119K people hurt by riot-control weapons since 2015: report
CTV
More than 119,000 people have been injured by tear gas and other chemical irritants around the world since 2015 and some 2,000 suffered injuries from 'less lethal' impact projectiles, according to a report released Wednesday.
More than 119,000 people have been injured by tear gas and other chemical irritants around the world since 2015 and some 2,000 suffered injuries from "less lethal" impact projectiles, according to a report released Wednesday.
The study by Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, in collaboration with the Omega Research Foundation, took 2 1/2 years to research. It provides a rare partial count of casualties, compiled from medical literature, from these devices used by police around the world, including in Colombia, Chile, Hong Kong, Turkiye and at Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.
The vast majority of the data comes from cases in which a person came to an emergency room with injuries from crowd control weapons and the attending doctor or hospital staff made the effort to document it, said the report's lead author, Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician and researcher at the University of California School of Public Health in Berkeley.
The report on casualties from a largely unregulated industry cites an alarming evolution of crowd-control devices into more powerful and indiscriminate designs and deployment, including dropping tear gas from drones.
It calls for bans of rubber bullets and of multi-projectile devices in all crowd-control settings and tighter restrictions on weapons that may be used indiscriminately, such as tear gas, acoustic weapons and water cannons, which in some cases have been loaded with dyes and chemical irritants.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said the report underscores serious issues.
"These troubling global numbers echo the concerns I raised locally when Donald Trump first dispatched armed troops to Portland in 2020 with no guidance on their use of chemical munitions near schools and against protesters when most were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights," Wyden said. "The report's recommendations are very worthy of consideration by the Department of Homeland Security."
