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Crowd Control In Iraq

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Additionally, journalists report tear gas related fatalities occurring from time to time. McCoy (2014) wrote about pyrotechnics in a tear gas canister burning down a house in the United States with dozens inside, 3 Palestinians in a protest getting killed as a result of concussions or direct inhalation, and 37 political prisoners in Egypt suffocating from the gas while trapped in a vehicle. Physicians for Human Rights (2012) reported that in Bahrain, where the gas is used frequently to “wound, harm, harass, and intimidate” protestors, an asthmatic died from lung failure after repeated exposure. The military or police often deny that tear gas had any connection to the fatalities whenever they can. To admit the opposite would inconvenience them with legislative restrictions on their favored method of crowd control.
Is tear gas effective as a means of crowd control?
Tear gas is objectively effective in immediately dispersing crowds, and that about sums up its usefulness in crowd control. As can be observed from the news coverage of Ferguson, Bahrain, …show more content…

The indiscriminate nature of the weapon makes even the protestors who are peaceful feel antagonized by the police, and the physical injuries that result from firing canisters into a crowd, as can be seen in Figure 2, can provoke retaliation. In Kashmir, a stray canister hit and killed a 14-year-old bystander despite efforts by police to use minimal force, and the people of Kashmir responded by throwing rocks at the Indian police and their vehicles. According to Stern (2014), every instance of violence in that region sparked “new and more intense protests” in which “injuries suffered by citizens, police, and paramilitaries numbered in the hundreds”. The worsening reputation of the local police as a result of their own methods also negatively affects their ability to actually control crowds in their

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