went to hide in his bedroom.” Louise convinced some of the police to leave and the others to take off their protective gear. After five hours, it became clear the night doctor had no intention of arriving to help. At 9:30 in the morning Joshua’s doctor and a social worker came to take him to the hospital. The police returned, in their riot gear, and told Louise they might use handcuffs. “I heard my son scream, ‘Mummy, mummy. They’re killing.’ I rushed to his room and saw three officers pinning down my son while the fourth sprayed him in the eyes with CS gas. Within moments we were all choking and spluttering—family and police alike. I have had half of my left lung removed and my eldest daughter suffers with asthma.” Louise recalled the agonizing effects of the CS spray. “However much I washed clothes and bedding, our eyes streamed with the aftereffects of the spray.” Joshua was left traumatized, terrified of going to the hospital and fearful of the police.

Such cases outraged the mental health community. CS was being used instead of talking to patients; critics called it a “chemical straitjacket,” used both to bring people to hospital and on National Health Service (NHS) premises. Nurses, doctors and medical organizations made numerous public complaints about it. A report released in 1998 led to calls for independent scrutiny of the use and effects of CS. The Home Office press team announced their support for such an investigation, returning to the rhetoric of officer safety: “Police officers take daily risks in the course of protecting the community from serious crime. Latest figures show that more than 15,000 officers were assaulted in 1996–7 and the number of serious attacks increased for the third year running.”²⁶ The Home Office ignored the fact that CS spray did not reduce assaults or replace police usage of the baton, findings that both contravene the notion that CS spray is “the best available protection.”

In the time between the 1971 Himsworth Report and the 1996 trials, medical researchers had linked CS to permanent but nonlethal lung damage, prolonged coughs and shortness of breath, heart failure, hepatocellular damage, and aneurysms, particularly in the elderly.²⁷ Also absent from this government PR campaign to roll out CS spray was any mention of the three police forces in England and Wales that decided not to issue the devices. Northamptonshire police, for instance, decided against issuing CS spray because of fears of long-term health effects and the negative impact on their relationship with the public. Surrey police, in addition to refusing to take part in CS trials, asked pyrotechnics company Pains Wessex to concoct a safer alternative for its officers. During this time CS was also becoming unpopular in Europe, with bans in Italy, Austria, and Germany.²⁸ These doubts influenced experts in the UK who became skeptical that CS could save officers from assault. One former officer turned police researcher, Bill Saulsbury, argued that “incidents happen so quickly that in most cases police won’t have time to use it.” Even Waddington felt that CS residue was a nuisance, as officers often had to clean out their cars because of contamination. While most objectors to CS called for a ban or for greater regulation, some influential voices responded by rallying to adopt the US alternative, pepper spray.

Pepper Spray

Back in 1973, the first aerosol “pepper sprays” containing oleoresin capsicum (OC) were dispatched to FBI personnel and US postal workers to temporarily incapacitate animals in the case of attack. During the 1980s, the FBI worked with scientists and manufacturers to create a weapons-grade spray. By the late 1980s, law enforcement officers around the country had pepper spray strapped to their belts. US military missions in Rwanda, Haiti, and Somalia also saw soldiers carrying the spray. OC quickly grew to replace Mace—a branded CN irritant formula—as the handheld weapon of choice (see Chapter 4). As an inflammatory agent, pepper spray worked faster than CN or CS sprays and was thought to be more effective against people who were drunk or intoxicated, as well as less likely to cause lasting harm.²⁹

Early forms of pepper spray date back to feudal Japan, when samurai warriors used metsubushi as a form of policing: pepper extract was poured into rice-paper bags and thrown into enemies’ eyes, causing temporary blindness. Chinese fighters are also said to have used the peppers in battle, cooking them in hot oil to produce an irritant smoke. In the fifteenth century, Taino Indians used “gourds stuffed with ashes and ground hot peppers” against attacking Spaniards to unleash a “choking, blinding smoke” on their unsuspecting adversaries. These early forms are often documented to reinforce a sense that this chemical weapon is organic and safe.³⁰ Yet, as scientists working in the area continually point out, there is nothing edible or fun about oleoresin capsicum, the oily extract of pepper plants used in the production of pepper spray—like Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who told viewers the substance was “a food product, essentially,” many pundits trivialize the effects of pepper spray. In reality, the standard dose of pepper spray is qualified at 1.5 million heat units, more than 1.3 million units hotter than the hottest habanero peppers.

The British Home Office had originally rejected pepper spray, noting the lack of available medical studies on its effects, but as CS came under scrutiny, pepper spray’s popularity grew. It seemed the United Kingdom’s affection for its homegrown CS compounds, largely tested at Porton Down since the 1950s, was no match for American marketers. US manufacturers claimed pepper was more effective, safe, and “organic” than its chemical cousin CS. As Safeguard Technology’s managing director, Colin Campbell, put it, pepper was the Rolls-Royce to CS’s Model T Ford. Mixing pseudoscience with anecdotal opinion, Sergeant Mike Bennett, chairman of the London branch of the Police Federation, noted his preference for pepper spray over CS: “It is suggested that pepper spray could give problems to severe asthmatics. But any spray, even hairspray, could have the same effect. What we do know is that the solvent in the CS under trial causes burns.” Following this hairspray science with an ill-founded legal observation, Bennett added, “There has been no litigation on pepper in the US and they are a more litigious country than us.”³¹

These claims were wildly exaggerated. In a 1993 executive brief circulated by the ACPO, Lois Pilant captures the situation well:

Although OC is used extensively in the field, there have been relatively few formal studies on its effectiveness or its health risks. It is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA or the Consumer Product Safety Council. As a result, OC manufacturers have rapidly proliferated in what has become a hotly competitive market. The lack of regulation, the dearth of studies, the novelty of OC spray and manufacturers’ product claims that range from the credible to the ridiculous, have left many administrators frustrated and confused, not knowing whether their officers should be carrying CS, CN, OC, or nothing at all.³²

The international law enforcement community was divided: some called for aerosol sprays to be rolled out to every officer, while others exhibited caution and even wariness toward the commodification of police weaponry.

The Payouts That Brought Us Pepper Spray

Amidst this confusion in the spring of 1996, it was revealed that the primary studies supporting the safety of pepper spray had been carried out by an FBI agent who was receiving payments from a leading pepper spray manufacturer. Between 1989 and 1990, Special Agent Thomas W. W. Ward received approximately $5,000 a month, for a total of $57,500, from the manufacturers of Cap-Stun, which was at the time Lucky Police Products. Ward’s work at the FBI Academy in Virginia was largely responsible for US law enforcement’s adoption of OC sprays. As leader of the FBI’s Firearms Training Unit, Ward frequently lectured on pepper spray use. Quotes from his research and video footage of his training were circulated in training films used in local police departments.

Ward pled guilty and was sentenced to two months in prison for accepting an illegal gift. Both the FBI and Cap-Stun came under pressure from lawyers involved in legal suits against the use of pepper spray. Allen Parachini of the American Civil Liberties Union said, “It is our position that the FBI work has tainted everything that followed it. It laid a foundation of sand under a house of cards.” Placing blame on manufacturers, Frederick Remer, a lawyer representing the family of a man who died after he was sprayed with OC during an arrest, told the San Francisco Examiner, “I think law enforcement agencies were duped by a chemical company who wanted to sell their product.”³³

Some of the strongest resistance to OC came from security officers. In North Carolina, corrections officers filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop pepper spray training. State health and occupational-safety committees launched an investigation into OC training practices. Drawing from field observations and a medical literature review, the investigators concluded that exposure to OC spray constituted an unacceptable health risk. In 1997, the North Carolina Medical Society adopted a resolution calling for safety guidelines; in 1998, safety measures were recommended for trainings, including providing safety goggles, spraying away from the eyes, screening for pre-existing health conditions, and having medical staff on hand to administer first-aid treatment.

Medical experts from Duke University Hospital argued that “serious adverse health effects, even death, have followed the use of OC sprays.” In stark contrast to law enforcement communications that repeatedly claimed that no deaths had ever been linked to pepper spray or CS, the Duke medical experts cited the National Institute of Justice’s own study to report that more than seventy in-custody deaths since 1993 had involved the use of pepper spray.³⁴ The Duke researchers argued that pepper sprays “should be regarded as poisons or weapons and kept away from children and teenagers.” They advocated for better training, more thorough and objective evaluation of hazards, and clearer communication with the public about the potential dangers of OC, particularly to children and youth.³⁵

As in the Sey case in the United Kingdom, in the United States law enforcement forensic teams tried to challenge the link between pepper spray and deaths. This decoupling of cause and effect is performed through diagnoses of positional asphyxia and “excited delirium.” The sudden deaths of inmates are deemed not to be the fault of security officers but of the drunken or intoxicated state of inmates, particularly those with mental illness or obesity. Such shifts of blame are rejected by the vast majority in the medical community, who state that “excited delirium” is not a real condition, yet this diagnosis continues to persist with regard to in-custody death cases today.³⁶

Tear Gas and the Alter-Globalization Movement

With OC rolled out in the United States and CS hitting the streets of the United Kingdom, Canada did not want to fall behind in its policing tactics. By the early 1990s, aerosol pepper sprays were making their way to the Mounties. In 1992, British Columbia hosted trials across seven departments, allocating thirty-seven officers OC spray. The spray was discharged 104 times in the six-month trial period. Police reported that the spray was effective 93 percent of the time, assuring media outlets that were no lasting side effects.

Canadian forces soon found themselves involved in legal cases over the abuse and misuse of pepper spray. During an early alter-globalization protest at a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 1997, Staff Sergeant Hugh Stewart of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was caught on video drenching students with pepper spray. Assigned to remove seated protesters from a road blockade, the officer is shown to yell some orders at the pacifist demonstrators; seconds later, he presses down on the nozzle of his fire-extinguisher-sized container of pepper spray, dousing the students—and the lens of CBC cameraman Robert Douglas. The action earned Stewart the nickname “Sergeant Pepper,” brought hours of airtime to the topic, and secured the incident a prominent place in CBC’s news footage archive. During testimony at APEC’s inquiry into violent policing of the student-led protests, Sergeant Stewart claimed self-defense: “I defended myself. And quite frankly I was concerned about defending myself. I was concerned about getting people off of me and not having them assault me.”³⁷

Law enforcement leaders and the Prime Minister stood by their use of force, ridiculing civil-liberties complaints. Notoriously, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien pointed to the “organic” qualities of the weapon to downplay its harm, saying, “For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.” Sergeant Pepper became an early meme of the Canadian alter-globalization movement, traveling through student papers, social movement campaign materials, and early web communications. For transnational protest cultures, the 1990s marked a crucial period in the rise of mobile technologies, the strategic use of the Internet for mobilization and media communications, and countersurveillance of the police. Since a home recording of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers went viral in 1991, video footage has taken an ever more prominent place in debates over police–public relations.³⁸

The excessive police use of pepper spray at APEC marked the beginning of the bigger, faster, and farther-shooting onslaught of tear gases that went on to be deployed as part of transnational policing strategies to contain and repress the burgeoning alter-globalization movement. Fueled by the increasing neoliberalization of world markets and inspired by Global South uprisings like that of the Zapatistas in Mexico, cities that hosted international economic summits saw their streets flooded with tens of thousands of protesters calling for more humane and just economic alternatives to for-profit superpowers. These protesters were met with massive quantities of all different types of tear gas.

At the 2001 meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) political forum in Genoa, police used large supplies of tear gas. An alter-globalization activist recounts,

Cops everywhere, guns everywhere, tanks for god’s sake! The whole city was tear-gassed. Tear gas was thrown from helicopters and 8th floor apartments. Only luck save you from severe beatings and charges. Not even pacifists and official looking people, like lawyers were safer.³⁹

Such summit protests saw millions of Homeland Security and counterterrorism dollars spent on policing civilian protest. Pre-emptive policing, surveillance, infrastructural blockading and fencing, as well as intensified public relations campaigns, accompanied the military siege-style tactics used in these city streets and rural towns. International alliances formed between government agencies to share tactics and techniques, touting safety and cloaking repression under the guise of “event management.” This strategy, which is still dominant today, sees the European Union listing funding streams for public assembly under “Security and Terrorism,” maintaining a message after Genoa Richard K. Moore interpreted as “Go back to your home, do not meddle in what doesn’t concern you.” Tear gas often plays a central function in these modes of suppressing mass protest, policing not only the ground and the body but the air itself.⁴⁰

Tear Gas Sprays and Icons of Resistance

At the University of California, Davis, Lieutenant John Pike went from campus cop to Internet meme overnight. During an Occupy movement student protest on November 18, 2011, Pike sprayed OC directly into the faces of seated students. Caught on video, the action revealed no sign of danger or threat to the officer, a perspective upheld by a university investigation and later in court. Pike went viral. Within days, his image could be found on the Internet pepper spraying an array of innocents, from women relaxing in the park in Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon to the animated rainbow creatures of My Little Pony. As memes circulate, they share and create collective sentiment, with humor easing the anger and tension of excessive force. The image of a bad cop provided a target for rage and abstracted revenge in a system where the identities of police officers who perpetrate violence often remain undisclosed and protected.

The case of Scott Olsen, a twenty-four-year-old US marine and Iraq War veteran who participated in Occupy Oakland, also caught media attention and captured public emotion: an officer fired a projectile that hit Olsen directly in the head, causing broken neck vertebrae, brain swelling, and a fractured skull. His case was first reported as an impact wound from a tear gas canister, but it turned out that Olsen had been hit with a beanbag round filled with 20 grams of lead pellets, amid the firing of tear gas and flashbang sound grenades that caused people to scatter and panic.

Scott Olsen was outspoken about his injuries and his service to the country. His backstory and his ability to handle media interviews with charm and precision drew attention to the violent and often highly racialized policing of Occupy Oakland. In 2014, Olsen was awarded a $4.5 million settlement. Asked by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman about the importance of filing lawsuits against the police, Scott told listeners, “They need to know that if they use these weapons, the beanbags and the CS flashbangs, and they use them against a crowd-control policy that they’ve already agreed to, and they blatantly violate that, then they shouldn’t be allowed to use these weapons at all, if they can’t play by the rules that they’ve been given.”⁴¹

Perhaps the most prominent tear gas icon to date is Istanbul’s “Lady in Red,” Ceyda Sungur. While walking across Gezi Park from her academic office, Sungur, wearing a light summer dress and carrying a shoulder bag, was sprayed directly in the face at close range by a riot-control officer. Caught by the cameras, the contrast of a woman in a bright red dress against a heavily armored man standing among a long line of darkly clad riot cops captured a perfect moment of grossly asymmetrical force. But, as Sungur reminds us, she was far from the only one pepper-sprayed that day at Gezi Park. With $21 million worth of tear gas ordered by Turkish authorities between 2000 and 2013, there was plenty to go around. Turkish protestors were repeatedly shot directly and intentionally in the face with tear gas sprays and canisters. Tear gas was also fired into enclosed locations. This resulted in hundreds of injuries, including permanent eye damage and head wounds, and several deaths, included that of fifteen-year-old Berkin Elvan, hit in the head by a tear gas canister while going out to buy bread for his family at a local shop. The assault left him in a coma for 269 days. When Evlan died, tens of thousands attended his funeral; there were solidarity protests around the world and Amnesty International conducted a massive print and social media campaign.

In Turkey, the penguin became an unlikely symbol of the movement after television news stations attempted to block out news of the uprisings by screening a documentary about penguins instead of footage from the protests. Wearing a gas mask with a fist raised in the air, Turkey’s radical penguin was stenciled on walls all over the city and images were sketched, snapped, posted, and tweeted around the world. A gas-masked version of the bird in the Twitter logo also emerged as a potent symbol of the protests after the Prime Minister cracked down on social media, calling it a “troublemaker.”

In 2014, Hong Kong pro-democracy protests gave the world the yellow umbrella. Protestors used umbrellas to deflect the effects of tear gas. Used in combination, they also created an extendable textile barrier between protest and police lines. As a defiant camping material, yellow umbrellas were propped into metal barricades, affixed to shelters as ceiling extensions, even secured to shield plants from the sun in an urban occupation garden. Images of yellow umbrellas spread across social media, earning the protests the nickname of the “Umbrella Movement.”

Trauma for Sale

Pike was first given paid leave and then terminated, despite an appeal attempt in 2012. In 2013, he was awarded $38,000 in compensation for suffering due to anxiety and depression caused by the death threats he and his family received following the incident and was allowed to keep his retirement benefits. He thus remained on the public payroll and his actions were deemed appropriate by the police department’s internal affairs. Such decisions in favor of the police work to legitimate violence against civilians and can dangerously mask the harm law enforcement officers cause. As university attorney Bernie Goldsmith told the Associated Press, it “sends a clear message to the next officer nervously facing off with a group of passive, unarmed students: Go on ahead. Brutalize them. Trample their rights. You will be well taken care of.”⁴²

Adding insult to injury, UC Davis went on a PR mission to make the event disappear from the Internet. In 2016 the Sacramento Bee newspaper obtained documents that showed the university spent at least $175,000 for help with “eradication of references to the pepper-spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor.”⁴³

While the outcomes of excessive-force trials are often riddled with corruption, the trauma experienced by officers who use excessive force is real. Like war veterans, police experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after seeing or inflicting violence. The suicides, domestic violence, and mental illness that can erupt after military combat are likewise experienced in policing. Yet while there is now a general public understanding of the trauma of perpetuating violence in war, in policing, trauma remains part of cycle of silence. When officer trauma is discussed, it is framed as a form of suffering caused by vulnerability rather than by officer violence. This vulnerability is then used to call for more weapons equipment and training—the warrior must be toughened up, not healed.

Trauma specialists and police-training researchers Bronwen Rees and Jonathan Smith argue that when police officers experience traumatic events that are not handled effectively, they can become “locked into a traumatic cycle.” This can include a feeling of always being on duty, with little opportunity for “discharging with the physiological effects of the body.” Their research review of studies involving police officers found that some officers talk about putting on their uniforms as being like putting on a suit of armor “to prevent any issue penetrating their thoughts and feelings and so stopping them from feeling vulnerable.” The block to emotion that comes with gearing up made some officers feel like they were going into “autopilot” or creating “a shield” both on and off the job. Their speech was often littered with military and adversarial language of battle and combat, and while there is often a deep camaraderie within police forces, studies have shown that this can result in a “social bonding that is built upon defensiveness, lack of emotions, and resistance to change.”⁴⁴

Such research points toward the need to link officers’ perpetuation of violence to trauma and to break the cycle of training and excessive force that legitimizes and perpetuates violent use of force doctrines for policing. But instead of interventions based on care and mental health, police are currently offered an ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and tactics. They are trained, under the guise of protocol and safety, to inflict pain and deflect accountability. The same people and companies selling these weapons are the ones providing the training. After 9/11 and with the rise of after-globalization protests, more and more public tax money went to expanding police arsenals and policing programs, as private entities profited. These business initiatives boomed in the aftermath of World War I and solidified in the 1990s with the expansion of military-policing partnerships around the development of tactics and technologies. Aerosol CS and pepper spray were only the beginning of another for-profit boom in the use of force.

7

Profiting from Police
Use of Force

A saleswoman sits at a meeting table, a bright wool sweater draped over her shoulders, hair dyed an unnatural orange. She stands out among the sea of business-suited men. The only other women in the room are dressed in white, handing out purple lanyards and exhibition floor plans to police representatives, military buyers, and international dignitaries. All around the room these men chat over champagne, popping breath mints branded with security company logos. The middle-aged woman is alone, surrounded by glass display cabinets. They hold row after row of cartridges and casings. Orange caps, blue caps, yellow caps—each signifies a different size and strength of smoke or bang or bullet. Above the woman, advertising banners make claims in bold colors: Innovation. Preferred Supplier. Safe is Smart.

This is Milipol, Europe’s largest internal security expo. Operating since 1984, Milipol is one of the longest-running and most established trade shows in the industry. The 2015 Expo, hosted just days after the Paris bombings took 130 lives, featured 949 exhibitors, drew 24,056 visitors, and hosted 115 official delegations from 77 countries.¹ Each of the exhibition stalls is a compact display unit. Branded backgrounds depict police and military in action. There are live demos of micro-drones and unloaded guns to play with. The display cases are stocked full of riot control of all shapes and shades. Mannequins wear the latest fashion in protective gear. A Chinese exhibitor features a riot cop clad in spiked body armor. Even the boudoir corset on display is made of heavy-duty bulletproof rubber. Welcome to today’s riot-control industrial complex.

Exhibitions like Milipol take place all around the world, from Israel to India, Qatar to Canada. They form part of a growing internal security sector, predicted to expand by 20 per cent by 2020. Investment researchers at Markets and Markets explained in 2013, “The prevailing uncertain economic circumstances, the complex political situation, and the deteriorating security condition across the globe have given rise to popular unrest and protests.” ² Unlike other parts of the economy that are hit hard by social unrest, the riot-control industrial complex profits off political upheaval. The Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, followed by mass demonstrations across Europe, the United States, Canada, Chile, and later Turkey, Ukraine, Brazil, and Hong Kong, have generated purchase orders for millions of tear gas canisters and related riot-control products.

Meanwhile, supplies to East Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Indian subcontinent also grow as struggles for democracy, the effects of climate change, and economic austerity fuel conflict in these regions. In the west, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, Trump’s election as US president, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the rise of the far right provide excellent marketing opportunities. Experts in the riot-control industry carefully track outbreaks of resistance to inform both sellers and buyers of where there are profits to pursue. Sales forces travel the world. Tear gas, internationally accepted as the most humane technology for social control, is a top seller. Carrying a stamp of approval from Western democracies, it travels into other nations with colonial-era promises of “civilizing” their police forces.

Who Profits?

Today’s international Riot-Control Industrial Complex is led by a handful of major players: Israel’s ISPRA, Germany and South Africa’s Rheinmetall Denel Munitions, Brazil’s Condor Non-Lethal Technologies, France’s SAE Alsetex, Verney-Carron and Nobel Sport, and the United States’ triad of leading tear gas manufacturers: Combined Systems, Inc., NonLethal Technologies, and Safariland, in addition to pepper-spray manufacturer Sabre.

Tear gas is also manufactured in most European countries and in Canada, Turkey, India, Pakistan, and increasingly across Southeast Asia, with China and Korea claiming stakes in the market. Predicting a compound annual growth rate of 5.4 percent between 2016 and 2021, a Markets and Markets report notes an increased need for “cross border control” and the technological advancements being made in the Asia-Pacific market.³

Many export relationships that exist today grew out of colonial connections. The 2014 protests in Occupy Hong Kong saw the use of British Chemring tear gas, while Lebanon’s You Stink protests turned up products from France. Zimbabwe gets many supplies from nearby South Africa, while the IDF have a preferred contract with US supplier Combined Systems Inc. With South Asian and Middle Eastern markets expanding, supply lines can cross. South Korea’s CNO Tech and Dae Kwang Chemical are newer to the international market in riot control; the old guard complains that they have entered the business by cutting costs and compromising on quality.

Largely unregulated by any kind of international standards, this transnational trade in tear gas is marked by its wide-ranging sites of manufacture as well as its tangled webs of corporate and quasi-public transactions. At international expos like Milipol, deals take place in winks and nods on the shop floor. Meeting booths populate the exhibition hall, granting a pop-up privacy with four walls for confidential conversations. Then there are the hotel rooms and bars, all part of what Andrew Feinstein calls the “shadow world” of the arms trade.⁴

Israel: ISPRA

Palestine was the first British colony granted permission to use tear gas on civilians, in efforts to counter Arab rebellions of the time. After 1968, the year ISPRA was founded, Israel became a leading producer of the equipment and expertise needed for the political control of large populations. The 1970s in particular saw a concerted knowledge transfer between the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the British side of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, and the repression of uprisings in apartheid South Africa.

By the time the First Intifada began in 1987, Israel was deploying a combination of domestic and foreign-supplied tear gases. Journalist Nigel Parry writes, “From the list of fatalities resulting from tear gas during the first year of the Intifada, it is clear that babies, young children, and old people are particularly susceptible.” The chemical weapon was linked to the deaths of sixty-seven people during the First Intifada. Deaths in Gaza included Amal Qseisa, five days old, and Raed Obeid, three months old, who was tear-gassed in his home. Also gassed in their homes were seventy-year-old Wadfa Faraj Alla and seventy-five-year-old Rajab Slaibi. In addition to the young and old, those with pre-existing heart defects appear on the list.⁵

Today ISPRA “is a global leader in developing, manufacturing and marketing of nonlethal devices for riot control, crowd management, anti-terror equipment and police gear.”⁶ At the Milipol expo, a saleswoman tells me ISPRA sells everywhere, all over the world, although most of the big Israeli defense contracts go to Combined Systems in the United States. Pointing at a row of blue cylinders, I ask why some of the grenades are made of cardboard. She explains that this is a biodegradable line of tear gas canisters made of composite fiberglass, a material that explodes and all but disappears. This, she assured me, was part of ISPRA’s commitment to replace dangerous materials with “user, and environment, friendly” ones.⁷ It also “provides a smart and sophisticated answer” to what the riot-control industry call the “throwback phenome-non”—when people pick up launched canisters from the street and return them to police lines. “Doesn’t the fiberboard make the canisters hard to identify?” I ask her. “Of course,” she tells me. Clients can order their canisters however they’d like. Logo, no logo; flag, no flag. The branding is all bespoke.

United States: Combined Systems

Just across the aisle from the Israeli section of the exhibition floor are the stalls from the United States. With his handlebar moustache and cowboy drawl, you would guess the salesman from Combined Systems, Inc. (CSI), was straight out of Texas. But the unlikely headquarters of this leading US tear gas manufacturer is actually in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, population just under six hundred. With the world’s third-largest police force and biggest prison population, the United States has a vast domestic market for riot-control products.

In operation since 1981, Combined Systems remains one of the world’s leading suppliers of less lethal arms and munitions. CSI is one of the largest suppliers to the Department of Homeland Security and has regular contracts with the IDF. CSI is part of the portfolio of the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm that came into the spotlight during the Iraq War, when it emerged that elite US government officials, former presidents, and the family of Osama bin Laden’s estranged son were all linked to the company that was profiting from defense sales. In a 2004 investigation, the Center for Public Integrity documented that six private investment firms, including the Carlyle Group, received nearly $14 billion in Pentagon deals between 1998 and 2003.⁸

Combined Systems spent the start of the twenty-first century growing its presence in emerging markets, particularly the Middle East, North Africa, and East Africa. As the Arab uprisings took off in 2011, CSI-branded tear gas canisters were everywhere. Savvy Egyptian activists were photographing the branding and serial numbers of canisters, uploading these images onto blogs and Tumblrs, and sending them to mainstream media contacts. Months later, a Guardian headline reported, “US firms shipped tear gas to Egypt during crackdown, investigation reveals” referring to Amnesty International’s report condemning US government approval of CSI contracts with Egypt during the uprisings. Yet, despite the international condemnation, CSI continued exporting tear gas to Egypt, with $2.5 million worth shipped in 2013.⁹

Before 2011, CSI was already well established in the international industry of protest policing. During the 2009 Group of Twenty (G20) protests in Pittsburgh, police used CSI’s newest product: OC Vapor. Causing a harsh pain and targeting the respiratory system to cause shortness of breath, the OC Vapor was used to disperse protesters. Alter-globalization activists were by then well acquainted with CS tear gas, but “the discharge of a non-visible vapor following the hissing sound, caught many of the would be rabble-rousers off guard.”¹⁰

CSI also sells large-scale crowd-control solutions, including the Israeli Samson NL RW5—a 360-degree rotating, modular, rapid-fire, multi-lethal response system for what Israeli manufacturer Rafael calls “low-intensity conflict violence.” The modular system combines long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) with CSI’s Venom grenade launcher for colored smoke and flashbangs. At the 2015 Milipol event, a Rafael representative explained that the product was being tested by the IDF and was ready to go. The Venom launcher is geared up to go on sale with it. It has been in development since the 2000 USS Cole bombing, in which a docked US Navy ship was attacked at a refueling port. The US military wanted a way to mitigate civilian casualties in urban acts of asymmetrical warfare. “In a situation like that,” Defense Review explains, “you have to be able to protect structures … vehicles, bases, etc. without necessarily killing the threat of human shield.”¹¹ By 2008 Venom was proudly on display at the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show in Las Vegas, affectionately nicknamed SHOT. Two years later, Police One magazine touted its appeal for domestic policing, calling it “capable of precise delivery of munitions while enhancing the capabilities of area denial and force escalation in riot control situations.”¹²

The makers and marketers of Venom are well aware this machinery has a vicious bite. Sure, Venom can provide a less lethal solution and this, according to Defense Review magazine, “is always nice.” But Venom can also be used to enhance an attack situation, coming in handy as a physically and psychologically disorienting machine. “After all,” Defense Review argues, “who says you can’t launch a smorgasbord of less-lethal 40mm munitions to hamper, confuse, and slow down the enemy while you’re also shooting it out with them?”¹³ For the security industry, the great thing about Venom is what’s on the smorgasbord menu. This launcher can fire smoke, CS gas, sting ball, flashbang, multibang grenades and more, fast—at thirty rounds per launcher in immediate succession.

Brazil

Back at Milipol, the next aisle over from the United States hosted a Brazilian pavilion dominated by Condor Nonlethal Technologies. With the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016, the security spotlight was on Brazil. Now a major player in the riot-control marketplace, in the early 2000s Brazil found itself a comfortable niche following the country’s relaxation of rules around arms sales. Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country when ranked by geographic size and population, but measured in square footage of riot-control products displayed on Milipol’s expo floor space, it ranks a close second after the United States. In 2002, the Brazilian government put forward a new set of flexible policies to increase national revenue by producing defense systems domestically.¹⁴

Alongside this move to increase the production of police technologies came changes to policing practices. In 2004 Brazil established the Força Nacional to deal with public security emergencies, forming part of a wider plan to expand military training for public order policing.¹⁵ In 2006, Condor Nonlethal and the Brazilian government jointly hosted what was at the time the largest less-lethal-weapons conference in the world, catapulting them onto the international stage. Speakers included US military expert Colonel John B. Alexander—of The Men Who Stare at Goats fame—as well as Charles “Sid” Heal, said to have “written the bible on SWAT.” Heal consulted for Condor in the 2000s as the company expanded its pursuit of the “peacekeeping” markets. Today the United States remains closely involved in Brazil’s public-order policing, with the FBI consulting and conducting trainings in centers funded by the US State Department.

Beni Iachan, a young business analyst schmoozing the crowds from Condor Nonlethal Technology’s stall at Milipol in 2013, is well versed in the company’s humanitarian mantra. “We always advise the right escalation of force,” he promised, pointing up at a poster that features a chart showing six levels of enforcement, each paired with Condor products. Like a lifestyle policing package, Condor offers something for every riot-control officer’s needs to repress civil unrest. Supplying this full range of force provisions has helped Condor’s business to grow by more than 30 percent since 2007.

As a world host, maintaining a façade of public order was crucial for Brazil’s diplomatic relations and tourism revenue. But vast wealth inequality, police violence, and cuts to public services and transport infrastructure, combined with corporate cronyism and forced removals, were causing waves of dissent across the country. The company’s $22 million contract for the 2014 World Cup provided tear gas, rubber bullets, light and sound grenades, and Tasers to Brazilian security forces.

South Africa

While South Africa does not have its own shiny pavilion, the Rheinmetall Denel Munition company partners Germany with South Africa to produce a range of riot-control products. While German police carry tear gas, it’s the African market on which Rheinmetall Denel thrives. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, tear gas was regularly deployed against anti-apartheid protesters in the townships as well as on city streets and university campuses. During the uprisings, South Africa’s vast crowd-control armament allowed the country to supply their own military and police forces, as well as export to those abroad. “The South African military industry really took shape in the 1980s and got to the point where its technical capability and design and production abilities were among the most advanced in the world,” explains military analyst Nicole Auger. Spurred by trade embargos and the Soweto uprising, after 1977 the apartheid regime increased its domestic production of weapons for crowd control.

In 1981, the South African defense minister approved the establishment of Project Coast, a secretive military initiative to scale up biological and chemical weapons development. It was headed up by Wouter Basson, who was promoted from Prime Minister’s physician to weapons researcher, manufacturer, and manager at just thirty years old. Basson’s first bankrolled mission was to travel to other countries and bring back insights into the latest security tactics and weaponry that would shape South Africa’s arsenals. Basson recruited roughly 200 medical and scientific researchers, managed annual funds of $10 million, and set up and monitored front companies.

Meanwhile, tensions in the townships were rising and national and international resistance to apartheid was at its peak. Mass actions in 1984 led to the development of a new form of CR gas called New Generation Tear Gas. Tested by COAST and Swartklip Products and now owned by industry leader Rheinmetall Denel Munitions, the new weapon was soon authorized for incorporation into the South African Defence Force for use in crowd control (when diluted) and as an offensive weapon (at full strength). When it was rolled out against protesters, New Generation Tear Gas was mixed with CS and used in water cannons. The chemical agent was produced at an industrial scale by one of Basson’s front companies for the military, Delta G Scientific, from 1987 to 1989.¹⁶

Today, South Africa remains an industry leader in riot control, primarily through the operation of Rheinmetall Denel. The company’s business is mainly focused on NATO countries and stretches across Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. Recently its tear gas has turned up in Bahrain, where its excessive use has been condemned by international governments and human rights organizations. South Africa also leads the way in riot-control drone technology. In 2014, Desert Wolf, the country’s military, policing, agriculture, and leisure supplies company, showcased its riot-control drone. Marketed as “preventing another Marikana,” the company turned a violent police crackdown that left thirty-four miners dead into a sales opportunity. According to research by less-lethals expert Michael Crowley:

In a July 2014 interview with BBC News, Desert Wolf’s managing director Hennie Kieser stated that the company “received an order for 25 units just after [the IFSEC expo]” from “an international mining house.” Mr Kieser claimed other potential customers included “Some mines in South Africa, some security companies in South Africa and outside South Africa, some police units outside South Africa and a number of other industrial customers.”¹⁷

Its promotional material embraced the nearly century-old rhetoric of safe tear gas, perfected in the Himsworth Report. Erasing not only the potential harms of remotely shooting eighty pepper-spray balls a second at people from the sky, this advertisement works to mystify the fact that the violence in Marikana was sparked by the use of tear gas in the first place.

During a trial investigation, legal questioning revealed that firing tear gas at striking miners in August 2012 likely led to the escalation of force that followed. Three days before the police massacred the miners, three protesters and two police officers were killed after police used tear gas and flashbang grenades on protesters. The miners’ legal representative, Dali Mpofu, asked the acting police commander to explain what he meant when he said to the commission “that the firing of tear gas was the spark.” William Mpembe responded, “I needed to make the point that that is what made the strikers attack the police.”¹⁸

Transnational Partnerships

With Western and Global South companies increasingly moving products into African and Southeast Asian countries, transnational partnerships like the one between Germany and South Africa are cropping up. While many of these bridge a US or European company with one in the Global South, South-South partnerships are also arising. Just as the Tripartite Agreement between the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom functions as a communication channel for knowledge exchange about policing and weaponry, the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Trilateral arrangements strengthen these countries hold on the security industry.

Partnering-up broadens companies’ global reach, enabling manufacturers like Condor to share tenders with smaller companies inside the EU, where trade regulations between member states are laxer. In addition, many of the components that go into making these weapons come from China and India, where exports are cheap. And emerging market players like Dae Kwang in South Korea have picked up tenders for contracts to countries to which the United States and Brazil stopped exporting as a result of international pressure following well-documented ongoing human rights abuses. Dae Kwang exported 3.16 million tear gas shells to twenty-four countries from 2011 to 2014; the majority went to Bahrain, with Turkey the second-largest customer.¹⁹ While it is crucial to understand the increasing transnational dynamics of this industry, the United States does remain a dominant force in shaping international security agendas and in producing the riot-control equipment that circulates around the globe. One company intent on establishing its reach across the entire internal security sector is the Florida-based Safariland Group.

Tear Gas and the 1 Percent

While the riot-control industry is growing, in actual sales, these businesses make breadcrumbs compared to companies that sell large arms and vehicles. While a single deal for missile sales is worth millions, the price of a tear gas canister may run only twenty dollars. You have to sell a lot of tear gas to come anywhere close to the figures the rest of the arms industry reaches. This is why some riot-control companies, like Rheinmetall Denel, are linked to larger arms manufacturers. Others focus on the bespoke nature and personalized service of their provisions. Then there are those who know that the best way to get rich is to diversify your investments: luxury real estate, lifestyle branding, a world-renowned art collection, and a portfolio of riot-control equipment.

Meet Warren Kanders, CEO of the Safariland Group. Made up of twenty-five individually branded policing and security subcompanies, the Safariland Group is a one-stop shop for protest repression—and its CEO is a poster child for the 1 percent. With a net worth valued at more than $180 million, Kanders tops rich lists and guest lists, sitting on the board of the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In his spare time, Kanders likes to tour the art galleries as his wife redecorates their multimillion-dollar home.

A tour through the corporate history of what has become Kanders’s vast enterprise reveals much about what it means to be a protest profiteer in today’s policing and security industry.

Started as a gun-holster company in 1964, Safariland became part of Body Armor in 1969, the larger police supply company that would eventually become Armor Holdings. Specializing in wearable equipment and holsters, Body Armor was not equipped to compete in the expanding riot-control marketplace. Its limited stock left Body Armor out of the game. The company was facing bankruptcy in the early 1990s—until Warren Kanders swooped in to save its shareholders.

An accomplished investment banker, in 1992 Kanders became one of the leading gainers on the American Stock Exchange as stock in his New York-based Benson Eyecare chain jumped 1,820 percent, from 31 cents to $6. Kanders told the Los Angeles Times that the path to success in a fragmented marketplace was “for a smart player to supply lower-cost products through efficiencies of size.”²⁰ Applying this approach to law enforcement equipment, in 1996 Kanders gained a controlling share in Body Armor. His holding company, Kanders Florida Holdings, Inc., bought out capital stock previously owned by two of Body Armor’s raw materials suppliers, Clark Schwebel, Inc., and Hexcel Corporation. Now with 66 percent of the company, Kanders set out to be the smart player.

Kanders’s first act was to rebrand to Armor Holdings Inc., a name that could carry a wave of horizontal acquisitions that would span the 1990s renaissance in new less lethal technologies. Under Kanders’s new regime, Armor Holdings acquired Defense Tech for $5.5 million, adding pepper sprays, tear gas, distraction devices, flameless expulsion grenades, and specialty impact munitions to its stocks. This diversification quickly paid off: Armor Holdings reported revenue of $31 million for the end of 1996.²¹ In the same year, Kanders bought a “handsome Colonial Revival house in Greenwich, Connecticut for $8.1 million”²² with his soon-to-be second wife, entertainment businesswoman Allison Merril Smith.

Meanwhile, Armor Holdings bought up more tear gas. In July 1998, the company acquired the law enforcement division of Mace Security International, Inc., which included Federal Laboratories. The rights to these products, along with the well-known Mace trademark, cost Armor Holdings $4.6 million paid in cash, with an additional $600,000 held in escrow.²³ With Mace and Federal Federal Laboratories under control of this accomplished East Coast multimillionaire, Armor Holdings was only just starting to expand.

As we saw in Chapter 2, back in the 1920s, Federal Laboratories became one of the world’s first tear gas suppliers, the rival to Lake Erie Chemical Company. These two US companies worked closely with the Chemical Warfare Service, perfecting new tear gas compounds and a plethora of devices to shoot them out of. A transnational brand of law enforcement, Federal Laboratories canisters littered the streets of Panama, Bolivia, San Francisco, Chicago, and Calcutta. Photos of their grenades filled the evidence files of investigative committees against weapons trade in the 1930s.

During the counterterrorism government spending spree that followed the attacks of September 11, 2011, Kanders’s business skyrocketed. Closely aligned to federal law enforcement and homeland security officials, Kanders joined the board of the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation (FEHSF), a private-public partnership between “concerned business leaders and current and former high-ranking federal enforcement officials.” Its board includes “actor and patriot” Dean Cain and CEOs from commercial mortgage lending firm Paradigm Capital and private equity firm Sun Capital Partners. Functioning as a nonprofit, FEHSF gives out financial aid to assist in creating synergy between federal departments for homeland security purposes. Working closely with special agents in the field and federal law enforcement offices in Washington, DC, the organization’s mission is to help fuel “the war against terrorism on American soil and protect and preserve our families and our countries” through knowledge exchange, business partnerships, and enhancing border security. The law enforcement and government agencies it supports include US Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Justice, and the Drug Enforcement Agency. This alliance allows the group to avoid “navigating the red tape” so that it can “support America’s heroes to protect and defend America.”²⁴

With rhetoric that mirrors the nationalism of General Amos Fries and the ideologues of the Garden Plot, this vision valorizes a military mentality toward emergency and the securitization of home and family. While some of the foundation’s funds support injured or killed officers and their families, other money goes to bolstering law enforcement departments “in need,” sponsoring conferences for law enforcement to exchange information and strategies, establishing counterterrorism training facilities for officers, and—to the potential benefit of board members like Kanders—investing in “new products and services to assist in the war on domestic terrorism.”²⁵

Like the 1033 technology transfer program, in which disused military equipment moved into police, university, and school security departments, the FEHSF establishes partnerships that move not only weapons but use-of-force mindsets of control and order. In contrast to programs like 1033, here private business contracts are transfered along with products and ideas.

Under the name of “homeland security,” the practice of law enforcement is outsourced to Fortune 500 companies so that, as in other industries like health and transportation, the provision of public goods is transferred into the hands of for-profit corporations. Organized around increasing revenue for the rich, the FEHSF maintains nonprofit status by billing itself as a facilitator—a mere conduit of exchange—when in reality it serves as a shell to protect and secure profit-driven transactions. As the incredibly wealthy plot to make more money off security spending, they give out small sums of financial aid to those whose deaths, in turn, make them more money by increasing the need for protection.

In 2007, William Kanders was listed as having enjoyed Forbes magazine’s twenty-seventh biggest payday of the year, taking in $300 million. Vanity Fair reports, “The war in Iraq was a boon for Kanders’s Armor Holdings, the US’s largest manufacturer of Humvee armor.” The increasing success of Armor Holdings attracted the United Kingdom’s leading arms dealer, BAE Systems. In 2007, BAE bought Armor Holdings for $4.1 billion, adding it to their newly formed law enforcement and sporting equipment group. The acquisition “created a significant opportunity to grow the business organically in our markets” and “enabled Armor Holdings’ customers to benefit from the talent, resources and technology a leading defense contractor provides.”²⁶

But the BAE acquisition did not last long as lawsuits against Armor Holdings’ business practices poured in. The US Department of Justice accused it of manufacturing and selling bulletproof vests between 2000 and 2005 while knowing that the key material, Zylon, was unsuitable and degraded quickly over time. Armor Holdings denied these accusations, claiming it did not know that Zylon was unsuitable. In 2008, Armor Holdings agreed to a $30 million settlement with the Justice Department to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act.²⁷ Armor Holdings agreed to the payment to “avoid the significant expense and inevitable uncertainty of litigation,” while denying the accusations and maintaining “that it always has acted responsibly and with the utmost concern for police officer safety.”²⁸

This was not the only legal trouble. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alleged that between 1998 and 2008 the division’s Mace manufacturer had failed to comply with court rulings on its toxic waste practices. This included storing hazardous waste in shipping containers near the Walloomsac River in Vermont’s Green Mountains. In 2008, EPA inspectors observed eighty unlabeled drums of chemicals and accused the company of failing to treat and remove pepper-spray residue. Executive Jon E. Goodrich was fined $100,000; earlier that year Goodrich had pled guilty to unlawfully storing hazardous waste without a permit at the Vermont facility. Goodrich and Mace employees spent over $785,000 to clean up the site.²⁹

Around the same time, alleged dodgy dealings by a former vice president of international sales for Armor Holdings, Richard Bistrong, were coming to the surface. Prosecutors accused Bistrong of paying bribes between 2001 and 2006 to get contracts to supply helmets, armored vests, pepper spray, and other protective gear to UN peacekeeping forces and law enforcement in the Netherlands. John Suttle, then senior vice president for corporate communications at the American unit of BAE, told the New York Times that Armor Holdings fired Bistrong before their acquisition of the company in 2007. “They did the right thing,” Suttle told the newspaper, making clear that the accusations related to prior events. Among the criminal information documents reported by the New York Times was a June 2001 arrangement with a Rotterdam police procurement officer who provided confidential information that enabled Bistrong to win a $2.4 million contract for pepper spray. Bistrong’s ex-wife, Ambassador Nancy Soderberg, had worked closely with the United Nations during the Clinton administration. Soderberg declined to comment.³⁰

In 2009, before these charges against him went public, Bistrong was brought into a large-scale FBI sting operation, turning his insider knowledge of bribery in the industry into undercover roleplay for the FBI. Bistrong served as a middleman, providing character references and introducing sales executives to undercover FBI operatives posing as defense officials. These officials told executives that in order to secure a contract with the purported minister of defense for Gabon, they must agree to a 20 percent commission, bumping up price quotes in order to include the soliciting agents’ fees. In Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, unsuspecting arms dealers negotiated sales of grenade launchers, riot-control suits, and rifles with undercover FBI agents.³¹ The sting operation culminated with a sweep at the Las Vegas SHOT Show. FBI agents arrested twenty-two executives accused of conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.³² Their dealings with undercover agents had been recorded during 155 meetings and 25,000 telephone conversations.³³

At the time of the arrests, the FBI saw great promise in the forthcoming prosecutions. It was the first time such an elaborate sting operation had been used in a foreign bribery case. Such intensive undercover tactics are more common in mafia and drug busts, according to Lanny A. Breur of the Justice Department. Breur was optimistic: “The message is that we are going to bring all the innovations of our organized crime and drug war cases to the fight against white-collar criminals.” This optimism, however, did not last long.

Split into four trials by Judge Richard Leon, the first resulted in a mistrial; the second ended with one defendant acquitted, two found not guilty and a hung jury on three more. Just over a week later Judge Leon dismissed all charges facing remaining defendants. Coming down hard on the FBI’s operation, he said in his ruling “I, for one, hope this very long, and I’m sure expensive, ordeal will be a true learning experience for both the [Justice] Department and the FBI.” Both judge and jury foreman criticized the Bureau’s tactics. From the raunchy banter between agents caught on tape, to the aggressive approach to securing deals, the sting operation was seen as a misuse of power. Bistrong, the cornerstone of the undercover efforts, was dismissed as an unreliable source with a dodgy criminal record.³⁴

The failed FBI sting operation had little impact. In the end, the US subsidiary of Britain’s BAE Systems, Armor Holdings, agreed to a $10.3 million penalty. In exchange for a nonprosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice, Armor Holdings accepted responsibility for improper commission payments, falsifying records to obtain foreign business, and failing to establish a proper internal accounting system. Armor Holdings also paid out nearly $5.7 million in disgorgement (illegally obtained profits), prejudgment interest (value accrued since the illegal activity occurred), and penalties.³⁵ After his 2014 release from prison, Bistrong went on to use the expertise he gained from working undercover with the FBI to help companies avoid similar charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—a piece of legislation that President-Elect Donald Trump has called “a horrible law” that “should be changed.”³⁶

Largely out of the riot-control business during this time of BAE ownership, Warren Kanders put forward a bid to join the board of Federal Signal, a security systems company. A 5.7 percent stockholder, Kanders touted his success with Armor Holdings. He lobbied shareholders with his victory in taking Armor Holdings out of bankruptcy to secure over thirty acquisitions in under ten years, building more than $3.5 billion in weapons revenue from 1996 to 2007.³⁷ But the board of Federal Signal saw things in a different light. In April 2009, board member John McCartney wrote a letter to company stockholders that extensively detailed why “Warren Kanders’s number one priority is Warren Kanders” and not the interests of the stockholders. In a letter signed by fellow board members, McCartney wrote that Kanders had “a history of self-dealing transactions extracting millions of dollars from the companies with which he is or has been involved.” This included thirteen transactions related to Armor Holdings and an estimated total of $6.5 million extracted from his companies for personal gain.³⁸ Further describing insider arrangements and loyalties, the Federal Signal board members signed off their letter with a warning, “We urge you to protect your investment and not risk your Company’s future and prospects by exposing Federal Signal to Warren Kanders and his associates.”³⁹

Kanders denied these accusations, but was turned down from Federal Signal. Soon after, he shifted his efforts at accruing stakeholder value back toward his old riot-control business. In 2011, BAE sold Armor Holdings back to Kanders’s acquisition company for $124 million. “The plan is to grow the business, both organically and through acquisitions,” Kanders said.⁴⁰ That year Kanders also acquired controlling interest in DHS Technologies, a global leader in mobile infrastructure systems for all civil and military intervention needs.⁴¹ A few years later, in December 2014, DHS paid out $1.9 million, plus interest, to the United States to resolve allegations that the company had charged federal agencies unfair prices for its products from 2007 through 2013.⁴² A lawsuit filed by a whistleblower led to a settlement that resolved these allegations. No determination of liability was made. Warren Kanders, meanwhile, bought a five-bedroom townhouse on West 12th Street in Manhattan for $17.8 million.

The story of Armor Holdings is both unique and run of the mill. For the past hundred years, every seller in the tear gas business has spent thousands—if not millions—in legal settlements. They have watched as their products are used to kill, maim, and torture people around the world. They have bought new houses, seen their children off to school, perhaps spent $150,000 at a Christie’s auction to acquire historic souvenirs. Investigating the financial lives of the elite is crucial for understanding how the security industry operates. Riot control is, and always has been, in the business of protecting the wealth of a tiny minority.

8

From Resilience to Resistance

While most of this book has focused on the harms of tear gas, all around the world people invent, adapt, and share techniques for resilience and resistance to tear gas. In doing so, they care for each other. They transform this weapon into a collectivizing tool. There is a growing transnational solidarity of tear gas resilience, aided by social media and mobile technologies that help protesters circulate relief remedies, gas mask designs, and grenade throwback techniques. Displaying what social movement researcher Gavin Grindon has called “grassroots cultural diplomacy,” these tips are tweeted from Greece to New York, from Palestine to Ferguson, from Egypt to Hong Kong.

In places like Bahrain and Palestine, widespread and even daily use of tear gas has made this chemical weapon a part of life. As a way of exhibiting and collectively processing this trauma, people sometimes transform tear gas canisters into other objects. Acts of anger, grief, and memorializing emerge as artistic practices. For example, in Bahrain, people designed a throne made out of tear gas canisters to signify their royal family’s role in the suppression of democracy protests. In Palestine, tear gas canisters have been used as Christmas tree ornaments to send a holiday message to the United States about the role of its tear gas and arms manufacturers in the violence of the Occupied Territories. In 2013, images of a Palestinian garden made out of plants potted in empty tear gas shells went viral, picked up by mainstream media outlets as an image of hope and quiet resistance. Yet, as Elias Nawawieh pointed out in +972 magazine, absent from the news stories, Twitter photos, and Facebook posts was the grave built as the garden’s centerpiece. It bears a translucent photo of Bassem Abu Rahmah, who was killed by the IDF in 2009 after being shot in the chest at close range by a tear gas grenade.

In 2013, Occupy Gezi in Turkey became a site of innovation, a place where people designed, adopted, and adapted novel modes of resistance and resilience to tear gas. There was Ceyda Sungur, the woman in the red dress, pepper-sprayed at close range and turned into a movement icon. There were dancing ballerinas in whirling, brightly colored skirts that contrasted against the harshness of the full-cover gas masks they wore as they spun around. Penguins wore gas masks to symbolize the media’s failure to cover police violence, as noted in Chapter 6. Christian Gubar writes that “as both political commodities and stage props, goggles and gas masks were embraced for their eerie theatricality, speaking volumes to the grotesque banality of living under billows of noxious gas.”¹

Rampant tear gas use on protesters and point-blank pepper-spray blasts are as common today as they were in the 1990s and early 2000s, with their use rapidly increasing across the Middle East and Eastern Africa. Like mobile video recording the decade before, the emergence of digital social media has meant that images of police violence against public demonstrators can circulate around the world in seconds. People directly hit with aerosol CS, pepper spray, and other tear gases take photos and videos that travel around Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, spreading stories often before the release of any official news reports. Such images can become movement icons.

The 2011 Occupy movement in the United States was marked by a number of these tear-gassed iconic images. First there were the young women penned in plastic while unarmed and peacefully protesting. Images of this action went viral, picked up by social and mainstream media. Then there was retiree Dorli Rainey, who was sprayed directly in the face at Occupy Portland.

These objects were as much about material reality as symbolism. Protesters in Gezi borrowed, translated, and reproduced instructions for making a gas mask out of a plastic bottle, and for using Maalox and other household ingredients as remedies for the painful effects of tear gas. Talcid Man appeared after a rumor spread that Talcid (a liquid medicine to relieve stomach inflammation) could help ease the effects of pepper spray. He emerged on site distributing the medicine as an embodied, mobile care unit, and became a symbol of the movement’s resilience and generosity, depicted in stencils and sketches that circulated far beyond the occupied park.

Street Medics

In the gas-flooded streets, a variety of shops, sidewalk stands, ground-level flats and even a hotel became makeshift medical field stations, providing remedies and treatments to protesters. At these sites, health workers and those with basic first-aid skills converged. As this book has shown, these medical volunteers often have a clearer and more accurate understanding of the real-world impact of “less lethals” than scientists running tests in sterile laboratories. It is here, under the tarpaulins of protest architecture and in the pop-up clinics, amid the chaos these weapons intentionally provoke, that the bruises and bleeding, the choking and vomiting, the inability to breathe, the concussions, and the paralysis are immediately felt.

At the site of protest, pain is not a toxicity count or a threshold percentage. “Less lethal” is no longer a technical term but a vision of how much torment a body can take, of how close someone can come to death without dying. Measured in human experience, the medical field stations of protests can make visible the reality of riot control. Their ways of seeing and knowing medical injury can move us beyond the flames and smoke of media screens. They can provide far more accurate and detailed on-the-ground accounts than hospital records can. Their testimony can be mobilized to challenge the clinical trials produced by military-paid scientists.

Tear Gas and the Law

While many people fight on the street, some decide to go through the long and often tedious, tiring, and expensive process of taking legal action. This dedicated form of protest can change policies, set legal precedents, and make acts of violence and corruption visible to the broader public. There are a number of legal avenues that people use to hold companies, police departments, and governments accountable for their use and abuse of tear gas.

Perhaps the largest area is personal injury and violations of individual rights, particularly in the United States, which has a long tradition of lawsuits as a form of activism. In the past few years, for example, there have been lawsuits against the city of New York for spraying a man talking on his phone during a Black Lives Matter march. A family brought a lawsuit against Sonoma County in California after a SWAT team flooded the house of Glenn Swindell with tear gas in a military-style raid, arguing that this caused him extreme suffering that led him to take his own life.²

However, while the personalized and often emotional nature of such cases makes for a good media hook and can gain broader coverage of the issues, once the trial begins and after a settlement is reached, outcomes cannot easily be linked strategically to broader movements or campaigns. Because of the way the legal process works, often testimony and evidence cannot be made public while a trial is going on. Out-of-court settlement deals are also normally kept private. There is no centralized database or filing system to allow lawyers, journalists, researchers, or the public to quantify, compare, and analyze these cases. Like the dispersion and secretive nature of medical research, the outcomes of settled personal lawsuits and the content of any legal testimony are rarely open or accessible.

Often more advocacy-focused, high-profile human and constitutional rights cases and class-action lawsuits can help collectivize a struggle and make a bigger impact than individual cases. In 2015, a class-action lawsuit was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the Birmingham, Alabama, police department for pepper-spraying minors in school as a form of disciplinary action. Another area for legal class action is environmental health and well-being. While the EPA has filed lawsuits against tear gas pollution and waste dumping, towns and cities can also team up to put tear gas on trial. In 2015, residents of rural Jamestown, Pennsylvania, filed a class-action suit against Combined Systems, Inc., their neighborhood riot-control manufacturing plant. Sixteen plaintiffs claimed nuisance and trespass: “The testing includes airborne explosions at intolerable noise levels that produce noxious gases and foul smells that penetrate plaintiffs’ real estate, ruining the quality of life for plaintiffs at their residence.” One local resident told the Sharon Herald, “I’ve been out mowing the lawn and get gassed … It burns the skin around my neck. You know what tear gas is like.”³

Given that Jamestown has a population of less than 600, this means that about one out of every twenty households in the town is part of this lawsuit against the corporation. These kinds of legal action can bring communities together and show the strength of towns when they collectively resist corporate crime. Yet, unless bigger media outlets or campaign groups pick up these small-town stories, the wider issues at stake can fade into an archive of anecdotes.

On the international level, legal trials often involve large-scale investigations of human rights violations. For example, in Abdullah Yaşa and Others v. Turkey, Izci v. Turkey, and Ataykaya v. Turkey, plaintiffs brought forward claims around the violation of their human rights to the European Commission for Human Rights. In all three cases the judges found that the Turkish authorities were misusing tear gas. A press release for Ataykaya v. Turkey stated that “the Court insisted on the need to reinforce, without further delay, the guarantees on the proper use of tear gas grenades, in order to minimize the risks of death and injury stemming from their use.”⁴

These international human rights trials can bring visibility and humanitarian weight to tear gas crimes, especially in countries where such acts are suppressed or covered up. Yet, as international law does not have enforcement mechanisms in place, such rulings can feel more like symbolic successes than triumphs of justice. Going through high courts is also a slow process. While these rulings in Turkey came alongside more recent struggles, they addressed incidents that took place in 2005 and 2006 and had little if any direct impact on Turkish policing at the time. Despite a long trial of rulings against Turkey’s use of tear gas, the country’s police continue to kill and maim protesters and bystanders.

Tear gas can also be brought into the courts through claims to freedom of speech and assembly, particularly when these are treated as a collective right to space and a democratic right to speak out. Following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, a US federal judge ruled that tear gas could not be used until police declared an illegal assembly and gave fair warning and time for protesters to disperse. While this ruling outlines what should be general legal protocol, its focus on the collective act of assembling to protest and its dispersal through tear gas speaks toward the chemical weapons’ original design: to “destroy the mob spirit.”

While most legal cases focus on individual injuries caused by grenades and canisters used against guidelines, the Ferguson injunction sees the use of tear gas itself—not just its mode of application or impact—as an act that can infringe upon people’s rights. This subtle distinction can help us see how tear gas functions as a form of what Anja Kanngieser and I refer to as “atmospheric policing.” By poisoning the air, tear gas makes speaking out, together, in public, impossible. It seeps into our skin, chokes our throats, burns our nasal cavities, stings our eyes shut, and stops our breath. This happens no matter how hard or soft or fast or slowly it is dispersed and, that is precisely what this weapon was designed to do.

In addition to legal action, all around the world people come together to enact strategic and creative campaigns against the tear gas trade. But accountability is hard to come by. Shielded from public view, sealed in secret files, and buried behind the paywalls of export databases, tear gas sales continue to grow, largely unregulated. With deals made in five-star hotels and exhibition meeting rooms, exposing or inhibiting the sale of tear gas is a daunting task. But even the best PR tactics and corporate cover-ups cannot always outsmart the passion and knowledge of everyday people. Whether at the local, grassroots level or as part of Amnesty International, people are conducting investigative research, leaking documents, sneaking inside arms fairs, and holding sit-ins, die-ins, and kiss-ins to protest against riot control.

The Riot ID Project

During the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, protestors started a blog identifying the tear gas canisters that turned up on the streets. Their Tear Gas ID site recorded details such as source information, links to company websites, and close-up images of canisters. The bloggers used Twitter (@tg_id) and the hashtag #teargasID to aggregate information and create chains of accountability. Similarly, when police and National Guard took over the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, journalists and activists on the ground worked to catalogue and identify riot-control weapons and linked this information to that collected in Egypt and Palestine.

Photograph all sides of the weapon, including the top and bottom. Take clear photos of all available details ensuring any text and markings are clear and in focus.

Inspired by these projects and our work with journalists in Ferguson, in the summer of 2015, the civic media research team of which I am a part at Bournemouth University partnered with the NGOs Bahrain Watch and Omega Research Foundation, as well as graphic designers at Minute Works, to launch RiotID. RiotID (riotid.com) is a civic media project designed to help people identify, monitor, and record the use of riot-control agents against civilians. Making accurate identifications of less lethal weapons can help people medically respond to the effects of exposure and injury, monitor human rights violations, challenge abuses, and identify the manufacturers and countries of origin of the devices.

The main resource that #RiotID uses is a pocket guide for documenting and identifying less lethal weapons that has been translated into eight languages. The ID process has two steps. First, people on location document the riot-control technologies. The #RiotID book provides techniques for recording and documenting all the information needed to do an identification. This includes photographing the device from all angles and recording all numeric and text information on the sides, top, and bottom of the device. Step two is using the documented features of the weapon to figure out what it is, as well as the supplier and country of origin. We designed a diagram that uses shapes, sizes, and details to help identify different kinds of less lethal impact and chemical munitions. Once a device is narrowed down to its size (i.e., 12-gauge, 37mm, 56mm) and type (flashbang, OC, baton round), it is easier to identify the manufacturer, as different companies make and specialize in different products. For help with identifications, people can tweet their photos to @riotID or use the hashtag #riotID. The RiotID team draw on their expert knowledge to help match photographs of weapons being used on the street and where they come from.

Since RiotID launched in August 2015, we have identified expired canisters being used in Uganda, Zambia, and Mexico. Expired tear gas is unsafe and can be volatile. As tear gas is a toxic chemical waste product, it must be properly disposed of after expiration. In St. Louis, our identifications exposed the misuse of barricade-penetrating munitions. We also worked with migrant solidarity activists in Calais, France, to help identify and monitor riot-control used in refugee camps there. Incorporating concerns over security and social media into the project, we are now teaming up with Eyewitness Media to utilize their secure documentation app. We are also responding to requests for more introductory information on tear gases and impact munitions. Working with young people, we have also designed infographics that answer basic questions about what these riot-control weapons do.

Stopping Shipments

The export chains that enable the sales of less lethal weapons are also often targeted by campaigns seeking to intervene in what Amnesty International calls the “trade in torture.” In an act of defiance that ignited the unions in Egypt, customs worker Asma Mohammed, a member of her union’s women’s committee, refused to process a shipment of seven tons of tear gas from Combined Systems Inc. According to the War Resisters League, which honored her with its 2012 Peace Award, Mohammed recalled, “I said ‘No, I refuse—because I don’t want to be the cause of someone’s pain or death.’ So in solidarity with me, or with the cause, my co-workers said, ‘No, we’re not going to work on it either.’ ”⁵

Last year, Bahrain Watch launched a #stoptheshipment campaign targeting Korean manufacturer Dae Kwang Chemical, which had contracted to supply more than a million canisters of tear gas to Bahrain—a country where more than forty people have died and thousands more have been injured as a result of tear gas. Campaigners worked with Amnesty South Korea, Korean unions, and local campaigns as well as journalists at agenda-setting publications such as the Financial Times and New York Times. These longstanding tactics were combined with sophisticated, contemporary uses of social media, including a catchy, action-based hashtag, timed retweets, and a campaign-specific website. They succeeded in pressuring the South Korean government into placing an embargo on tear gas to Bahrain, stopping the Dae Kwang shipment.

Engaging in Direct Action

Another way to resist excessive uses of riot control and protest profiteering is engaging in direct actions that intervene at sites where the transnational training of police forces takes place. In October 2013, the Facing Tear Gas campaign brought together organizations to protests against Urban Shield, an annual SWAT team training session and security sales expo that promotes the use of military tactics for protest policing. The campaign built a coalition of more than thirty local groups in Oakland, including the Oscar Grant Foundation and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. The next year they came back more organized, more informed, and determined to make a difference. They created online petitions, held dedicated coalition-building meetings with council members, adopted a pre-emptive press strategy, and staged a demonstration outside the expo site that drew hundreds to the streets. Their efforts paid off: The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office announced that Urban Shield would no longer be held at the Marriott, and Mayor Jean Quan said that the City of Oakland would not renew its contract with Urban Shield. This was a small victory in a much larger struggle to change policing policies and practices.

A key part of the success of the Stop Urban Shield campaign is sometimes called “going for the low-hanging fruit.” Trying to counter police use of force at the level of government policy or even at the sites of corporate headquarters will likely be slow and require legal action. Expos and SWAT training events held in public, or in spaces that have some public access (like hotel lobbies), are often easier to reach. They offer a convergence site for demonstrations, architecturally and territorially. Likewise, as sites where policing products are sold and displayed, expos offer activists an opportunity to make the secretive world of the arms trade visible. As the wide circulation of Shane Bauer’s 2014 video exposé of Urban Shield for Mother Jones evidenced, in today’s journalistic world of fake news, seeing verified information is believing.

In addition, social media has changed PR, making image management a two-way process where customers’ influence is bigger than ever before. This transition is expanding the field of image-based activism, as people find key image locations—moments and partnerships—that are ripe for intervention. While this can appear to be auxiliary, targeting theaters or museums sponsored by arms dealers hits PR teams where it hurts. In this case, by linking Urban Shield to ongoing events in Ferguson and to Oakland’s past cases of police brutality, particularly against young black men, the Stop Urban Shield coalition’s multiethnic, queer membership made it impossible for the city council to support the expo without further damaging the city’s image.

Importantly, it was not just the act of showing up and demonstrating at an arms fair that had this effect: It was making a global struggle local through grassroots mobilization and antiracist critique. Similarly, in explicitly targeting the Marriott, a large international hotel chain popular with families, Stop Urban Shield forced the company to weigh the profits of running this policing event against the risks of tarnishing its image. Getting the Marriott to pull out of Oakland’s Urban Shield is no guarantee that it will stop hosting similar expos elsewhere. However, Stop Urban Shield’s success in Oakland reveals a key pressure point that could become the grounds for a sustained campaign to get for-profit policing out of the Marriott.

Resisting from Within

In 2013, after I began writing in the media about tear gas, I received an email from a police trainer working in Eastern Europe. “I hope you will continue to read my message after I confess [my job]… I worked in this field for 20 years and I realized that the high-profile policing (using force against demonstrators) is a dead-end and I campaign for the communication-based or low profile approach. Now I lead a police training center and hope I can use my influence to spread this idea.” The officer went on to ask for training materials that he might be able to translate for his trainees. Letters like this one serve as a much-needed reminder that other worlds are possible. They remind us that we often have more in common than we think.

If you work in law enforcement and you are still reading this book, thank you. It is not an easy thing to question the principles and protocols that shape your job and the way it is done. While my focus in this book has been on advocacy from the outside, there are also a number of ways you can help transform how police are trained from the inside. In doing so you are likely to upset others around you, and you will certainly upset all those private consultants and experts who make money off the Saturdays you spend in their classrooms. Yet, by speaking out from within, you will be joining the ranks of many officers who have fought against the way excessive force is taught, enacted, and then covered up and protected within police departments. You will be speaking out against the cycles of trauma that can produce and perpetuate unnecessary uses of force. Change cannot just be about better public relations; it must also come from the bravery of speaking out from your heart and mind against systems you know are broken or corrupt.

What Now? What Next?

The increasing deployment of tear gas around the world has led to more canister strikes to the head, more asphyxiation from grenades launched in enclosed spaces, more tear gas offensives coupled with rubber bullets and live ammunition. These violent deployments of chemical weapons continue to leave people dead, disfigured, and with chronic physical and mental health conditions. If the century-long medical history of modern tear gas shows us anything, it is the problem with for-profit science. When science is leveraged for the profit of the few instead of the protection and health of the many, all of society suffers. In the place of clear communication, we are given sound bites manufactured by weapons-industry PR companies. Government secrets pile up and the partisan membership of weapons evaluation committees remain undisclosed. At the most basic level, people deserve to know more about the chemicals that can be used against them. This is an issue of public health that must be researched independently and disclosed in ways that allows people to clearly understand the effects.

At the same time, the legal status of tear gas, under international law as well as in regard to export sales and trade regulations, remains unclear. There is no standardized mechanism to account for how much tear gas is shipped, stored, or used on either a national or international scale. Like other toxic products, tear gas must be clearly and systematically regulated and all trade publicly disclosed. For this to happen, as many others have argued at length, its legal status under the Chemical Weapons Convention must be clarified.

In terms of corporate accountability, if we are to treat tear gas like a drug, as Himsworth was tasked to do back in 1970, then we should treat participants in the riot-control industry as we would those in the pharmaceutical business. Just as doctors on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies must declare a conflict of interest or face criminal charges, all tear gas trainers, salespeople, scientists, expert witnesses, and educators should be legally required to announce their present and past financial and personal transactions with riot-control products manufacturers. Failure to do this should result in criminal penalties and prohibit the guilty from any continued business.

Tear gas must also be considered in its material form—as an object designed to torment people, to break their spirits, to cause physical and psychological damage. No amount of corporate public relations or safety guidelines can hide that foundational truth of chemical design. Tear gas is a weapon that polices the atmosphere and pollutes the very air we breathe. It turns the square, the march, the public assembly into a toxic space, taking away what is so often the last communication channel people have left to use. If the right to gather, to speak out, is to mean anything, then we must also have the right to do so in air we can breathe.

Cutting across these important debates on tear gas is a broader, fundamental concern: What is the relationship between profit and violence? In detailing how private individuals and for-profit corporations make money from the policing of often racialized and vulnerable bodies, I aim to bring the 1 percent back into the picture. I do this as a refusal to let the battles of the street and the prison cell play out only between the police and the people. As government elites and corporate CEOs settle backroom deals for fraud, corruption, bribery, toxic-waste dumping, and unethical science, too often we deliver blame only to the structures of policing, leaving the rich to their $500-a-plate gala dinners and the next scandal they can buy their way out of. If this book makes one contribution to the growing debate on law enforcement reform and abolition, let it result in greater investigation into who benefits from the escalation of force.

Afterword

This book was the product of five years of dedicated research. It is an argument fueled by long days in the archives, dozens of interviews, hundreds of conversations, thousands of news reports, investigations into the shipments of millions of tear gas canisters, and a handful of trips to international security expos. I am accountable for the positions I have taken here, just as the people who profit from the sale of “nonlethal” weapons are accountable to every person who has been killed, maimed, or traumatized by their products. Just as the dealers and traders who push riot control as the answer to political unrest are responsible for the pain and harm that follows. Just as the scientists who say “let’s leave out that study” are to blame for why the public still does not actually know if tear gas causes respiratory failure or miscarriages or cancer.

Despite journalists’ best efforts to unearth a harrowing personal origin story for why I began this study, the truth is far more mundane. Flipping through photos of protest-camp evictions while researching my previous monograph, I discerned an eerie trend: a pattern of clouds. They dated back to 1932—the Bonus Army eviction. It occurred to me that I had no idea where tear gas came from or really what it was. So I set out on a late-night Google search.

For support in the early stages of proposal writing, I am indebted to Toby C. Jones, James Delbourgo, and the Networks of Exchange fellows at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. My thanks to Jackob Horstmann, David Shulman, Jamie Coleman and the ever-inspiring (and always the right kind of challenging) Kheya Bag for pushing me to turn a late-night rant into a book proposal.

As I started research for this book, I went looking for arms-control experts. What I found was an extraordinary group of generous people with some very strange senses of humor. From New York to Manchester, Rio to Johannesburg, from award-winning journalists to grassroots NGOs, this book is the product of these dedicated people’s insights, patience, and perseverance. It is the synthesis of thousands of hours of other people’s research, travel, interviewing, data aggregating, and fervent Freedom of Information requesting over the past nine decades on chemical weapons. It was a privilege to get to know this wonderful assortment of dedicated people as I attempted to weave together a story of a hundred years of tear gas.

Like all histories, this one is incomplete. It is limited by all the languages that I do not speak and the archives to which I did not travel. At times this book zoomed out to take a global focus, but the people and incidents featured in these stories come predominantly from the United States and United Kingdom. While this is in part because these countries served—and continue to serve—as dominant hubs in the manufacture of riot-control products and circulation of police training and expertise—it is also because those are the countries I live between. The materials I work with are predominantly English language texts. This means that other international stories brought into the fold are often mediated through Western notions of civilization, of life, death, and human rights.

While limited to the English language, I have attempted to account for the ways that imperialism is caught up in the political-economic forms of policing that now dominate the world. My thanks to Thomas I. Faith for insights on the Chemical Warfare Service and to Jean Pascal Zanders from The Trench for sharing his knowledge of gas warfare in World War I. Stephen Legg, Alex Mankoo, and Sam Goodman helped me discover the archives of the British Empire. Yet, to really address the colonial history of tear gas, more books need to be written. Perhaps most notably needed are a history of France and Germany’s roles in the development of tear gas and of the relationship between European colonialism and the rise of less lethal weapons. I look forward to Alex Mankoo’s forthcoming work on this topic, as well as to my doctoral student Tim Sontheimer’s research on the MENA region’s less-lethals industry.

Funding from the Wellcome Trust and Emory University enabled my research on the 1960s and 1970s, as did the guidance of Julian Perry Robinson and Caitriona McLeish at the Harvard-Sussex Archive. More historical investigation is also needed into this period, particularly around the use of tear gas (among other tactics) to repress strikes and student occupations in the 1960s and the riot-control tactics and special police forces that arose out of these experiences, shaping policing culture around the world. It was also during this time that South Africa saw a sharp spike in its use of tear gas; with its centrality to the international trade in, development of, and justificatory rhetoric around less lethal weapons, South Africa deserves its own investigation, attuned to the colonial complexities and ongoing injustices that shape its riot-control landscape. I thank Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein for help navigating the South African riot control industry.

While these are some obvious holes, even with a team of dedicated researchers and a large pot of funding, gaps are unavoidable: There are just too many secrets and too many lies. The international trade in tear gas is buried under bureaucracy and often classified beyond the reach of Freedom of Information requests. There are files upon files that have been shredded and burned, deleted, altered and falsified. As Charles H. Logan telegraphed to Senator Lafollette about a tear gas salesman back in 1937, “He emptied the files of everything they then contained and burned the file folder.”¹ Today, and in the seven intervening decades, files continue to be deleted, destroyed, and redacted.

This difficulty of finding data led me to rely heavily on the tips and tricks of data diggers and investigative journalists. Rob Evans’s incredible collection of FOI-requested documents in his Gassed archive held at King’s College London made the chapter on “Policing with Poison” possible. Contemporary chapters relied heavily on material archived at the Omega Research Foundation. The team at Omega, riot-control experts extraordinaire, was indispensable to this project and at times to my sanity. For teaching me to dig for and clean data, to scrape and pivot and chart, my gratitude goes to Einar Thorsen and the Bournemouth University Fusion-Funded Datalabs team. Tim Groves, Malachy Brown, Jay Cassano, and the folks at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Centre of Investigative Journalism, Small Media, IRIN, and Corporate Watch who brought data journalism alive. Pippa Gillingham, Steve McFarland, Doug Specht, Matt Ellis, and the Mapping for Justice crew likewise shared with me the gifts of critical GIS.

For their intellectual imaginations and pushes to keep me questioning, my thanks to Paul Rekret, Adam Bobbett, Anastasia Kavada, Pollyanna Ruiz, Tim Sontheimer, Rhys Machold, Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Jack Bratich, and seminar participants at SOME Seminars, the British Science Festival, King’s College London, Keele, Sheffield, Sussex, UCL, Westminster, York, and William Morris Sixth Form for enriching this work during its development.

Throughout the process, this book was shaped and inspired by people protesting for a better world out on the streets, particularly those in Tahrir Square, the Occupy movement, Gezi Park, and Ferguson. I thank John Horne and members of Bahrain Watch, War Resistors League, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Conectas, Pública, Million Hoodies, the Bradford Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project, and Amnesty International, who have shared their time and reflections with me. I am also grateful to Gavin Grindon, Mel Evans, Occupy Design, and the amazing team at Minute Works, whose illustrations fill this book, for keeping cruel design and disobedient objects at the heart of this project.

In addition to the community of experts who helped shaped this book, I am indebted to my fabulous student research assistants, who time and again injected the energy, passion, and ethos of social justice to get me through this project (not to mention coffees and photocopies): Ozlem Demirkol, Daniel Weissmann, Laura McKenna, and Lauren Weeks. Special thanks to my protest camp boys, Gavin Brown, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy, carpet stompers forever! Anja Kanngieser, you are the best interspecial atmospheric partner a girl could ask for. Thanks to Andy Hsiao, my editor at Verso, I now know what “voice” means. Thanks to my family for always letting us be weird, to my AHCS McGill family for teaching me how to make a career out of it, and to my Bournemouth family for nurturing that career. Finally, a huge thank you to Daniel Buchan—it is a privilege to write, and a profound one to get to write while being married to you.

Notes

Introduction

1Rick Gladstone, “Bahrain Is Criticized for Its ‘Torrent’ of Tear Gas Use,” New York Times, August 1, 2012.

2Physicians for Human Rights, “Tear Gas or Lethal Gas? Bahrain’s Death Toll Mounts to 34,” press release, March 16, 2012.

3Amnesty International, “Bahrain’s use of tear gas against protesters increasingly deadly,” press release, January 26, 2012.

4Hurriyet Daily News, “Injured Gezi Protester Has ‘Gone Back to Being 5-Year-Old Girl,” November 25, 2013; Ayşe Arman, “She Was My Elder Sister Before, Now She Is My Baby,” Hurriyet Daily News, July 7, 2013; Physicians for Human Rights, “PHR Documents Improper Use of Tear Gas and Unnecessary Force on Demonstrators in Turkey,” press release, July 12, 2013.

5I have chosen not to use the term “police militarization” in this manuscript, except where referenced by another person or a campaign group. Following Alison Howell, while the term police militarization has been a useful shorthand for the media and a galvanizing term for grassroots campaigns, as a concept it fails to account for the entangled ways that police and military technology and tactical transfers play out. Likewise, again following Howell, it can limit our understanding of demilitarization to the removal of military protocols from policing, but it cannot demand the dismantling of the many other colonial roots of police violence. In place of this term I refer to for-profit policing, violence, and use of force. I offer detailed descriptions of how military, police, and business interests become entwined at specific points in time in efforts to complicate our existing notions of police militarization as we move toward developing a more accurate and effective terminology for social justice work. See Alison Howell (forthcoming) “Forget ‘Militarization’: Race, Disability and the Martial Politics of the Police and of the University.”

6Steffi Duarte, “Ferguson and The Design Dimension: Exploring Makeshift Tear-Gas Masks on BBC Radio 4,” Victoria & Albert Museum blog, November 26, 2014.

7Alex Altman, “Ferguson Protesters Try to Block Use of Tear Gas,” TIME, December 12, 2014; Associated Press, “Police to Restrict Teargas Use as Part of Settlement with Ferguson Protesters,” Guardian, March 26, 2015.

8Patrick Bogue, Richard Sullivan, Anonymous, and Guglielmo Chelazzi Grandinetti, “Settlements and Separation in the West Bank: Future Implications for Health,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival 30(1), 2014: 4–10.

9Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Facts about Riot Control Agents,” 2003, cdc.gov; A.R. Hill, N.B. Silverberg, D. Mayorga, and H.E. Baldwin, “Medical Hazards of the Tear Gas CS: A Case of Persistent, Multisystem, Hypersensitivity Reaction and Review of the Literature,” Medicine 79(4), 2000: 234–40; Holly G. Atkinson and Richard Sollom, “Weaponizing Tear Gas,” Physicians for Human Rights, 2012, physiciansforhuman rights.org.

10Michael Owens, “Despite Warnings, Tenn. Officers Start Home Fire With Pyrotechnic Grenade,” Bristol Herald-Courier, May 19, 2011; Tony Burchyns, “Report: Vallejo SWAT Tear Gas Rounds Likely Ignited ‘Accidental’ House Fire,” Vallejo Times-Herald, April 16, 2012.

11The Human Effects of Non-Lethal Technologies (NATO RTO HFM-073) 2006

12Mari Hayman, “Chilean Government Resumes Use of Tear Gas as Hidro Aysén Protests Continue,” World Affairs, May 25, 2011.

1Chemical Warfare in World War I

1For a detailed account of chemical and biological weapons prior to the Industrial Revolution, see Adrienne Mayor’s Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (New York and London: Overlook Press, 2009) and C. J. Hilmas, C. J., J. K. Smart, J. K., and B. A. Hill, History of Chemical Warfare: Medical Aspects of Chemical Warfare (Washington, DC: US Army Office of the Surgeon General, 2008). Weapons made of crude chemical concoctions can be found as early as 3000 BC. Egyptians studied the lethal effects of hydrocyanic acid, a colourless, volatile liquid with a strong odor that can cause asphyxiation. From 2000 BC, dynasties in India are thought to have used smoke screens, sleep-inducing fumes, and incendiary devices during battle. The first known record of a sulphur attack in Western civilization happened during the Peloponnesian War. According to Thucydides’s documented history of the violent battles between Sparta and Athens, in 429 BC the Spartans led an attack with this early chemical weapon. Dated to 660 AD, Greek Fire is thought to have been a mixture of resin, pitch, sulfur, naphtha, lime, and saltpeter. Fictionalized in Game of Thrones as “wildfire,” this early chemical weapon would be thrown on the water and set alight in naval combat. Leo IX of Byzantium recorded another early poison in the ninth century. This invention appears to have worked like a primitive version of Israel’s Skunk spray used by the IDF in the Occupied Territories since 2009.

2Hilmas et al., History of Chemical Warfare, 9–76.

3Supporting the case that France was first to fire, historians of chemical warfare have offered archival evidence that suggests French police were already experimenting with chemical agents for getting protesters out from behind barricades prior to WWI. Lessons French authorities learnt during the Revolution of 1848 included the need for a weapon that could penetrate barricades in ways that gun and even canon fire could not. Likewise, they needed a technique to demoralize and disorient, breaking the collective spirit that formed behind the barricade wall. A weapon that could fill the atmosphere, moving between the cracks of a barricade’s construction and up through the air, could be just the thing the French authorities needed to suppress street-based insurrections. For a brief discussion of pre-WWI tear gas see Coffey’s Cathedrals of Science. For a detailed account of Barricades in the French Revolution see Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). While more research is needed into this early French history of policing with chemical agents, like other examples in this book, it points toward the reciprocal development of policing and military technologies. Rather than a directly linear relationship often assumed in concepts of militarized policing, such developments show how the police and military often codesign experiments in force.

4Joanna Legg, Graham Parker, and David Legg, “New German Weapon: The Gas Cloud,” TheGreatWar.co.uk, n.d.

5Dominiek Dendooven, “22 April 1915–Eyewitness Accounts of the First Gas Attack,” in Jean Pascal Zanders (ed.) Innocence Slaughtered (London: Uniform Press, 2016), 70–85.

6Ibid., 244.

7Wolfgang Wietzker, “Gas Warfare in 1915 and the German Press” in Zanders (ed.), Innocence Slaughtered, 170–89.

8Gerard J. Fitzgerald, “Chemical Warfare and Medical Response During World War I,” American Journal of Public Health 98 (April 2008): 4.

9Patrick Coffey, Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries that Made Modern Chemistry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

10Cited in Leo van Bergen and Maarji Abbenhuis, “Man-Monkey, Monkey-Man: Neutrality and the Discussions about the Inhumanity of Poison Gas in the Netherlands and International Committee of the Red Cross,” in Zanders (ed.), Innocence Slaughtered, 225.

11L.F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 47.

12Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers in the Great War (New York: Penguin, 1979), cited in Fitzgerald, “Chemical Warfare.”

13Haber, Poisonous Cloud, 261.

14Cited in Fitzgerald, “Chemical Warfare.”

15Ibid.

16Jean Pascal Zanders, “The Road to the Geneva,” in Innocence Slaughtered, 238–72.

17Joseph F. Murray, Arthur K. Stuempfle, and Amy L. Stuempfle, Edgewood (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2012).

18Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).

19Theo M. Knappen, “War Gases for Dispersing Mobs,” Gas Age Record, November 26, 1921, 702–3.

20Amos Fries, “By-Products of Chemical Warfare,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (October 1928): 1083.

21Knappen, “War Gases.”

22John Stauber,Toxic Sludge is Good for You (Monroe, MN: Common Courage Press, 1995).

2War Gases for Peacetime Use

1Amos Fries, “Chemical Warfare and Its Effect on Strategy and Tactics,” [nd], Amos Fries Papers, University of Oregon.

2Gerald Egan, “Building Up Chemical Warfare Service,” Evening Independent, December 29, 1923.

3“Chemistry and Civilization” Amos Fries Papers, University of Oregon.

4Chemical Warfare Service, CWS 175 boxes 10–5 National Archives II.

5Chemical Warfare Service, CWS 175 boxes 8–15, National Archives II.

6Ibid.

7Knappen, “War Gases.”

8Seth Wiard, “Chemical Warfare Munitions for Law Enforcement Agencies,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 26, no. 3 (Fall 1935): 439.

9Cited in Thomas I. Faith, Behind the Gas Mask: The US Chemical Warfare Service in War and Peace (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 67.

10Fries, “Chemical Warfare.”

11Egan, “Building Up Chemical Warfare Service.”

12Ibid.

13New York Times, July 20, 1921, cited in Daniel P. Jones, “From Military to Civilian Technology: The Introduction of Tear Gas for Civil Riot Control,” Technology and Culture 19 (1978): 151–68.

14Ibid., 168.

15Lake Erie Chemical Company 1926–27, CWS archives, National Archives II.

16Ibid.

17Ibid.

18Ibid.

19Ibid.

20Lake Erie Chemical Company 1927–31, CWS archives, National Archives II.

21Ibid.

22Ibid.

23Federal Laboratories, Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, United States Senate, 73rd Congress, S. Res. 206 Part 7, September 18, 19 and 20, [1934], 1619–20.

24Frank C. Hanighen, “Arming the Industrialists,” Nation, August 22, 1936, 209–11.

25Ballads of the B.E.F. (New York: Coventry House, 1932).

26CWS 175, CWS Correspondence, National Archives II.

27David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation (New York, Pan Macmillan, 2001).

28CWS 175, CWS Correspondence National Archives II.

29Robert LaFollette, LaFollette 46, box 4, National Archives.

30Federal Laboratories Munitions Industry Special Committee, 1619–20.

31Robert LaFollette, LaFollette 46, box 85, “Kiplinger letter,” September 26, 1936, National Archives.

32Ibid.

33Women of the Ku Klux Klan letter and membership forms, Amos Fries Papers, University of Oregon.

34H.R. 7120, “To Exclude and Expel Alien Fascists and Communists,” Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, First Session, April 3–4, 1935.

35Patrick Maney, “Joe McCarthy’s First Victim,” Virginia Quarterly Review 77(3), Summer 2001.

3Tear Gas and the Benevolent Empire

1Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006); Nick Lloyd, The Amritsar massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (London: IB Tauris, 2011).

2Collett, Butcher of Amritsar.

3Dyer admitted in testimony that he had premeditated intentions of firing on the crowd: “I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing … But they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself …Therefore I considered it my duty to fire on them and to fire well.” Quoted in Collett, Butcher of Amritsar, 333–4.

4British Library, India Office Archives, Use of tear gas in India IOR/L/PJ/12/414 [1927–33].

5Ibid. For a detailed discussion of tear gas and the role of Punjab police in the interwar period see S. Shoul, “British Tear Gas Doctrine Between the World Wars,” War in History, 15(2), 2008: 168–90.

6British Library, India Office Archives, Use of tear gas in India IOR/L/PJ/12/414 [1927–33].

7National Archives, Use of Tear Gas by Various Police Forces 1922–34 MEPO 218848.

8Ibid. Germany also pursued the British market for the sale of tear gas in the early 1930s, but to no avail.

9National Archives, Use of Tear Gas by Various Police Forces 1922–34 MEPO 218848.

10British Library, India Office Archives, Use of tear gas in India IOR/L/PJ/12/414 [1927–33].

11Ibid.

12Ibid.

13British National Archive, Nigeria, CO 323/1113/12.

14British Library, India Office Archives, Use of tear gas in India IOR/L/PJ/12/414 [1927–33].

15Daniel M. Mayton, “Gandhi as Peacebuilder: The Social Psychology of Satyagraha,” Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daniel J. Christie, Richard V. Wagner, and Deborah DuNann Winter (New York: Prentice Hall, 2000), 307–13.

16British National Archive, Nigeria, CO 323/1113/12.

17Ibid.

18Mary Davis, “Labour, Race and Empire,” in The British Labour Movement and Imperialism, edited by Craig Horner, Billy Frank, and David Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 89–105.

19British Library, India Office Archives, Use of tear gas in India IOR/L/PJ/12/414 [1927–33].

20British National Archive, Rhodesia, CO 323/1113/13.

21Ibid. Caitriona McLeish suggests that Britain’s reluctance may also be associated with the proximity of gas warfare during World War I. As the United States was late to enter the war, their exposure to gas warfare was limited in comparison to British troops.

22British National Archive, Nigeria, CO 323/1113/12.

23Ibid.

24Ibid.

25Ibid.

26Ibid.

27Ibid.

28British National Archive, Palestine, CO 733/272/10. For more discussion of Palestine’s role in the legalization of tear gas for the colonies, see Mike Waldren, Tear Gas and Empire (Police Firearms Officers Association, 2013), https://www.pfoa.co.uk/245/tear-gas-and-empire; Michael J. Cohen, “Sir Arthur Wauchope, the Army, and the Rebellion in Palestine, 1936,” Middle Eastern Studies, 9(1), 1973: 19–34; Alex Mankoo, “Teargas—We Haven’t Got The Foggiest: Deconstructing the Ambiguities of Creeping Legitimisation,” MA thesis, University College London.

29British National Archive, Palestine, CO 733/272/10.

30Ibid.

31British National Archive CO 323/1341/19.

32Ibid.

33British Library, India Office Archives, IOR/L/PJ/12/418.

34In 1932, Govan Brothers set up two sugar factories in Rampur, a small Muslim state covered in farmland. Raza Sugar Co. Ltd. and Buland Sugar Co. Ltd. were leased agricultural land from Rampur and in 1935 they partnered to form Agricultural Company, Rampur (Govan Brothers v. Commissioner of Income-Tax, Uttar Pradesh, May 10, 1962).

35Ibid.

36Ibid.

37British Library, India Office Archives IOR/L/PJ/12/418.

38Ibid.

39Ibid.

40Ibid.

41Quoted in Riaz Ahmad, ( “An Aspect of the Pakistan Movement: Muslim League’s Civil Disobedience Movement against the NWFP Ministry of Dr. Khan Sahib (20 February–4 June 1947),” Pakistan Journal of History and Culture 28(20), 2007, from NWFP Police Abstract of Intelligence, Vol. 43, Peshawar, April 15 1947, NDC Library, Islamabad.

42British Library, India Office Archives IOR/L/PJ/12/418.

43Ibid.

44Ibid.

45Ibid.

46Ibid.

47British Library, India Office Archives IOR/L/PJ/12/418.

48In place of the No. 92 grenades, in 1949 the Secretary of State for the Colonies reported that one hundred No. 91 tear gas grenades were supplied to Hong Kong, Singapore, the Federation of Malaya, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Cyprus. This would allow for trials in real-life conditions.

49Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (New York: Random House, 2007).

50Among the chemical and biological weapons tested on British veterans at Porton Down from the early 1940s to the end of the 1980s were mustard gas, sarin, chlorine, and pesticides. Eight of the chemicals tested are known to be carcinogenic.

51T. J. Keegan, S.A.S. Walker, C. Brooks, T. Langdon, L. Linsell, N.E.S. Maconochie, P. Doyle, et al. “Exposures Recorded for Participants in the UK Chemical Warfare Agent Human Research Programme, 1941–89,” Annals of Occupational Hygiene 53(1), 2009: 83–97.

52Gassed collection, Box O, King’s College Military Archive.

53Ibid.

54An exception to this is the wartime tests of tear gases conducted across the UK. These gasmask preparedness drills are documented in Alex Mankoo’s forthcoming paper.

4Tear Gas and the Rise of Modern Riot Control

1Department of the Army, “Characteristics of Riot Control Agent CS,” Edgewood Arsenal EASP 600, October 1, 1967. CN, however, was used in liquid form as the product Mace.

2For more on chemical weapons, riot control agents, and force multiplication, see Michael Crowley, Chemical Control: Regulation of Incapacitating Chemical Agent Weapons, Riot Control Agents and their Means of Delivery (New York: Springer, 2016).

3Charlayne Harris-Gault, “Taunts, Tear Gas, and Other College Memories,” New Yorker, November 13, 2015.

4Shermika Dunner, “Freedom Riders on Display, Deep South, September 11, 2011.

5Kayla Epstein, “Representative John Lewis ‘Live’ Tweets Bloody Sunday—as He Saw and Felt It,” Guardian, March 8, 2015.

6Roy Reed, “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negroes,” New York Times, March 8, 1965. For narrative retellings of the events, see Jeffrey K. Smith, The Fighting Little Judge: The Life and Times of George C. Wallace (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009); Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

7Adam Bernstein, “Alabama Sheriff James Clark Embodied Bigotry,” Washington Post, June 7, 2007.

8Reed, “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs.”

9May, Bending Toward Justice.

10Barbara Harris Combs. From Selma to Montgomery: The Long March to Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2013), 37.

11J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2002).

12Reed, “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs.”

13Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 116.

14History Channel, “Bloody Sunday 1965,” video, n.d.

15Williams v. Wallace 240 F. Supp 100 (N.D. Alabama, 1965).

16Letter from Albert J. Lingo in Birmingham, Alabama, to Bill Jones, press secretary for Governor George Wallace in Montgomery, Alabama. Alabama Department of Archives and History, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2951.

17Paul J. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1945–92, vol. 30, no. 20–1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), 103.

18Ibid., 117.

19Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1994).

20Interview with Sheriff James Clark, conducted by Blackside, Inc., on February 19, 1986, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.

21Gary Rivlin, “The Night Chicago Burned,” Chicago Reader, August 25, 1988.

22Christopher Chandler, “Shoot to Kill… Shoot to Maim,” Chicago Reader, April 4, 2002.

23Rivlin, “The Night Chicago Burned.”

24John Schultz, No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 113. Another reporter on site wrote of a spraying machine, like the types used to dispense pesticide, that discharged tear gas into the crowd.

25Reports on exact numbers of people present, both protesters and police, vary across texts. For the most part, figures used come from Schultz, No One Was Killed. Also referred to here are Frank Kusch, Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and David Farber, Chicago’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). However, Schultz and other journalists who were on the scene contest these latter accounts for their uncritical reproduction of police and politicians’ versions of events.

26Schultz, No One Was Killed, 114.

27Kusch, Battleground Chicago, 89.

28Todd Gitlin, quoted in ibid., 97.

29Schultz, No One Was Killed; Kusch, Battleground Chicago.

30Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago During the Week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).

31John Schultz, “The Siege of ’68,” Chicago Reader, September 8, 1988.

32For more on atmospheric policing with tear gas, see Anna Feigenbaum and Anja Kanngieser, “For a Politics of Atmospheric Governance,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5(1), 2015: 80–84; M. Nieuwenhuis, “Terror in the Air in Istanbul,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2013); Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Boston: Semiotext(e), 2009); Miguel de Larrinaga, “(Non)-Lethality and War: Tear Gas as a Weapon of Governmental Intervention,” Critical Studies on Terrorism (2016): 1–19.

33Eric Leif Davin, Fight the Power: A Memoir of the Sixties (Pittsburgh: Davin Books, 2009).

34Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

35Mario Savio, address on the steps of Sproul Hall, delivered December 2, 1964, University of California at Berkeley.

36In 1967, liberal Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr was fired from his post for his lenient treatment of student radicals. Just weeks after Ronald Reagan took office as governor, Kerr was fired by the UC Regents Board in a 14–8 vote “effective immediately.” For an extensive discussion of these issues see Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Macmillan, 2012).

37Robert Neelly Bellah, “The New Consciousness and the Berkeley New Left,” in The New Religious Consciousness, vol. 362, edited by Charles Y. Glock, Robert Neelly Bellah, and Randall H. Alfred (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

38UC Berkeley Police Department, “Retired Officer’s Notes on the History of People’s Park,” n.d., http://ucpd.berkeley.edu/retired-officers-notes-history-peoples-park.

39Peter Allen, “Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism and Urban Renewal,” Institute for the Study of Societal Issues Working Paper Series (2007): 21.

40Rock ’n’ roll archive, University of Sussex, People’s Park 1969.

41Allen, “Violent Design,” 22.

42Rock ‘n’ roll archive, University of Sussex, People’s Park 1969.

43Ibid.

44Belva Davis and Vicki Haddock, Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2011), 111.

45William J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

46Davis and Haddock, Never in My Wildest Dreams.

47Peter Barnes, “An Outcry: Thoughts on Being Tear Gassed,” Newsweek, June 2, 1969.

48“Helicopter Gases UC Crowd Mourning Shooting Death,” Stanford Daily, May 21, 1969: 1. Of note here, like the sanitation truck, the helicopter was first developed for civilian use, rather than for military use. Rather than a direct military transfer of technology, here a domestic technology is first adapted by the military before being put back out for use in civilian policing.

49“Berkeley’s Use of Guard Costs State $50,000 A Day,” Fresno Bee, May 21, 1969: 4.

50Ibid.

51Jeffery Kahn, “Ronald Reagan Launched Political Career Using the Berkeley Campus as a Target,” UC Berkeley NewsCenter, June 8, 2004.

52Dave Grossman, On Killing (New York: Open Road Media, 2014).

53Scheips, Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, vol. 30: 216–7.

54Ibid., 218.

55Department of the Army, Civil Disturbances and Disasters, Field Manual 19–5, March 25, 1968.

56Scheips, Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, vol. 30:228.

57US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics: A Report of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights,” 93rd Congress, First Session, 1973, 34–6. Further commentary on the Garden Plot can be found in Ron Ridenhour and Arthur Lubow, “Bringing the War Home” New Times 51(101), November 28, 1975: 18, 20–4. For commentary linking Garden Plot to post-9/11 policing, see Frank Morales, “US Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home,” Centre for Research on Globalisation, May 8, 2002.

58President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970), x.

59Ibid.

60Anthony Deane-Drummond, Riot Control (London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 1975), 73.

61Anne Keleny, “Maj Gen Tony Deane-Drummond: Soldier decorated after Operation Market Garden,” Independent, March 4, 2013; Joseph Hanlan, “Will Weapons, Spies, and Teacher Restrictions Prevent Riots?” New Scientist, April 10, 1975: 86.

62John Cookson and Judith Nottingham, A Survey of Chemical and Biological Warfare (New York: NYU Press, 1969).

63Ibid., 120.

64Anna Feigenbaum and Daniel Weissmann, “Vulnerable Warriors: The Atmospheric Marketing of Military and Policing Equipment Before and After 9/11,” Critical Studies on Terrorism (2016): 1–17.

65Rex Applegate, Kill or Get Killed (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1976). Applegate’s book is also important in considering the history of SWAT teams. For an extensive discussion of how SWAT arose out of race riot policing in the 1960s, see Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 2013). Balko’s text can usefully be read alongside the history of riot control I offer in this chapter for a fuller picture of the changing policies that led to increased police use of force tactics and weaponry.

66Rex Applegate, Riot Control: Material and Techniques (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1969), 39.

67Ibid., 52.

68Robert J. Bunker, Nonlethal Weapons Terms and References (Collingdale, PA: DIANE Publishing, 1999).

69Rex Applegate, “The Chemical Mace: Evaluation of a New Police Weapon for Mob Control or Individual Defense,” Law and Order (1966): 48, quoted in Joseph A. Page, “Of Mace and Men: Tort Law as a Means of Controlling Domestic Chemical Warfare,” Georgetown Law Journal 57 (1968): 1239.

70Mace was originally designed by a young inventor to be a self-defense spray after his wife was attacked on the street: Daniel A. Gross, “The Forgotten History of Mace, Designed by a 29-Year-Old and Reinvented as a Police Weapon,” Smithsonian, November 4, 2014.

71Page, “Of Mace and Men,” 1242.

72Applegate, Riot Control, 54.

73Deane-Drummond, Riot Control, 125.

5The Science of Making CS Gas “Safe”

1Museum of Free Derry, “Battle of the Bogside,” n.d.

2London Times, “Ulster Investigation Urged by Labour MPs,” April 26, 1967.

3Freya McClements, “The Day that the Troubles Began,” BBC News, October 3, 2008.

4Ann Devenney also flung herself over her father at one point during the attack and was kicked and forcefully pulled from him. She recalls watching the police beat her younger siblings, including a four-year-old and a ten-year-old. See her 1969 interview, Micky K (YouTube user), “Devenney Interview 69,” YouTube video, posted May 9, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exjygMKmxs.

5Raymond McClean, The Road to Bloody Sunday (Dublin: Ward River Press, 1983).

6Although an investigation was conducted at the time, the results of the Drury report were never shared with the Devenney family. It was not until a complaint was upheld in 2001 that responsibility for the death of Sammy Devenney at the hands of RUC police was formally and publicly acknowledged. Police ombudsman, “Police Ombudsman Releases Findings on Devenney,” press release, October 4, 2001, http://www.policeombudsman.org/Publicationsuploads/devenny.pdf.

7Deane-Drummond, Riot Control,

8Russell Stetler, The Politics of Violence in Northern Ireland (London: Sheed and Ward, 1970).

9Museum of Free Derry, “Battle of the Bogside.”

10Tim Jones, “Police defend use of smoke,” London Times, August 14, 1969.

11Harold Himsworth, “Diary of Visit to Northern Ireland,” PP/RHT/C1 Himsworth Collection, Wellcome Trust.

12Ibid.

13Battle of the Bogside, dir. Vince Cunningham, 2004.

14Ibid.

15Bogside Artist Collective, author interview, Derry, January 8, 2013.

16Battle of the Bogside.

17Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (New York: Pan Books, 1970), 203.

18McClean, Road to Bloody Sunday; Interview with Bogside artists.

19John Gray, “Obituary: Sir Harold Himsworth,” Independent, November 9, 1993.

20New Scientist, “Profile: Sir Harold Himsworth: His Inspiration Was the Family Doctor,” October 30, 1958: 1161–2.

21Himsworth, “Diary.”

22Ibid.

23Tim Jones, “Bogside tells inquiry team of gas effects,” London Times, September 3, 1969.

24Battle of the Bogside.

25McClean, Road to Bloody Sunday.

26BBC News, “Porton Down—A Sinister Air?” August 20, 1999.

27Ibid.

28Keegan et al. “Exposures recorded for participants.”

29Commons Hansard Debates, text for March 17, 1998. A formal enquiry began in 1999. Its outcome validated veterans’ claims to the nature of testing and the lies told to them by the government that garnered their participation. Out-of-court settlements saw some compensation and apologies provided to veterans’ families, but there have been no criminal convictions.

30Tal Bolton, “Putting Consent in Context: Military Research Subjects in Chemical Warfare Tests at Porton Down, UK,” Journal of Policy History 23(1), 2011: 53–73.

31Linsey McGoey, “The Logic of Strategic Ignorance,” British Journal of Sociology 63(3), 2012: 533–76.

32Himsworth Committee, minutes of first meeting, October 4, 1969.

33International Committee of the Red Cross, “Hungary: Practice Relating to Rule 74. Chemical Weapons,” n.d., icrc.org.

34United Nations, Chemical and Bacteriological (Biological) Weapons and the Effects of Their Possible Use (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), xv.

35John R. Walker, Britain and Disarmament: The UK and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons Arms Control and Programmes, 1956–1975 (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 35.

36Ibid., 33.

37Ibid., 33.

38Himsworth Committee, minutes of third meeting, December 11, 1969.

39Himsworth Committee, minutes of first meeting.

40Parliament, Report of the Enquiry into Medical and Toxicological Aspects of CS (Her Majesty’s Stationary Office: London, 1971).

41Ibid.

42Personal correspondence, October 20, 1971, Wellcome Trust.

43Ibid.

44McClean, Road to Bloody Sunday.

45Ibid.

46Hilary Rose and Russell Stetler, “What Gas Did in Derry,” New Society, September 25, 1969.

47Himsworth Committee, minutes of first meeting.

48Parliament, Report of the Enquiry, 20.

49Personal correspondence, Kahn to Himsworth, [1970 Wellcome Trust PP/HPH/C/6.

50Parliament, Report of the Enquiry, 21.

51Personal correspondence, Kahn to Himsworth, March 8, 1970 PP/HPH/C/6.

52Parliament, Report of the Enquiry, 21.

53Himsworth Committee, meeting minutes, March 23, 1971, Wellcome Trust.

54On January 30, British violence against Irish demonstrators took a dark turn. During a peaceful civil rights march in Derry, the British military fired live finger-length bullets repeatedly into crowds of protesters. They killed fourteen men and boys—six of them only seventeen. The bullets were so powerful and had been shot at such close range that in some instances they cut straight through one person’s body and into another. The events of this day are infamous as “Bloody Sunday.” Further immortalized by Bono in U2’s 1983 hit song “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” January 30, 1972, became the best recorded and most remembered moment of the Irish civil rights struggle.

55Colin Burrows, “Operationalizing Non-Lethality: A Northern Ireland Perspective,” in. The Future of Non-Lethal Weapons: Technologies, Operations, Ethics, and Law, edited by Nick Lewer (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2002).

56Government Accountability Office, “Use of US-Manufactured Tear Gas in the Occupied Territories,” April 13, 1989, NSIAD-89-128.

57House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs and Criminal Justice, “Waco Investigation Day 10 Part 3,” House Oversight Committee hearing, YouTube video, filmed August 1, 1995, posted January 1, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhjhRehknZA.

58Frontline, “Waco: The Inside Story,” online repository, PBS, 1995–2014.

6Policing with Poison

1Stephen Kelly, “Toxteth’s Toxic Legacy: Liverpool Is Still Feeling the Impact of the Toxteth Riots,” Independent, July 30, 2011.

2Ibid.

3Philip Jordan, “Oxford Defends Use of CS Gas Cartridges,” Guardian, September 17, 1981.

4Stewart Tendler, “Yard’s Riot Report Calls for CS Gas or Plastic Bullets and New Tactics” London Times, July 3, 1986.

5See BSSRS Technology of Political Control Group, TechnoCop: New Police Technologies (London: Free Association Books, 1985), 77–8.

6Steve Wright, “Your Unfriendly Neighbourhood Bobby,” Guardian, July 16, 1981.

7Tendler, “Yard’s riot report.”

8International Defense Review, “UK to Procure New Riot Gun,” 1989.

9Quentin Cowdry, “Jail Officers Seek Gas and Grenades to Quell Cell Riots,” London Times, May 23, 1990.

10Ibid.

11Egmont Kock and Bernard Rix, “A Review of Police Trials of the CS Aerosol Incapacitant,” Police Research Group, 1996, v.

12Ibid., vi.

13Ibid., vi.

14Ibid.

15Gassed Archive Box O; Jason Bennetto, “Police to Sue over CS Spray Injuries,” Independent, March 1, 1996. For an extensive discussion of CS injuries and the problems associated with the failure of organizations or law enforcement agencies to record this data systematically see, Brian Rappert, “Health and Safety in Policing: Lessons from the Regulation of CS Sprays in the UK,” Social Science and Medicine 56(6), 2003: 1269–78; Brian Rappert, Non-lethal Weapons as Legitimizing Forces? Technology, Politics, and the Management of Conflict (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2003).

16Rappert, “Health and Safety in Policing.”

17Peter Evans, “CS gas ‘best way’ of crowd control; British Criminology Conference,” London Times, July 19, 1989.

18Peter Waddington, “Both Arms of the Law: Institutionalised Protest and the Policing of Public Order,” paper presented at the British Criminology Conference, Loughborough University, July 18–21, 1995, http://britsoccrim.org/volume1/008.pdf.

19Peter Waddington, “Stop and Search,” Police Review, April 19, 1996: 16–7.

20In response to my Freedom of Information request (reference no. 2014020000772), filed during the public consultation on water cannons in 2014, I was told: “The documents are restricted documents. The Metropolitan Police Service holds copies of the documents. The documents are held on Commander David Martin’s computer records. The Metropolitan Police Service does not hold information with regards to who was a member of the review committee and their details.”

21Home Office, “Michael Howard Backs CS Spray for Police,” press release, August 21, 1996.

22Home Office, “Michael Howard Backs CS.”

23“Decision on CS sprays due next week claims Sir Ron,” [nd], Gassed archive, King’s Military Archives; Jason Bennetto, “Police Patrols to Be Armed with CS Gas,” Independent, January 4, 1996.

24David Maclean, Minister of State, Commons Debates, Oral Answers to Questions, January 22, 1996, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199596/cmhansrd/v9060122/debtext/60122-32.htm.

25Pseudonyms are used here. Joshua is given in the archival documents, Louise is added by author. Gassed Archive box O NSF and Home Office press releases.

26Ibid.

27Rappert, “Health and Safety in Policing.”

28Ken Hyder, “Is CS the Wrong Solution?” New Scientist, March 1996.

29Theodore C. Chan, “The Impact of Oleoresin Capsicum Spray on Respiratory Function in Human Subjects in the Sitting and Prone Maximal Restraint Positions,” National Institute of Justice, 2000, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/182433.pdf; Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011); Koplow 2006.

30Chan et al., “Impact of Oleoresin Capsicum Spray.”

31All quotes from Hyder, “Is CS the Wrong Solution?”

32Lois Pilant, “Less-Than-Lethal Weapons: New Solutions for Law Enforcement,” International Association of Chiefs of Police, December 1993.

33Jim Jeron Zamora, “Pepper Spray Study Is Tainted,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1996.

34R. G. Christensen and D. E. Frank, Preliminary investigation of oleoresin capsicum. National Institute of Justice Report, Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 1995, 100–95, cited in C. Gregory Smith and Woodhall Stop-ford, “Health Hazards of Pepper Spray,” North Carolina Medical Journal 60(5), September/October 1999.

35Ibid.

36The Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths’ primary aim is to “minimize liability and risk management issues” for law enforcement officers—largely by peddling the ‘science’ of excited delirium. In 2005, John Peters and Taser’s litigation lawyer Michael Brave, registered the company. Soon they were regulars on Taser’s payroll, hosting Taser training sessions, serving as expert witnesses, and running national conferences for law enforcement. A 2009 exposé by Mother Jones traced these corporate connections. Admitting to his financial interests, Peters explained in a deposition, “Some of the manufacturers said, you know, ‘[Police departments] are paying out lots of money in these lawsuits, and it’s hurting us because they don’t have money left over to buy our product.’ ” See Bernice Young, “Taser’s Delirium Defense: How Lawyers Used Junk Science to Explain Away Stun-Gun Deaths,” Mother Jones, March/April 2009.

37Daliah Merzaban, “Stewart Defends Pepper-Spraying,” Ubyssey 81(14), October 29, 1999: 5.

38Rodney King’s case was, of course, not the first time police violence was caught on a home camera, but its aftereffects shaped police PR discussions and strategies. Likewise, mainstream-media video footage has long played a large role in debates around police violence. In the United States, the “Battle of Chicago” at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (see chapter 4) and the theatrical use of television by the Black Panther Party shaped social-movement media strategy. Even in the 1930s, suppressed footage of Republic Steel strikes ended up making its way to newsreels after a government subpoena.

39Green Mountain Anarchist Collective, Battle of Genoa (Baltimore: AK Press, 2002), 66.

40For excellent overviews of policing the alter-globalization movement, see Amory Starr, Luis A. Fernandez, and Christian Scholl., Shutting Down the Streets: Political Violence and Social Control in the Global Era (New York: NYU Press, 2011); Luis Fernandez, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-Globalization Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

41Scott Olsen, “U.S. Vet Nearly Killed by Police Beanbag at Occupy Oakland, Settles Lawsuit with City,” Democracy Now!, March 21, 2014.

42Adam Gabbatt, “UC Davis Pepper Spray Police Officer Awarded $38,000 Compensation,” Guardian, October 23, 2013.

43Sam Stanton and Diane Lambert “UC Davis Spent Thousands to Scrub Pepper-Spray References from Internet,” Sacramento Bee, April 13, 2016.

44Bronwen Rees and Jonathan Smith, “Breaking the Silence: The Traumatic Circle of Policing,” International Journal of Police Science and Management 10(3), 2008: 267–79.

7Profiting from Police Use of Force

1This chapter draws from participant observation research conducted at Milipol in 2013 and 2015. Milipol, “Milipol Paris 2015: High Attendance of Homeland Security Professionals at the 2015 Edition,” press release, November 26, 2015.

2“Global non-lethal Weapons Market report 2018,” iBusiness Wire, November 26, 2013.

3Markets and Markets, “Riot Control System Market Worth 11.78 Billion USD by 2021,” press release, n.d.

4Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Picador, 2012).

5Samir Abed Rabbo and Doris Safie (eds.), The Palestinian Uprising (Jerusalem: FACTS Information Committee and Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1990).

6ISPRA Ltd., company website, www.ispraltd.com.

7ISPRA Ltd., “Environment,” n.d.

8M. Asif Ismail, “Investing in War: The Carlyle Group Profits from Government and Conflict,” Center for Public Integrity, November 18, 2004; Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The Ex-Presidents’ Club,” Guardian, October 31, 2001.

9Emily Smith, “Controversial Tear Gas Canisters Made in the USA,” CNN.com, January 28, 2011; Karen McVeigh, “US Firms Shipped Teargas to Egypt During Crackdown, Investigation Reveals,” Guardian, December 7, 2011; RT.com, “Egypt orders $2.5mln Worth of Teargas from US Despite Plunging Economy,” February 23, 2013.

10“CTS Less-Lethal Munitions Used During G-20 Summit,” Police One, November 10, 2009.

11David Crane, “VENOM Less-Lethal 40mm Munitions Launcher for Urban Warfare Operations,” Defence Review, March 23, 2008.

12Combined Systems Inc., videos available at Police One, http://www.policeone.com/manufacturers/Combined-Tactical-Systems/videos.

13Crane, “VENOM Less-Lethal 40mm Munitions Launcher.”

14See Pública’s work on Condor Nonlethal: for example, Daniel Santini and Natalia Viana, “Brazil Arms Exports: Country Preaches Peace, Sells Tons of Arms,” March 5, 2012; also Anna Feigenbaum, “Repressing Word Cup Protest—a Booming Business for Brazil,” Waging Nonviolence, June 18, 2014.

15Daniel Santini and Natalia Ciana, “Brazil Arms Exports: Country Preaches Peace, Sells Tons of Arms, Huffington Post, March 5, 2012.

16Stephen F. Burgess and Helen E. Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Center for Aerospace Doctrine Research and Education, 2001); Chandré Gould, Peter I. Folb, and Robert Berold, Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2012).

17Michael Crowley, “Tear Gassing by Remote Control,” Omega Research Foundation report, December 2015, 25. Crowley gives a detailed account of the development and sale of drones for riot control.

18eNews Channel Africa, “Teargas triggered Marikana chaos—SAPS,” November 13, 2013.

19Tae-jun Kang, “South Korea Is Arming Authoritarians with Tear Gas,” Diplomat, October 17, 2014.

20Tom Petruno, “Stocks That Were Hot, Not So Hot in 1992,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1993.

21Funding Universe, “Armor Holdings, Inc. History,” n.d.

22John J. Tackett, “Same House, Same Owners, Different Decorators,” Devoted Classicist, May 28, 2013.

23Funding Universe, “Armor Holdings, Inc. History.”

24Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation, “What We Do,” n.d., fehsf.org.

25FEHSF’s 2012 income tax exemption form is available from http://pdfs.citizenaudit.org/2013_12_EO/82-0555933_990_201212.pdf.

26Peter Newcomb, “America’s 50 Richest Paydays: Who, What, and How Much,” Vanity Fair, April 2008; Safariland Group, “Our History,” 2016, safariland.com.

27BBC News, “BAE Firm in Body Armour Pay-Out,” October 7, 2008; US Department of Justice, “Armor Holdings Products LLC Pays US $30 Million for the Sale of Defective Zylon Bullet-Proof Vests,” press release, October 7, 2008.

28Michael Kavanagh, “Armor Set to Pay US Government $30m,” Financial Times, October 7, 2007.

29Environmental Crimes Case Bulletin, US EPA, May 2012, Jon E. Goodrich, Mace Personal Defense, Inc.—Region 1.

30Diana B. Henriques, “Supplier Accused of Bribes for UN Contracts,” New York Times, January 22, 2010.

31Feinstein, Shadow World.

32Diana B. Henriques, “F.B.I. Charges Arms Sellers with Foreign Bribes,” New York Times, January 20, 2010; Securities and Exchange Commission v. Armor Holdings, Complaint, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, July 13, 2011, http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2011/comp22037.pdf; Paul Pinkham, Roger Bull, and Steve Patterson Sun, “Jacksonville Company’s Shady Dealings Spanned Globe, Authorities Say,” Jacksonville.com, March 7, 2010; Roger Bull, “Armor Holdings: Elaborate Sting Set Up a Number of Meetings,” Jacksonville.com, March 7, 2010.

33Christopher M. Matthews, “How a Former Executive Went Undercover for Prosecutors,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2014.

34Del Quentin Wilber, “Charges Dismissed against 16 Accused of Bribing Foreign Official in Sting,” Washington Post, February 21, 2010.

35Nick Kochan and Robin Goodyear, Corruption: The New Corporate Challenge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 43–45; Securities and Exchange Commission, “SEC Charges Armor Holdings, Inc. With FCPA Violations in Connection with Sales to the United Nations,” press release, July 13, 2011.

36Mike Koehler, “Donald Trump: The FCPA Is a ‘Horrible Law and It Should be Changed,” FCPA Professor, August 6, 2015.

37Warren B. Kanders, “Warren B. Kanders, 5.7% Stockholder, Seeks to Become CEO of Federal Signal Corporation,” press release, June 30, 2008.

38Federal Signal, “Federal Signal Sends Letter to Stockholders,” press release, April 6, 2009.

39All quotations and documents are held in the SEC archive: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/277509/000095013709002643/c50442exv99w2.htm EX-99.2 3 c50442exv99w2.htm EX-99.2.

40Olivia Just, “Kanders Completes Goal of Buying Body Armor Company,” Connecticut Post, July 31, 2012.

41In the same year the Safariland deal was finalized, Kanders spent millions on stock for Black Diamond Inc., a company for which he was already chairman of the board. A producer of outdoor gear and equipment, Black Diamond is the kind of leisure supplier that often crosses over with policing and law enforcement goods. As of the time of this writing, Kanders and Co. owns over 7 million shares in Black Diamond—21.5 percent of the company.

42US Department of Justice, “DHS Technologies Agrees to Pay $1.9 Million to Settle Federal False Claims Act Allegations,” press release, December 4, 2014.

8From Resilience to Resistance

1Christiane Gruber, “The Visual Emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement,” in “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey, edited by Anthony Alessandrini, Nazan Üstündağ, and Emrah Yildiz (Boston: Tadween Publishing, 2013), 31.

2Paul Payne, “Family Sues Sonoma County over Standoff that Ended in Suicide,” Press Democrat, February 27, 2015.

3Joe Pinchot, “ ‘All Day Long’: Neighbors Sue Munitions Maker over Gas, Noise, Waste,” Sharon Herald, January 17, 2015.

4Council of Europe, “Court: Turkey Must Regulate Tear Gas,” press release, July 22, 2014.

5War Resisters League, “WRL Honours Suez Port Worker and Labor Leader Asma Mohammed,” press release, April 12, 2012.

Afterword

1Robert LaFollette, LaFollette 46, box 5, National Archives.

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations.

1033 technology transfer program 161

accountability 14, 144, 173, 181

Africa 52

Aida Refugee Camp 5

Alabama 171

Alabama Voting Rights campaign 72–5

Alexander, Colonel John B. 153

Alla, Wadfa Faraj 149

Allami, Lobna 3

Allen, Peter 86

alter-globalization activists 14, 151

alter-globalization movement 137–9

Altnagelvin hospital 108–9

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 136

American Civil War 16

American Medical Association (AMA) 11

Ames, Major-General Glen C. 89

Amnesty International 2, 141, 151, 173, 177

Amnesty South Korea 177

Amritsar Massacre, 1919 46–7

Anonymous 14, 85

antiwar movement 85–6

Applegate, Rex 95–8

Arab Executive 58

Arab Resource and Organizing Center 178

Arab Spring 1–2, 146, 151, 173–4

Armor Holdings 158–66

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference (APEC) 13–4, 137–9

Associated Press 46, 143

Association of Chief Police Officers 127, 135

asymmetrical warfare 152

atmospheric policing 173

Auger, Nicole 154

Austria 60, 133

BAE Systems 161–5, 165

Bahrain 1–2, 155, 157, 167, 177

Bahrain Watch 174, 177

Baltimore 92

Barnes, Dr. John 114

Barnes, Peter 88–9

Basson, Wouter 155

Bauer, Shane 178

beanbags 140–1

Bell, Gordon 110–1

Bennett, Sergeant Mike 134–5

Benson Eyecare 158

Ben-Tovim, Gideon 123

Berkeley Daily Gazette 87

bin Laden, Osama 150–1

Bistrong, Richard 162–4

Black Lives Matter 170

Black Panther Party 79, 86

Blanchard, Alan 88

Bland, Joanne 73–4

Blankenhorn, Heber 38–9

Bodroghkozy, Aniko 74

Body Armor 158–9

Boens, Daan, “Gas” 19

Bogside, Londonderry, Battle of the 102–6, 106–9

Bombay 48, 62

Bono, Sonny 121

Bonus Army 37–9

Bournemouth University 3, 174

Boynton, Amelia 75

Bradley, Attracta 108

Brazil 3–4, 146, 148, 152–4, 157

Breur, Lanny A. 163–4

Briggs, Lyman J. 40

British Criminology Conference, 1995 129

British Medical Association (BMA) 11

British Medical Journal 116

British Society for Social Responsibility in Science 116–7, 129

Brixton riots 125

Brown, Mike 4

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 11

Butler, Early 77–8

C-4 tear gas 74

Cain, Dean 160

Calais, France 176

California 9, 13–4, 84–90, 140, 143, 170

California Highway Patrol 87–8

Cambridge University 18

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 95

Campbell, Colin 134

Canada 67, 137–9, 146, 148, 157

Cap-Stun 135–6

Carlyle Group 150–1

CBC 138

Center for Public Integrity 151

Ceylon 60

Chadbourne, William H. 27

Chandler, Christopher 79

Cheit, Earl 90

Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down 109–12, 124

Chemical Mace 98

Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) 12, 22, 24, 25–31, 31, 33, 35–6, 39–40, 42, 94, 159

Chemical Weapons Convention 181

Chemring 148

Chicago 12, 32, 79–84, 89, 92, 94

Chicago Crime Commission 82–3

children 78, 115, 149

Chile 2, 11, 146

China 5, 134, 148, 157

chlorine 16, 23

Chrétien, Jean 138

Clark, Sheriff James 72–3, 74, 77, 78

Clément, Joseph 17

Cloud, Major 73

CN gas 6, 69, 91, 103, 110, 118, 133

CNO Tech 148

COAST 155

Coffey, Patrick 18

Cole, USS 152

Collins, Morgan A. 32

colonial deplolyment 12, 29, 46–68

debate 48–53

India 52–4, 58, 62–4, 64–6

Nigeria 55

North Rhodesia 54–5

Palestine 57–60

South Africa 50

Combined Systems Inc. 1, 148, 150, 150–2, 171, 177

Condor Non-Lethal Technologies 1, 4, 148, 152–4, 157

Congress of Racial Equality 85

Coyle, Charles 108–9

CR gas 6, 67, 110, 118, 120, 155

Craik, Henry Duffield 63–4

Crimean War 15

Crowd and Riot Control Including Close-Combat Techniques for Military and Police (Applegate) 96

crowd infiltration 96–7

Crowley, Michael 155–6

CS flashbangs 140–1

CS gas 6, 9, 13, 84, 168

bans 133

Battle of the Bogside 103–6

clearance for use 115–6

effects 69, 105, 115, 119–20, 126–33

Himsworth Committee report 106–12, 113–22, 132

Northern Ireland 99

origins and development 66–8

Police Research Group trials 126–33

pubic support 126

risk-assessment model 124–5

safety claim 91

Cunliffe-Lister, Sir Philip 58–9

Cyprus 66

Dae Kwang Chemical 148, 157, 177

Daley, Richard Joseph 79, 83, 89, 94

Davin, Eric Leif 84

Davis, Mary 53

De La Noy, Stephen J. 30–1

Deane-Drummond, Major-General Anthony 94–5, 98, 99

deaths 2–3, 37, 64–6, 97, 118–9, 121, 128–9, 136–7, 141, 149, 168

Defense Review 152

Defense Tech 9, 159

DeGale, H. O. 50

Delta G Scientific 155

Democracy Now! 140–1

Derry Citizens’ Defence Association 103

Derry Housing Action Committee 101

Desert Wolf 155–6

Detroit 91, 92

Devenney, Ann 102

Devenney, Sammy 102

Devlin, Bernadette 103, 105

DHS Technologies 165

direct action 177–9

Doughty, John W. 16

Douglas, Robert 138

Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 113

drone technology 155–6

Drug Enforcement Agency 160

Duke University Hospital 136–7

Dunner, Shermika 71–2

Durban, South Africa 50, 61

Dyer, Reginald 46–7

East Africa 146

Eastman Kodak Company 35–6

Edgewood Arsenal 22, 32, 33, 34–5, 36, 37, 69

effects 2, 6, 8–9, 11, 28–9, 38–9, 65–6, 78, 107

CS gas 69, 105, 115, 126–33

psychological 61, 70, 181–2

Egypt 2, 5, 151, 173–4, 177

Elvan, Berkin 141

European Commission for Human Rights 172

European Union 139

Evans, Grimley 111

Evans, Rob 110

Evening Independent 26

Evening Standard 60–1

excessive-force trials 143

export chains, targeting 177

Eyewitness Media 176

Facing Tear Gas campaign 14, 178

FBI 121, 133, 135–6, 153, 163–4

Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation 160–1

Federal Laboratories 1, 35, 36–7, 39, 41, 159

Federal Signal 164–5

Feinstein, Andrew 149

Ferguson, Missouri 4, 172–3, 174, 179

Financial Times 177

First Intifada 149

Fitzgerald, Gerard J. 18

Five Powers Treaty 47, 56

FM19-15 Civil Disturbances and Disasters 91–2

Forbes 161

Força Nacional, Brazil 153

Foulkes, Major-General Charles Howard 21

Fox News 9–10, 134

France 56, 60, 148, 176

Free Speech Movement 12, 84–5

Freedom Riders 12, 70, 71–2

Freedom Summer 84

Freeland, Sir Ian 106

Fries, General Amos 12, 21–2, 24, 25–31, 31–3, 35, 43–5, 48, 160

Frontiers, Battle of the 16

Gandhi, Mohandas 46, 53

Garden Plot 92–3, 160

“Gas” (Boens) 19

Gas Age Record 23, 27–8

gas look, the 99

Gaza 149

General Ordinance Equipment Corporation 98

Geneva Convention 21, 26

Geneva Gas Protocol 12, 25, 52, 56, 112–3

Genoa 14, 139

Georgia, University of 71

Germany 56, 60, 133, 148, 154

Gezi Park 3, 141, 168

Gilchrist, General 35–6

Ginsberg, Allen 80

Goldsmith, Bernie 143

Goodman, Amy 140–1

Goodrich, Jon E. 162

Goss, Colonel B. C. 31–3, 34–6

Govan, R. E. Grant 62

Govan Brothers 62–3

grassroots cultural diplomacy 167

grassroots mobilization 179

Greater London Council 129

Greening, Vanessa 130–1

Grindon, Gavin 167

Group of Eight (G8) meeting, 2001 139

Group of Twenty (G20) protests, 2009 151

Guardian 151

Gubar, Christian 168

Haber, Fritz 18

Haber, Ludwig 18, 19–20

Hadfield, Sir Ron 131

Hague Conventions 16, 21

Haiti 133

Haldane, J. B. S. 20

Hamburg 60

Hanighen, Frank C. 37

Harvard 20

Headwaters Forest, Eureka, California 13–4

Heal, Charles 153

Herman, Binger 29

Himsworth, Sir Harold 106–12, 113–22, 125, 181

Himsworth Committee 13, 106–12, 113–22, 132, 156

Holman, W. C. 48

Holmes, Hamilton 70–1

Hong Kong 4, 67, 142, 146

Hood, J. E. W. 57

Howard, Michael 126, 130, 131

human rights 13, 157, 172

Humphrey, Hubert 81

Hungary 112–3

Hunter, Charlayne 70–1 Hurriyet 3

hydrogen cyanide 23

Iachan, Beni 153

Ilford Police Station, London 128–9

image-based activism 179

incendiary forms 9

India 5, 46–50, 52–4, 55, 58, 62–4, 64–6, 85, 146, 148, 157

India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Trilateral arrangements 157

Indonesia 5, 67, 146

injuries 8, 34, 65–6, 97

internal security sector

exports 146, 157

growth 146, 148

major players 148–56

manufacturer locations 147

regulation 148

trade shows 145–6

transnational partnerships 156–7

International Defense Review 125

international law 181

invisible gas 97

Iraq War 150–1

ISPRA 148, 149–50

Israel 120–1, 148, 149–50, 151–2

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) 5, 120–1, 148, 150, 168

Istanbul 141

Italy 60, 133

Jackson, Jimmie Lee 72

Jackson shootings 93–4

Jakarta 5

Jamestown, Pennsylvania 150, 171

Japan 133–4

Johns Hopkins 20

Jones, Daniel P. 31

Joshua (CS gas victim) 131–2

Kahn, Francis 117–9

Kampala 6

Kanders, Warren 158–62, 164–6

Kanders Florida Holdings, Inc. 158–9

Kanngieser, Anja 173

Keelan, Tim 123

Kelly, Megyn 9–10, 134

Kent State University shootings 93–4

Kenya 67

Kieser, Hennie 155–6

Kill or Get Killed (Applegate) 95–6

King, Martin Luther, Jr., assassination 70, 79

King, Rodney 138

Kiplinger Finance 41–2

Knappen, Theo M. 23, 27–8

Korea 148

Koresh, David 121

Ku Klux Klan 44, 71–2

Kusch, Frank 81

lachrymators 110

Lady in Red 141, 168

Lafollette, Robert, Jr. 39–41, 41–2, 44–5

Lake Erie Chemical Company 31–4, 34–6, 36–7, 38, 39, 48, 159

Las Vegas, Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show 152, 163

Lebanon, You Stink protests 148

legal action 170–3

legitimization 12, 20–4, 25–31, 43–5, 49–51, 90

Leon, Richard 164

Lesher, Stephen 77

Lewis, John 72, 75

line of release method 97

Lingo, Albert 75, 75–7

London Metropolitan Police 48–9, 62

Londonderry 100–6

Los Angeles Times 158

Louise (mother of Joshua) 131–2

LSD 22

Lucky Police Products 135–6

Maalox 169

McCarthy, Eugene 81

McCarthy, Joseph 45

McCartney, John 165

McClean, Dr. Raymond 105, 116

McClean, Sheila 107–8, 116

McClenaghan, Dermie 101

McDermott, Donal 107

MacDonald, Malcolm 60, 61

MacDonald, Ramsay 52

Mace 82, 83, 98, 133, 162

Mace Security International, Inc. 159

McGoey, Linsey 111 Macina, Madame 118–9

Maclean, David 131

Madras 48

Malaysia 67

Manama, Bahrain 1–2

Maney, Patrick 45

manufacturers 147, 148–56

Manville Manufacturers 8

Marikana 155–6

Mark, Sir Robert 124

market value 30, 41, 42

Markets and Markets 146, 148

Martin (baby CS gas victim) 104–5, 105, 109, 119

media coverage 17–8, 23, 25, 30–1, 74–5, 87, 89, 90, 138

medical field stations 169–70

medical legitimization 50–1

Medical Research Council 106

Mercer, Patrick 110

Meredith, James 76

methylbenzyl bromide 16

metsubushi 133–4

Mexico 139, 176

Milipol 145–6, 148–56

Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics 93

military-industrial complex 42–3, 44

Mississippi 84

MIT 20

mobile technologies, rise of 138, 167

Mohammed, Asma 177

Moir, A. Reid 28–9

Monteith, Will 6

Moore, Richard K. 139

moral difficulty 55–6

Mpembe, William 156

Mullin, Chris 111

Nairobi 5

Nation 37, 38–9

National Institute of Justice 136–7

National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam 79, 81

National Schizophrenia Fellowship 131

NATO 11, 155

Nawawieh, Elias 167–8

Ndimbalan, Paebou 128

Netherlands, the 162–3

New Generation Tear Gas 155

New Scientist 106

New Society 116–7

New York 92, 158, 170

New York Times 1–2, 28–9, 30–1, 74, 162–3, 177

Newsweek 89

Nigeria 5–6, 55, 67

Nobel Sport 148

NonLethal Technologies 148

North Carolina 136

North Carolina Medical Society 136

North Rhodesia 54–5

Northamptonshire Police 132–3

Northern Ireland 13, 57, 99, 100–2, 120, 124, 149

Battle of the Bogside 102–6

Himsworth Committee and 106–9, 113, 114, 116–7

Long Kesh riots 120

North-West Frontier 49

Notting Hill Carnival 124

Nuremberg code 111

Nye, Gerald P. 39, 41, 44

Oakland 178–9

Obeid, Raed 149

OC Vapor 151

Occupy Gezi protests, Turkey 3, 168

Occupy Hong Kong 148

Occupy movement 2, 140–1, 168–9

Occupy Oakland 140

Occupy Portland 169

oleoresin capsicum 5, 6, 133–9, 140, 141

Olsen, Scott 140

Olympic Games, 2016 152–3

Omega Research Foundation 174

O’Reilly, Bill 9–10

Oscar Grant Foundation 178

Oxford, Mississippi 76–7

Oxford University 18

Page, Joseph 98

Pains Wessex 133

Pakistan 5, 148

Palestine 11, 57–60, 149

Occupied Territories 5, 120–1, 167–8

Panama Canal 37

Parachini, Allen 136

Paris, May 1968 uprisings 118–9

Paris, University of 18

Parry, Nigel 149

Pascal, Jean Zanders 17

Passfield, Sidney Webb, Lord 53, 55

penguins, radical 141–2, 142, 168

Pepper Fog 98

pepper spray 2, 5, 6, 9–10, 13–4, 133–9, 140, 141, 156, 168, 169

Peshawar prison riot, 1947 64–6

Philadelphia 30–1, 48

Physicians for Human Rights 2

Pike, Lieutenant John 140, 142–3

Pilant, Lois 135

Playfair, Sir Lyon 15

Police Federation 134

police militarization 4, 31, 42

Police One 152

Police Research Group, CS trials 126–33

Police Review 129

Police Training School, Phillaur, Punjab 50

policing trauma 143–4

political economy 42–3

Popp, Major 27

Porton Down, Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment 66–8, 109–12, 124

Porton Papers, the 119

Portugal 67

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 143–4

President’s Commission on Student Unrest 93–4

Prison Officers’ Association 125

profit, and violence 182

Project Coast 154–5

protection 14, 19–20, 80, 105–6, 142, 167, 169

protest policing, United States of America 69–99

psychological effects 61, 70, 181–2

punitive use 77–8

Qseisa, Amal 149

Quan, Jean 178

Rafael 151–2

Rahmah, Bassem Abu 168

Rainey, Dorli 169

Rapport, Brian 127

Reading, University of 129

Reagan, Ronald 84, 88, 89, 89–90, 92

Rector, James 88, 90

Reed, Roy 74

Rees, Bronwen 143–4

regulation 16, 21, 48–9, 135, 148

Remer, Frederick 136

Reno, Janet 13, 121

resilience, rise of 167

resistance

from within 179–80

direct action 177–9

icons of 140–2, 142, 168

modes of 14

stopping shipments 177

Resurrection City protest 70

Rheinmetall Denel Munitions 148, 154–5, 158

Rhodesia 67

Richardson, Major Charles 26–7

Rio de Janeiro 3–4

Riot Control (Deane-Drummond) 94

riot control, military influences 91–9

Riot Control-Material and Techniques (Applegate) 96–9

Riot ID Project 173–4, 174, 175, 176

Robins, Phil 123

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 112

Royal Canadian Mounted Police 137–9

Royal Society of Medicine, Section of Experimental Medicine 106

Royal Ulster Constabulary 103–6

Russell, Tory 4

Rwanda 133

Sabre 148

Sacramento Bee 143

SAE Alsetex 148

Safariland Group 148, 157, 158–62

Safeguard Technology 134

Saint Louis 176

sales projections 2

Samson NL RW5 151

Samuel, Mugarura 6

San Francisco 92

San Francisco Examiner 136

sarin 110

satyagraha 53, 55, 85

Saulsbury, Bill 133

Savio, Mario 84–5

Schermuly Ltd 94–5

Schultz, John 83

science, for-profit 181

Scotland Yard 124, 125

Seattle, Battle of 14

Selma, Alabama 12, 72–5, 89

trial 75, 75–8

Sergeant Pepper 14, 138

Sey, Amie 128

Sey, Ibrahima 128–9, 137

Shanghai 50

Sharon Herald 171

Shekerjian, Lieutenant Colonel Haig 40–1

Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show, Las Vegas 152, 163

Shraddhanand, Swami 46

Siebert, Willi 16–7

Siegel, Dan 87

Sierra Leone 60

Singapore 62, 67

Slaibi, Rajab 149

Smith, Jonathan 143–4

social media 142, 167, 168, 178–9

Soderberg, Nancy 162

Somalia 133

Sonoma County, California 170

South Africa 50, 57, 60–1, 148, 149, 154–6, 157

South African Defence Force 155

South Korea 5, 148, 157, 177

Southern Poverty Law Center 171

Soweto uprising 154

Sproul Plaza, University of California at Berkeley 84–90

Stewart, Staff Sergeant Hugh 138

Stop Urban Shield campaign 178–9

#stoptheshipment campaign 177

street medics 169–70

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 72–5, 84, 92

Sungur, Ceyda 141, 168

Surrey Police 133

Suttle, John 162–3

Swartklip Products 155

Swindell, Glenn 170

Taino Indians 134

Taksim Square 3

Talcid Man 169

Tasers 130, 154

Tay-Ninh 117–8

Tear Gas ID website 173–4

tear smoke 56, 63, 64, 66

Thailand 5, 146

Thatcher, Margaret 124–5

Thorne, J. A. 62

throwback phenomenon 150

Times, The 17–8

Times of India 50

Toxteth riots 123–4

trade shows 145–6

transnational partnerships 156–7

Tripartite Agreement 157

Tripartite Conference, 1958 67

Trump, Donald 146, 164

Turkey 3, 141–2, 142, 146, 148, 157, 168, 172

Turkish Medical Association 11

Uganda 5–6, 176

Ukraine 146

Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong 142

United Kingdom

Biology Advisory Committee 114

Brexit 146

Chemical Defence Advisory Board 114

colonial deployment 12, 46–68

colonial deployment debate 48–53, 54–60

Colonial Office 54

CS gas policy 113–4

CS trials 126–33

exports 67

first civilian CS gassing 103–6

gas testing 109–12

general election, 1929 52

Home Office 105, 114, 127, 130, 132, 134

India Office 47

Ministry of Defence 66, 95, 103, 109, 111, 113–4

Notting Hill Carnival 124

risk-assessment model 124–5

Toxteth riots 123–4

trials 67, 68

Tripartite Agreement 157

War Office 15, 51, 54, 56, 57, 62, 64, 66

World War I 18

United Nations 10, 58, 162–3

United States Army 69

United States of America 9, 47, 48, 51, 56, 57, 61, 67, 146, 153

Blind-X Shell tests 33–4

Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) 12, 22, 24, 25–31, 31, 33, 35–6, 39–40, 42, 94, 159

civil disobedience, 1960s 12–3

civil rights movement 70–7

Civil War 16

Congressional Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights 93

Department of Homeland Security 150

Department of Justice 160, 161–2, 163–4

Edgewood Arsenal 22, 32, 33, 34–5, 36, 37, 69

Environmental Protection Agency 162, 171

Ferguson, Missouri protests 4

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act 163–4

Free Speech Movement 84–5

Geneva Protocol 112–3

government investigations 39–42, 44–5

Headwaters Forest, Eureka, California 13–4

manufacturers 148, 150–2, 157

Military Affairs Committees of the House and Senate 27

Militia Bureau 36

National Bureau of Standards 39–40

National Guard 12–3, 36, 37, 40, 69–70, 76, 79, 81, 83, 88–90, 91–2, 93–4, 174

National Labor Relations Board 38–9

Occupy movement 2, 168–9

Philadelphia demonstration 30–1

practical field test 37–9

President’s Commission on Student Unrest 93–4

protest policing 69–99

public relations industry 23, 25

Sproul Plaza 84–90

State Department 153

Tripartite Agreement 157

Trump’s election as president 146

Waco, Texas 13, 78, 121

World War I 20

University College London 18

University of California at Berkeley, Sproul Plaza 84–90

University of California—Davis 140, 143

Urban Shield 178–9

US Customs and Border Protection 160

US Marine Corps 50

Vallejo, California 9

Vancouver, APEC protests 14

Vanity Fair 161

Venom 152

Verney-Carron 148

Versailles Treaty 21

Vietnam War 112, 113, 117–8

violence

and profit 182

scales of 9–10

Waco, Texas 13, 78, 121

Waddington, Peter 129

Walker, Daniel 82–3

Walker Report 82–3, 89

Wallace, George 75, 76, 77

Walloomsac River, Vermont 162

War Resisters League 177

Ward, Thomas W. W. 135–6

Washington, DC 37, 92, 160

Washington Naval Conference 49, 52

water cannons 130

Wauchope, Sir Arthur 57–60

weapons 7, 8, 38

Webb, Sidney, Lord Passfield 53, 55

West Point 29

white man’s burden approach 53

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 158

Williams, Brian 74–5

Williams, Hosea 75

Women’s War, Nigeria 55

World Cup, 2014 152–3, 154

World Medical Association 11

World War I 16–20, 26, 56

World War II 44, 63, 109, 112

Wright, Dr. Steve 124–5

Yale 20

You Stink protests, Lebanon 148

Young, John W. 37

Ypres, Battle of 1915 16–8

Zambia 176

Zanders, Jean Pascal 21

Zapatistas 139

Zimbabwe 148

Zylon 162