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.
This article was originally published in AP News. By Andrew Selsky, March 22, 2023
SALEM, Ore. (AP) — 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.
Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, which produced the report, called it “the most comprehensive study on crowd-control weapons to date.”
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.
Produced in collaboration with the Omega Research Foundation, the report took 2 1/2 years to compile and used medical literature. Some of the injuries were fatal but it was impossible from the data to estimate the total number of deaths, 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.
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