CROWD CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES - Omega Research Foundation

STOA, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in Washington, to create an early warning system
to alert decision makers about the potential hazards of technological innovation. Nowadays, the early
warning system for such concerns about the environment has been institutionalised and we are all
familiar with the process of Environmental Impact Assessments, which is now seen as a normal part of
the planning landscape.
Could not something similar be set up to ensure that decisions regarding new police technologies
including crowd control weapons are fully informed by the full range of likely social and political
impacts? Such technologies can have profound implications for civil liberties and human rights. If
they were subject to a compulsory Social Impact Assessment or audit of the human and civil rights
consequences, particularly problematic innovations would not proceed without the legal and regulatory
framework being fully clarified. Experience has shown that vested interests soon surround the
implementation of any new technology. Once introduced it is very difficult to reverse an implementation
decision and its associated cultures.
Decisions about specific crowd control technologies are often viewed as operational matters and
simply left to the police or the military. Questions about appropriateness are taken by user groups and
often in secrecy without any public debate. A better policy route would be to thoroughly explore the
impacts of all policing technologies before implementation. A testing set of criteria should be developed
to objectively judge and assess the impact, ongoing requirement (including deployment and training
procedures) and any potential need to withdraw or redesign the technology should untoward impacts
emerge. Special consideration should be paid to the dangers of )technological creep( and )decision
drift( whereby a system that would never have been given the go-ahead if introduced in one move, is
deployed by a series of incremental technological changes and gradual reorientation of training and
targeting procedures. Such social impact assessments would be able to objectively pronounce on the
health, safety and legal liability issues associated with particular crowd control weapons before they
were introduced and ensure a consistent approach. The most efficient alternative to the deployment of
crowd control weapons are social and economic policies which effectively create areas of freedom,
security and justice. The deployment of crowd control weapons is usually an admission that such
policies have not been implemented or have failed. In such instances, purely technical means do not
effect a long term solution and can prove dysfunctional.
7.3 Alternative Crowd Management Methodologies. Any alternatives to crowd control technologies
must be discussed in the context of their role in creating areas of freedom, justice and security and
must be democratically accountable. There may indeed be appropriate non lethal alternatives to
currently used crowd control weapons but any proposed pragmatic options should be independently
tested against preset health and safety criteria for both the public and the officers charged with using
them. There are many potential pitfalls of implementing )easy technical fixes( based upon centralised
control systems, secrecy and a lack of accountability. It is easy to substitute more repressive
technologies for social justice as events recorded in Indonesia, Kenya and most recently Zimbabwe
testify. (See Section 8). It is also easy to reject counter-intuitive alternatives because they seem too
radical. A good example is crowd control outside nightclubs which was always thought to require
muscle bound bouncers who could tackle any trouble that was presented at the doors by punters who
might be less than sober. However, the macho culture of night club bouncers was based on the
assumption that the threat of violence was the only way to maintain order and overly violent doormen
caused many of the violent episodes they were there to prevent. Changing the image, training and
including more women amongst night club door staff, has recently led to less violence, partially
because the women appear to have more sophisticated verbal skills and can diffuse potential violence
by negotiation rather than coercion. A prescient observation in this regard was given by Her Majestys
Inspectorate of Constabulary in the UK )Some officers forget that the best weapons theyve got to deal
with potential violence are their brains and the ability to talk(. 382
Could a similar approach be successfully adopted for public order policing? Again it seems counterintuitive
but we might be guided by the notion that if it has already happened then it is possible. South
Korea, the most recent case, also seems the least likely. In the past, the South Korean Police have
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