- When Carlo Giuliani's rage at the new world order turned
violent during the recent G-8 summit in Genoa, he was hit with an old-fashioned
response: two bullets that ripped through his head. Police forces are asking
themselves if that kind of death is an inevitable part of street clashes,
or if high-tech nonlethal weapons could offer a way out.
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- Police in the future may be armed with energy beams that
inflict a burning sensation on skin without causing permanent damage, or
even painlessly and temporarily immobilize a rioting demonstrator. Waves
of sound and light could disorient mobs, and sticky foam could trap them
like flies on a strip.
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- "As things stand, if you dropped Wyatt Earp into
today's world he'd be pretty comfortable," says Captain Charles "Sid"
Heal, a nationally regarded nonlethal-weapons guru with the Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department. But Earp's bullets aren't the answer to every
breach of code, he says. Save them for a time when inaction will cost a
life, and consider even that a failure for not acting nonlethally, sooner.
-
- Activists worry that cops with gentler means of crowd
restraint will be more likely to nip protests in the bud, preventing any
message from getting out. Already, demonstrations have been wrecked and
people injured by tear gas and rubber bullets.
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- "The increasing popularity of less lethal weapons
is a two-edged sword," says David Jackson, a spokesman for CopWatch.com,
a Web site dedicated to tracking police abuses. "On the one hand,
their use causes far fewer deaths than the use of traditional firearms.
On the other hand, the perception that they are 'nonlethal' results in
their indiscriminate or improper use to a far greater degree than such
use of traditional firearms."
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- That's not a bad thing, according to Colonel Andrew Mazzara,
director of the U.S. Marine's Institute for Emerging Defense Technologies
at Pennsylvania State University. "I would assume and hope that the
'trigger' would be pulled sooner than a lethal weapon," he says.
-
- Faced with that hard line, rabble-rousers are piling
gadgets into their own box of tricks. Protesters now have robots that can
graffiti public spaces at lightning speed. The technology exists for real
flying saucers to project laser messages onto the sides of buildings or
display text on their underbellies with light-emitting diodes.
-
- The Institute for Applied Autonomy, the techno-artist
collective that makes the remote-controlled GraffitiWriter, sees nothing
ahead but growth. "[T]he IAA has identified the already emerging market
of cultural insurrection as the most stable market in the years to come,"
says their Web site. "IAA research has examined the primary behavior
patterns of this market and is developing technologies that best serve
the needs of the burgeoning market."
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- The term "nonlethal" is a goal, not a guarantee,
because these weapons can be deadly if used carelessly. Heal counts 11
deaths from bean-bag rounds in North America alone. That's what scares
activists. "Ill-trained, overzealous, angry cops frequently use pepper
spray as an impromptu, 'officially sanctioned' form of torture," says
Jackson of CopWatch.com. Likewise, firehoses and truncheons have broken
bones.
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- Modifications to these weapons on the Penn State radar
include a water cannon made by Jaycor that can deliver an electric charge.
New sensors on muzzles can slow projectiles when a target is too close
for safety. Another new projectile is the Sticky Shocker, a battery-powered
device that clings to its target's clothing with glue and barbs, delivering
an incapacitating electric charge. There are even billy clubs that fire
soft projectiles and ensnaring nets.
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- Streams of gluey foam, like a souped-up version of the
party favor Crazy String, can also immobilize suspects or create barriers.
That was done by marines in Somalia, who created perimeters of the foam
to block mobs as UN forces withdrew. Problem was, those barriers were easily
bridged by laying down planks of wood and sheets of plastic.
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- Small explosives that deliver a burst of shockwaves can
be used to disorient an entire crowd, as can LE Systems' handheld "Laser
Dazzler," which is essentially over-stimulating rave gear that could
have been designed by Dr. Evil. Some speculate that infrasound assaults
of low-frequency waves could confuse people and if applied in greater doses
will produce vomiting, diarrhea, deafness, and death.
-
- A nonlethal-weapons laboratory may sound like another
Tower of London, but any of these ideas might have spared Carlo Giuliani's
life. "The standard is not perfection," Heal says. "The
standard is the alternative""death by gunshot. "Our immediate
retort is, What would you rather be shot with?"
-
- Still, he knows that standards within police forces don't
match the layman's ideal. "Everything changed on a Thursday night
in 1966," he says. "When Star Trek first aired and the phaser
entered the public psyche, it set the standard whether we liked it or not."
He's serious. "The phaser as conceived on Star Trek is portable. It
discriminates, meaning you can target one individual without affecting
another. It's reusable and environmentally benign. It defeats the will
and the ability to resist, and the guy recovers with no aftereffects. It
just makes people after nonlethal tools drool," says Heal.
-
- The federal government has Kirk envy, too. Air force
research labs announced in March the creation of a beam weapon that caused
a target to feel burning pain"as if one had touched a hot light bulb"but
without causing permanent damage. Only the top 1/64th of an inch of the
skin is affected, according to the air force. Oak Ridge National Laboratory
is developing another beam that goes to the core, raising body temperature
and provoking a debilitating fever of up to 105 degrees. Other national
labs have worked toward developing beams that induce grogginess or small
seizures.
-
- An outfit called HSV Technologies in San Diego claims
it's developing something more benign and truer to the spirit of a Star
Trek phaser set on stun. "We're on the verge of changing the world
as we know it," says Eric Herr, HSV vice president for research. The
company's real-life phaser would shoot two weak ultraviolet beams at its
target, ionizing two channels through the air. A small charge of electricity
at a pulse rate that mimics nerve signals would trace them as if they were
wires, in fractions of a second. A person struck by the beams would complete
a circuit with the phaser and be instantly immobilized as the skeletal
muscles froze up, tricked into reacting as if the brain were ordering them
all to contract at once. Whole crowds could be stilled by a beam from a
hovering helicopter, he notes.
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- "No pain, no shock, no sensation whatsoever,"
Herr says. Power would have to be increased 150 times before the phaser
could induce a fatal heart attack, Herr says. "I would be disappointed
if it were used as a means of killing other human beings, but we cannot
control how governments behave."
-
- Even if the technology isn't perverted into a lethal
tool, it might be exactly the kind of convenient weapon that would make
it all too easy for cops to quell justifiable unrest in the name of maintaining
cosmetic order.
-
- Colonel Mazzar dismisses that worry, saying nonlethal
weapons don't threaten the right to protest. "It is the exploitation
of perceived civil liberties which extends into violence and puts innocent
lives and property at risk that ultimately leads to such hindrance,"
he says. "I would trust the judgment of trained law-enforcement professionals
trying to maintain public order and public safety over that of a younger,
immature, less circumspect agitator." In other words, the kids aren't
all right.
-
- Captain Heal used to think the same way before he started
boning up on sociology, especially the work of Clark McPhail, author of
The Myth of the Madding Crowd. Now Heal fears that a "dream"
weapon like the phaser might ultimately lead to greater bloodshed. With
an eye to '60s-era civil rights protests and today's Palestinian struggle,
Heal asks, "Are we sealing off the safety valve? Riots tend to bring
issues to the forefront that would have become the cause of a full-blooded
revolution. If there's no riot, the safety release is not there."
-
- The idea of giving protesters leeway was hard for Heal
to swallow. "For me to shift my paradigm after 25 years in law enforcement
was almost a nervous breakdown," he reflects.
-
- Protesters aiming to give politicians a nervous breakdown
are turning increasingly to new technologies, beyond the hacktivism of
defacing Web sites and e-bombing a corporation's inbox. The Institute for
Applied Autonomy makes robots to stage protests where a human might be
in danger or too restricted. The collective also has an anthropomorphic
pamphleteer called "Little Brother" that hits passersby with
protest literature. It's intentionally designed with a disarming cuteness
that George Lucas or Steven Spielberg could love. All that's missing is
a "We Shall Overcome" MP3 file.
-
- At the last Davos, Switzerland, economic meeting, protesters
projected their sentiments in laser light across a mountain face by typing
messages into www.hellomrpresident.com.
-
- Remote-controlled flyers like the saucer-shaped Draganflyer
made in Canada have been eyed as vehicles for toting banners, projecting
images, and carrying wireless cameras. That would make it a good platform
for what activists call "digital witnessing," sending images
via satellite to webcasters for worldwide viewing, bypassing corporate
media. The human and environmental rights group AmazonWatch says the tools
it has given native peoples for digital witnessing may already be restraining
companies and governments in the region, but can do little against secretive
vigilantes.
-
- The Ruckus Society is opening a Tech Toolbox Action Camp
in October to train activists in new technologies and to pool together
experts. But program director Han Shan warns against developing a fetish
for electronic toys. Basic things like text messaging, micro-radio broadcasting,
and e-mail to Palm Pilots have already made street organizing far more
effective, he observes.
-
- Still, one can take technology so far that protests become
a bloodless ritual, a meaningless Kabuki. Imagine the Washington Mall filled
with angry citizens shoulder-to-shoulder, fists raised high with righteous
anger"all holograms projected by people safely in their living rooms.
Think that's absurd? The folks at www.whitehouseprotests.com will, for
a fee, carry your banner and chant your slogan in the capital, and send
you a photo of the day's events.
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- "Robots and flying machines are fanciful and interesting,
but there's simply no replacement for human bodies on the street to show
our power in numbers and for being radically nonviolent. The purest way
of people communicating their outrage is putting themselves in harm's way,"
Shan says. You have to be willing to "throw [your] body like a monkey
wrench into the machine to say, 'No more!' "
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- Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0131/baard.php
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