The moral dangers of non-lethal weapons | Stephen Coleman

52,231 views ・ 2012-02-07

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
What I want to talk to you about today
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is some of the problems that the military of the Western world --
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Australia, United States, the UK and so on --
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face in some of the deployments that they're dealing with
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in the modern world at this time.
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If you think about the sorts of things
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we've sent Australian military personnel to in recent years,
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we've got obvious things like Iraq and Afghanistan,
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but you've also got things like East Timor and the Solomon Islands,
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and so on.
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And a lot of these deployments
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that we're sending military personnel to these days
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aren't traditional wars.
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In fact, a lot of the jobs we're asking military personnel to do
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in those situations
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are ones that, in their own countries -- Australia, the US and so on --
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would actually be done by police officers.
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So there's a bunch of problems that come up
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for military personnel in these situations,
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because they're doing things they haven't really been trained for.
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And they're doing things that those who do them in their own countries
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are trained very differently for and equipped very differently for.
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Now, there's a bunch of reasons why we send military personnel,
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rather than police, to do these jobs.
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If Australia had to send 1,000 people tomorrow
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to West Papua, for example,
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we don't have 1,000 police officers hanging around that could go tomorrow,
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and we do have 1,000 soldiers that could go.
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So when we have to send someone, we send the military --
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they're there, they're available,
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and heck, they're used to going off and doing these things
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and living by themselves
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and not having all this extra support.
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So they are able to do it in that sense.
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But they aren't trained the same way police officers are,
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and they're certainly not equipped the way police officers are,
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so this has raised a bunch of problems for them
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when dealing with these issues.
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One particular thing that's come up that I am especially interested in,
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is the question of whether,
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when we're sending military personnel to do these sorts of jobs,
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we ought to be equipping them differently;
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and in particular, whether we ought to be giving them access
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to some of the nonlethal weapons that police have.
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Since they're doing some of the same jobs,
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maybe they should have some of those things.
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And there's a range of places you'd think those things would be really useful.
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For example, when you've got military checkpoints.
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If people are approaching these checkpoints
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and the military personnel are unsure if this person's hostile or not,
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say this person approaching here, and they say,
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"Is this a suicide bomber or not?
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Is something hidden under their clothes?
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What's going to happen?"
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They don't know if the person is hostile or not.
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If the person doesn't follow directions, they may end up shooting them,
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and then find out afterwards either, yes, we shot the right person,
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or, no, this was just an innocent person
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who didn't understand what was going on.
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So if they had nonlethal weapons, then they would say,
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"We can use them in that sort of situation.
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If we shoot someone who wasn't hostile,
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at least we haven't killed them."
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Another situation: this photo is from one of the missions
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in the Balkans in the late 1990s.
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This situation is a little bit different,
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where maybe they know someone is hostile;
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they've got someone shooting at them
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or doing something else that's clearly hostile,
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throwing rocks, whatever.
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But if they respond,
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there's a range of other people around who are innocent people,
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who might also get hurt.
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It'd be collateral damage
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that the military often doesn't want to talk about.
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So again, they'd say, "With access to nonlethal weapons,
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if we've got someone we know is hostile,
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we can do something to deal with them,
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and know that if we hit anyone else,
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at least we're not going to kill them."
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Another suggestion has been,
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since we're putting so many robots in the field,
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we can see the time coming
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where they're actually going to send robots out in the field
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that are autonomous.
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They'll make their own decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot,
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without a human in the loop.
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So the suggestion is,
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if we're going to send robots out and allow them to do this,
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maybe it would be a good idea if they were armed with nonlethal weapons,
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so if the robot makes a bad decision and shoots the wrong person,
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again, they haven't actually killed them.
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Now, there's a whole range of different sorts of nonlethal weapons,
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some of which are available now,
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some of which they're developing.
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You've got traditional things like pepper spray,
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OC spray up at the top there,
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or Tasers over here.
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The one on the top right here is actually a dazzling laser,
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intended to just blind the person momentarily
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and disorient them.
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You've got nonlethal shotgun rounds
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that contain rubber pellets instead of the traditional metal ones.
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And this one in the middle here, the large truck,
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is called the Active Denial System,
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something the US military is working on at the moment.
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It's essentially a big microwave transmitter.
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It's sort of your classic idea of a heat ray.
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It goes out to a really long distance,
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compared to any of these other sorts of things.
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Anybody who is hit with this feels a sudden burst of heat,
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and just wants to get out of the way.
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It is a lot more sophisticated than a microwave oven,
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but it basically is boiling the water molecules
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in the very surface level of your skin.
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So you feel this massive heat,
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and you go, "I want to get out of the way."
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And they think this will be really useful
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in places where we need to clear a crowd out of a particular area,
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if the crowd is being hostile.
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If we need to keep people away from a particular place,
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we can do that with these sorts of things.
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So there's a whole range of different nonlethal weapons
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we could give military personnel,
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and there's a whole range of situations
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where they're looking at them and saying,
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"These things would be really useful."
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But as I said,
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the military and the police are very different.
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(Laughter)
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Yes, you don't have to look very hard at this to recognize
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that they might be very different.
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In particular,
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the attitude to the use of force
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and the way they're trained to use force
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is especially different.
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The police --
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and knowing because I've actually helped to train police --
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police, particularly in Western jurisdictions at least,
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are trained to De-escalate force,
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to try and avoid using force wherever possible,
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and to use lethal force only as an absolute last resort.
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Military personnel are being trained for war.
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So they're trained that, as soon as things go bad,
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their first response is lethal force.
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The moment the fecal matter hits the rotating turbine --
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(Laughter)
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you can start shooting at people.
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So their attitudes
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to the use of lethal force are very different,
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and I think it's fairly obvious
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that their attitude to the use of nonlethal weapons
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would also be very different from what it is with the police.
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And since we've already had so many problems
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with police use of nonlethal weapons in various ways,
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I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of those things
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and relate it to the military context.
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I was very surprised when I started to do this to see that, in fact,
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even the people who advocated the use of nonlethal weapons by the military
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hadn't actually done that.
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They generally seemed to think,
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"Why would we care what's happened with the police?
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We're looking at something different,"
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and didn't seem to recognize
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they were looking at pretty much the same stuff.
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So I started to investigate some of those issues,
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and have a look at the way police use nonlethal weapons
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when they're introduced,
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and some of the problems that might arise out of those sorts of things
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when they actually do introduce them.
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And of course, being Australian,
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I started looking at stuff in Australia, knowing from my own experience
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of various times when nonlethal weapons have been introduced in Australia.
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One of the things I particularly looked at was the use of OC spray --
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oleoresin capsicum spray, pepper spray --
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by Australian police,
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and seeing what had happened when that had been introduced,
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and those sorts of issues.
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And one study that I found, a particularly interesting one,
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was in Queensland,
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because they had a trial period for the use of pepper spray
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before they actually introduced it more broadly.
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And I went and had a look at some of the figures here.
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Now, when they introduced OC spray in Queensland,
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they were really explicit.
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The police minister's and a heap of public statements were made about it.
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They were saying, "This is explicitly intended to give police an option
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between shouting and shooting.
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This is something they can use instead of a firearm
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in situations where they would have previously had to shoot someone."
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So I looked at all of the police shooting figures.
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And you can't actually find them very easily
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for individual Australian states;
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I could only find these.
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This is from an Australian Institute of Criminology report.
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You can see, in the fine print at the top:
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"Police shooting deaths" means not just people shot by police,
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but people who have shot themselves in the presence of police.
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But these are the figures across the entire country,
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and the red arrow represents the point where Queensland said,
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"Yes, this is where we're going to give
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all police officers across the entire state
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access to OC spray."
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So you can see there were six deaths sort of leading up to it,
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every year for a number of years.
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There was a spike a few years before,
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but that wasn't actually Queensland.
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Anyone know where that was?
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Wasn't Port Arthur, no.
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Victoria? Yes, correct.
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That spike was all Victoria.
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(Laughter)
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So it wasn't that Queensland had a particular problem
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with deaths from police shootings and so on.
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So, six shootings across the whole country,
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fairly consistently over the years before.
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The next two years were the years they studied -- 2001, 2002.
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Anyone want to take a stab at the number of times,
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given how they've introduced this,
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the number of times police in Queensland used OC spray in that period?
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Hundreds? One? Three?
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A thousand is getting better.
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Explicitly introduced as an alternative to the use of lethal force --
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an alternative between shouting and shooting.
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I'm going to go out on a limb here
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and say that if Queensland police didn't have OC spray,
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they wouldn't have shot 2,226 people
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in those two years.
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(Laughter)
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In fact, if you have a look at the studies they were looking at,
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the material they were collecting and examining,
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you can see the suspects were only armed in about 15 percent of cases
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where OC spray was used.
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It was routinely being used in this period,
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and, of course, still is routinely used --
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because there were no complaints about it,
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not within the context of this study, anyway --
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it was routinely being used to deal with people who were violent,
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who were potentially violent,
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and also quite frequently used
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to deal with people who were simply passively noncompliant.
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This person is not doing anything violent,
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but they just won't do what we want them to.
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They're not obeying the directions we're giving them,
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so we'll give them a shot of the OC spray -- that'll speed them up.
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Everything will work out better that way.
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This was something explicitly introduced
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to be an alternative to firearms,
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but it's being routinely used
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to deal with a whole range of other sorts of problems.
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Now one of the particular issues that comes up
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with military use of nonlethal weapons --
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and people actually say, "There might be some problems" --
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there's a couple of particular problems that get focused on.
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One of those problems is: nonlethal weapons may be used indiscriminately.
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One of the fundamental principles of military use of force
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is that you have to be discriminate;
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you have to be careful about who you're shooting at.
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So one of the problems suggested with nonlethal weapons
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is that they might be used indiscriminately --
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that you would use them against a whole range of people,
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because you don't have to worry so much anymore.
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And in fact, one particular instance where I think that actually happens
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was the Dubrovka Theater siege in Moscow in 2002,
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which probably a lot of you, unlike most of my students at ADFA,
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are old enough to remember.
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So, Chechens had come in and taken control of the theater.
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They were holding something like 700 people hostage.
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They'd released a bunch of people,
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but they still had about 700 people hostage.
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And the Russian military police special forces, "Spetsnaz,"
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came in and stormed the theater.
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The way they did it was to pump the whole thing full of anesthetic gas.
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And it turned out that lots of the hostages died
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as a result of inhaling the gas.
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It was used indiscriminately.
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They pumped the whole theater full of the gas.
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And it's no surprise that people died,
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because you don't know how much gas each person is going to inhale,
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what position they'll fall in when they become unconscious, and so on.
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There were, in fact, only a couple of people who got shot
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in this episode.
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So when they had a look at it afterward,
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there were only a couple of people who'd apparently been shot,
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by the hostage takers or by the police forces
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trying to deal with the situation.
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Virtually everybody that got killed
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got killed from inhaling the gas.
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The final toll of hostages is a little unclear,
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but it's certainly a few more than that,
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because other people died over the next few days.
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So this was one problem they talked about,
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that it might be used indiscriminately.
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A second problem people sometimes talk about
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with military use of nonlethal weapons --
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and it's actually why, in the chemical weapons convention,
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it's very clear that you can't use riot-control agents
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as weapons of warfare --
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is that it's seen that sometimes nonlethal weapons might be used
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not as an alternative to lethal force,
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but as a lethal force multiplier:
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that you use nonlethal weapons first,
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so your lethal weapons will actually be more effective.
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The people you'll be shooting at won't be able to get out of the way.
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They won't be aware of what's happening, and you can kill them better.
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And that's exactly what happened here.
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The hostage takers who had been rendered unconscious by the gas
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were not taken into custody;
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they were simply shot in the head.
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So this nonlethal weapon was being used in this case
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as a lethal force multiplier,
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to make killing more effective in this particular situation.
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Another problem I want to quickly mention
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is that there's a whole heap of problems
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with the way people are actually taught to use nonlethal weapons,
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and get trained about them and then tested and so on.
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Because they're tested in nice, safe environments,
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and are taught to use them in nice, safe environments --
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like this, where you can see exactly what's going on.
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The person spraying the OC spray is wearing a rubber glove
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to make sure they don't get contaminated, and so on.
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But they're never used like that.
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They're used out in the real world,
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like in Texas, like this:
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["Police Taser Great-Grandmother During Traffic Stop"]
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I confess, this particular case was one that piqued my interest in this.
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It happened while I was working as a research fellow
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at the US Naval Academy.
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News reports started coming up about this situation,
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where this woman was arguing with a police officer.
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She wasn't violent.
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In fact, he was probably six inches taller than me,
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and she was about this tall.
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And eventually she said to him,
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"Well, I'm going to get back in my car."
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And he says, "If you get back in your car, I'm going to tase you."
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And she says, "Oh, go ahead. Tase me." And so he does.
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And it's all captured by the video camera
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running in the front of the police car.
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So, she's 72.
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And it's seen that this is the most appropriate way of dealing with her.
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And there are other examples of the same sorts of things,
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where you think,
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"Is this really an appropriate way to use nonlethal weapons?"
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"Police Chief Fires Taser into 14 year old Girl's Head."
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"She was running away. What else was I suppose to do?"
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(Laughter)
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Or Florida:
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15:10
"Police Taser 6-year-old Boy at Elementary School."
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15:13
And they clearly learned a lot from it, because in the same district:
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15:17
"Police Review Policy After Children Shocked:
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2nd Child Shocked by Taser Stun Gun Within Weeks."
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15:22
Same police district.
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15:24
Another child within weeks of Tasering the six-year-old boy.
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15:28
Just in case you think it's only going to happen in the United States,
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it happened in Canada as well:
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15:33
["Mounties Zap 11-year-old Boy"]
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15:35
And a colleague sent me this one from London:
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["Arrested Man, 82, Shot with Taser"]
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But my personal favorite, I have to confess, does come from the US:
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15:43
"Officers Taser 86-year-old Disabled Woman in her Bed."
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15:46
(Laughter)
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I checked the reports on this one.
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I looked at it. I was really surprised.
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Apparently, she took up a more threatening position in her bed.
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15:57
(Laughter)
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I kid you not, that's exactly what it said:
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"She took up a more threatening position in her bed."
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OK.
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But I'd remind you --
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I'm talking about military uses of nonlethal weapons,
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so why is this relevant?
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Because police are actually more restrained in the use of force
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than the military are.
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They're trained to be more restrained in the use of force
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than the military are.
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They're trained to think more, to try and De-escalate.
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16:22
So if you have these problems with police officers
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16:24
with nonlethal weapons,
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16:25
what on earth would make you think
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it's going to be better with military personnel?
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The last thing that I would like to say:
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When I'm talking to the police
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16:35
about what a perfect nonlethal weapon would look like,
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they almost inevitably say the same thing.
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16:40
They say, "It's got to be something that's nasty enough
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that people don't want to be hit with this weapon.
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So if you threaten to use it,
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people are going to comply with it.
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But it's also going to be something
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that doesn't leave any lasting effects."
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In other words,
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16:57
your perfect nonlethal weapon is something that's perfect for abuse.
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17:01
What would these guys have done if they'd had access to Tasers,
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17:04
or to a manned, portable version of the Active Denial System --
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17:08
a small heat ray that you can use on people
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and not worry about.
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So I think yes,
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there may be ways that nonlethal weapons will be great in these situations,
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but there's also a whole heap of problems
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17:21
that need to be considered as well.
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17:22
Thanks very much.
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(Applause)
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