Back in 2020, Alex Johnson was a regular at the long-running George Floyd/racial justice protests in Portland, Oregon. This frequently exposed her to the various crowd-control measures employed that summer by the Portland Police Bureau and other agencies charged with keeping a lid on the often-rowdy scenes – especially tear gas.
She didn’t much care for it. “It’s the worst feeling in the world,” Johnson told The Guardian in 2023, “like the inside of your eyes are on fire and being sandpapered at the same time.” She later joined a lawsuit against the city over PPB’s use of CS and other tactics against the throngs, and police in Portland, as well as several other cities, were temporarily restricted in how they used it.
From the other, bluer side of those raucous rallies, that probably seems a wildly disproportionate overreaction to what is primarily a tool for safety – and a very safe and low-force tool at that.
“I equate safety to space,” said Tom Burns, an expert in less-lethal force who spent more than 30 years as an officer in Seattle, where he was chemical agent cadre leader for the Seattle PD’s SWAT team during the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” WTO unrest. “If you and I are standing next to each other, we can create danger for each other. But if I can separate us by 10 feet or 10 yards or 30 yards, that becomes more difficult. The farther we are away from each other, the better it is for us. So that’s the beauty of less-lethal tools – they provide a safety margin.
“You don’t see people die from chemical agents,” Burns added. “Yes, they’re uncomfortable. Yes, people will be coughing and hacking. They can create an incredibly uncomfortable environment. But I don’t think research bears out that people are dying or getting long-term illness from them.”
It’s also unlikely any protesters would find the alternative – a broader use of ballistic weapons – much more palatable.
STATE YOUR CASE
This gap in understanding around tear gas and other less-lethal force isn’t limited to Portland or even the blue-state hubs where antipolice sentiment peaked in 2020. It can be pervasive across communities. Thus, given the utility of less-lethal options for officers facing dangerous situations, it can be useful to have a command of the facts and comfort with the intellectual ammunition to rebut overblown and inaccurate claims about how they work.
“Our most stressful time is during large civil disturbances,” said Paul Ford, vice president of sales and marketing for Combined Systems, a major provider of less-lethal and related products for law enforcement. “When our products get used, we can experience just flat-out harassment. Our company is disparaged. People make claims and publish information that is incorrect – that tear gas poisons and kills people. In reality we serve a meaningful purpose in our country and around the world to protect life and property. And the escalation of force we provide to officers is what’s preventing people from more serious injury and even greater uses of force.”
The use of tear gas and other less-lethal force options should reflect a few key principles that will make them more rhetorically defensible. Officers should understand and be able to communicate the following.
1. Less-lethal force is used in accordance with the law.
While use of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases” was banned in military settings under the 1925 Geneva protocol, that did not restrict domestic use by law enforcement, and the U.S. reserved its right to use riot-control agents internally – an exception it retained through the United Nations’ 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. Riot control agents are also still used by the U.S. military for training and were used for nonlethal military purposes in Vietnam prior to U.S. ratification of the Geneva agreement in 1975.
Local American jurisdictions that restricted the use of CS and other options in 2020 often attempted a piecemeal approach that preserved some options for law enforcement. For instance, Seattle’s initial restraining order against tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bang grenades was limited to 14 days and left exceptions for imminent threats and targeted use. Portland’s prohibition allowed a loophole for any “serious and immediate threat to life safety, [when] there is no other viable alternative for dispersal.” A Denver ban was also limited in duration.
Those decisions made police lives harder, but even in 2020, outside a few noisy advocates, there wasn’t much real appetite among the broader public for widespread bans.
“From a public standpoint, if we take away those tools, what do we have?” noted Burns. “When decisions that were politically driven didn’t allow officers to do their jobs, a lot of people were put in danger, and a lot of property damage was done. If we have a good toolbox of less-lethal options, we can limit that behavior for the safety of all parties involved.”
2. It’s safe.
While some subjects exposed repeatedly to tear gas in 2020 claimed it caused them health problems, very few people endure it daily for months on end. Brief, short-term exposure to tear gas isn’t likely to cause more than discomfort. The CDC recommends simply moving to clearer air and rinsing/washing it away.
“Tear gas is probably the most misunderstood product in all our categories,” said Ford. “Ironically, it’s the thing police officers can use to be most effective and humane against large crowds, where we need the most backup. It’s not our biggest risk product; there’s more of that around impact munitions, which also supports that tear gas is a humane product.”
Beyond tear gas, Combined Systems offers a broad range of both impact and irritant munitions, as well as aerosols, flash-bangs and related products to help control unruly crowds. Though some of these were linked to injuries in 2020, their overall risk profile when used correctly, like tear gas, is generally quite safe.
It’s hard to draw comprehensive conclusions from that summer’s engagements due to differences in tools, protocols and local circumstances, but a 2021 New England Journal of Medicine review of injuries linked to the use of less-lethal force during the Floyd protests in Minneapolis suggests injuries were largely minor. From a starting pool of more than 6,600 medical records identified in an initial search, investigators found just 89 cases from the protests’ first three weeks that cited externally caused injuries or had protest-related terms (e.g., “riot,” “projectile,” “rubber bullet,” etc.) in their care notes. While injuries included eye trauma and traumatic brain injuries, Injury Severity Scores were in the “mild” range for 77 of 89 patients (87%) and “severe” for just four. These findings, the authors noted, were limited to those who chose to seek medical evaluation.
3. The danger is contagion.
Peaceful protesters in 2020 often wondered why tear gas was often used broadly against everyone, rather than more specific options against individual bad actors. The reason, as police know but citizens may not, is the risk of contagion.
Imagine your football team wins a big game. You may not have planned to storm the field and tear down the goalposts. But when first one, then another, then a handful and then a bunch of your ecstatic fellow fans vault onto the field for an impromptu celebration, it’s easy to get excited and be pulled along. This is the contagion effect police fear.
“In a large crowd situation, there may be certain individuals there for mayhem,” said Burns. “In dealing with that, other people can get caught up in the moment – we see that a lot in riots. You might have a group of protesters who are completely peaceful and nonthreatening, and then you’ll have some people start throwing rocks and bottles, and then the police respond to the rocks and bottles, and now there’s that contagion effect. People get caught up who weren’t previously involved.”
Acting against those crowds is a preemptive strike to prevent bad behavior from spreading and a prophylactic protection of health and property.
4. Training is important.
If you train regularly on using less-lethal force and have clear protocols and guidelines around it, share that and ensure your citizens know you’re striving to do things the right way. If you’re shortcutting this essential training, you’re not doing yourselves any favors.
“I’ve never understood why some departments, in the No. 1 area that has potentially the greatest effect, positively and negatively, on the people we deal with and society in general, provide hardly any training,” said Burns, who in 2014 coauthored a book, “Risk Management of Less Lethal Options,” with Washington law enforcement colleague R.T. Wyant. “It makes no sense.”
Many agencies, Burns found in traversing his state, had no mandatory training on less-lethal force at all. Most averaged just 8–10 hours for not just less-lethal but all their use-of-force training. The most he found was 20 hours a year for less-lethal and defensive tactics combined.
After the Battle of Seattle, federal authorities sought input from local law enforcement across the country about how they controlled crowds in the face of unrest and riots. Ultimately they chose Seattle’s approach as a model, which led to Burns traveling the country to share it.
“When we had the opportunity to train people at a high level, the outcomes were positive,” Burns said. “But it has to be educational and consistent, and you have to maintain it. If I give you four intensive hours of golf training but then you don’t go back out and play for six months, you’re not going to play good golf.”
To help ensure force is used consistently and in the right way, Burns and colleagues at the Washington Criminal Justice Training Center are now working to standardize use-of-force training throughout the state.
5. Less-lethal force equals de-escalation.
This statement may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the proverbial ounce of prevention. Stopping burgeoning misbehavior in its tracks may prevent contagion, but it also halts specific bad actors without a much more potentially destructive increase in force.
“We use less-lethal because it’s actually more humane,” said Burns. “If we don’t have less-lethal tools, the force level is definitely going to be higher. It provides early control of situations and offers flexibility – instead of just using sheer force, we can use chemical agents and just make an environment uncomfortable.
“When we’re hands-on and physical, the public sometimes finds it egregious. But if we can use a less-lethal tool and minimize that confrontation physically by controlling people, I think the public actually likes that. If someone’s using the crowd as a shield, we still have to protect the greater good.”
TRAINING INSTITUTE SUPPLEMENTS MATERIALS
Combined Systems (CTS) started life producing precision components for military weapons systems but has now been in the business of providing less-lethal options for law enforcement for roughly three decades. It’s become the company’s core business.
CTS helps users deploy those products safely and correctly through its CTS Training Institute, which provides various programs in support of the products the company sells. Its three-day less-lethal instructor training course, as one example, provides hands-on experience, classroom instruction and a practical perspective that qualifies graduates to return home and certify others. The course encompasses chemical and impact munitions, OC/aerosols and flash-bangs/sting-balls. Other courses include ballistic breaching instructor certification, a one-day ballistic breaching class, grenadier instruction and more.
“We’re training thousands of police officers,” said Ford. “Our director of training and most of our adjunct instructors are full-time police officers, corrections officers or recently retired. They’re all very experienced subject matter experts.”
For more information on less-lethal products and training, visit Combined Systems.
