Banned on battlefields, not on city streets
Tear gas has become ‘easy-to-use and affordable way’ for police to handle social unrest
Shot into crowds of demonstrators from New York to Philadelphia and Atlanta, pale clouds of tear gas have emerged as one the enduring images of protests currently roiling the United States.
Although U.S. President Donald Trump has disputed the terminology, “tear gas” is a blanket term for chemicals that cause skin, respiratory and eye irritation. In just over a century, it has made it from the battlegrounds of Europe to the streets of North America.
It is now banned in wartime, but use against civilians, at least in the U.S., has become commonplace.
“Look what happened to Rodney King, and we never learned a thing from that,” said Carleton University criminologist Darryl Davies, referring to the California man beaten by police in1991, sparking riots in Los Angeles. He argues reliance on tools like tear gas show that police are no more equipped to handle large scale protests than they were 30 years ago.
“You do not, in my view, build the trust of the community when you buy tank trucks and tear gas.”
Protests have exploded across the U.S. and around the world over the past week sparked by a video showing a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck shortly before his death.
As people have taken to the streets in protest of police brutality, some American officers have in turn drawn criticism for their use of force, including rubber bullets and tear gas.
Although Canadian protests have been smaller and calmer for the most part, tensions flared in Montreal last Sunday, and police used tear gas and pepper spray on crowds after they said projectiles were thrown.
Advocates have called for, if not an outright ban, clearer guidelines on what kind of chemicals can be used for riot control, or more restrictions on its use, given the damage it can do to people.
On its website, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says that riot control agents, more commonly referred to as tear gas, “temporarily make people unable to function by causing irritation to the eyes, mouth, throat, lungs, and skin.”
Video of tear gas wafting over protesters shows people coughing, crying and wiping their eyes.
“Tear gas is seen as an easy-touse and affordable way to clear a protest and take control over space,” Anna Feigenbaum, the U.K.-based author of “Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today,” wrote in an email.
“It was originally marketed with this intention and we continue to see it used as a means to disperse public assembly.”
Although it’s believed that French police toyed with tear gas earlier, the first deployment was during the First World War by French forces. Evidence suggests it was used as early as summer of 1914, months before the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres.
Once chemical attacks became an established part of the war, troops were issued gas masks. Part of the strategy behind using tear gas was to force opposing forces to wear masks as much as possible, according to history of science professor Daniel P. Jones, whose 1978 paper detailed tear gas’s rebirth as a riot control tool.
“It was learned that soldiers lost much of their efficiency after wearing those uncomfortable masks for any extended period of time,” he wrote. Tear gases were a more economical way to accomplish this than more toxic equivalents, and thus became commonplace at the front.
The transition to civilian use was swift.
The years after the First World War were marked by social tensions, inflamed by wartime inflation that saw prices for things like food and clothing spike. In the two years after the war, the U.S. saw 29 violent labour strikes and major riots, and federal troops were brought in to restore order. It was not surprising, Jones wrote, that veterans would turn to a familiar tool — tear gas.
The U.S. war department was against the idea of turning gas on civilians, according to Jones. But the chemical warfare service (CWS), another branch of the federal government that had researched gases during the war, was eager to prove its value during peacetime, and keen to find other uses for it. A member of the New York Police Department was the first to broach the topic.
“It has occurred to me these gases might be an efficient agency suppressing disorder,” A.D. Porter wrote. He also asked whether there would be any “serious or lasting results” on the people gassed. In response, Maj. Gen. William L Sibert, director of the CWS, said that they were making tear gas grenades for the very purpose of dispersing crowds.
And while tear gas grew in popularity as a police tool, it has been mostly curtailed for military purposes.
The international use of tear gas has been restricted by the Chemical Weapons Convention since 1997, which requires that participating countries commit “not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.” But notably, the agreement also includes an exemption for law enforcement and “domestic riot control purposes.”
Police in the United States, as well as other countries such as France and Uganda, are now quick to turn to pepper sprays and tear gases, which are “heavily” marketed to law enforcement, Feigenbaum says.
“For the most part, it has been internationally accepted as a way for police to disperse protest and take control over space,” she said.
Although there are reports it had already been used to clear buildings in Ontario, tear gas was used for crowd control for the first time in Toronto at the G20 protests in June 2010. At the time, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said officers temporarily lost control of the downtown core, and several officers were injured after being hit by projectiles, including bricks.
Davies argues police are starting to over-rely on tools such as tear gas, because of a lack of training in things such as communication and de-escalating potentially dangerous situations.
“We’re asking police to deal with social problems, and we’re not training them to be able to adequately go into those situations and deal with them, in a constructive and positive way,” he says. He argues if police were better equipped to talk to people, or find other ways of easing confrontations, they’d resort to tear gas less often.
“I think police do the best with what they’ve got, but training is where it starts.”
Over time, new chemical formulas for tear gas have been developed, Feigenbaum says. More recently, police have begun using devices that launch multiple cartridges, or cartridges that break into pieces or bounce, so it’s harder for protesters to throw them back.
Tear gas is not the only military-inspired technology that has been taken up by police either, she notes. New technologies from armour to drones were developed on the battleground.
“However, there are many dangers to seeing protests, as well as Black and minority communities more generally, as enemies that police need protection from and weapons to battle,” Feigenbaum says.
She adds there are calls internationally for clearer guidelines on which chemicals are exempted under the Chemical Weapons Convention, as well as limits on how these products are marketed.
In one of the most high-profile deployments yet, tear gas was reportedly used when authorities cleared a peaceful crowd from outside the White House on Monday so Trump could pose for a photo at a church across the street.
Trump has denied it: “They didn’t use tear gas,” he told Fox News Radio on Wednesday.
But police have acknowledged deploying a pepper compound, which the CDC and other scientific organizations list as a form of tear gas. According to reports, authorities at the scene set loose a wafting gas that sent people scattering; coughing, gagging, their faces marked, in some cases, with tears.