I think they sometimes got picked up and tossed back at the police.
Teargas is not the greatest way to disperse a crowd for the same reason that standing room only isn’t the best way to host an immensely popular concert.
If I know anything about Boston cops, if some of these guys weren’t in uniform, they’d be rioting instead. Give one of them a reason to bust some heads, and they’ll gladly do it. I’ve had a couple bad experiences with law enforcement around here which have left me with the impression they don’t know how to handle themselves in a professional manner. You show a little disrespect to a Boston cop, and he may very well beat you silly for it (which is why I don’t). Excessive force? Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
MacTech, good post. Too bad newspapers can’t provide basic information like that. I agree it was probably one in a million shot.
Myself, I fall in the category of blaming the rioters.
If my property were under attack because a bunch of drunken revelers wanted to have fun I would be seriously angry. Knowing police are called upon to put themselves in harms way to protect my property makes me even angrier.
If it were up to me I’d send a hundred plain-clothes policemen into the crowd with a Taser and a can of red paint that doubles as mace. Every twitching red-faced drunk lying on the ground would be fined $5000 for rioting, plus court costs, plus any damage they did, plus restitution.
Well that’s my fantasy anyway. Until people are held accountable for their actions these tragedies will continue to follow sporting events.
Agreed, it was a highly unfortunate accident, the woman was sadly in the wring place at the wrong time, the blame should be placed squarely on the rioters
technically, the pepperball system is being marketed as a less lethal system, not a non lethal system, there’s no guarantee (as seen here) that a NL system would not kill, it’s just less likely
another possibility in this situation could be a hardware malfunction, or an overpressurized bottle, the pepperball marker uses a HPA tank (High Pressure Air), but i only see one regulator on it, the one on the bottle, many paintballers that use HPA have 2 regulators, one on the bottle, and one on the marker itself for safety and redundancy, if one regulator fails, they have a backup, seems strange to me that a law enforcement marker has less safety systems on it than a consumer marker
my Tippmann Model 98 Custom for example, i’ve equipped with an expansion chamber that helps regulate the CO2 gas, i noticed a variation in FPS velocity when i was calibrating it on the field, before i had the X-Chamber my velocity ranged from 260-290, after the X-Chamber, the variation dropped to 2 FPS (278-282)
and, just so you know, at 280 FPS, a paintball is travelling (roughly) around 300 MPH…
Two points:
I’ve been shot in the eye by a conventional paint pellet gun, and I think what saved my eye was the fact that I was wearing glasses under safety goggles. The pellet took out the safety goggle lens, and popped the eyeglass lens from its frame, pressing it into my facial skin, making a circle around my right eye like a raccoon or that dog from the Little Rascals.
And I treat riots and loud crowds like tornados - I move away at right-angles to their path. And like a tornado, you don’t stand nearby to watch - you move away and go somewhere safe. I’ve been near riots after high school football games, and been near so-called “peaceful protests” where people were throwing barriers at the police, and it’s very clear what’s happening and what could happen. Beatings, car tippings, gang molestations or even rapes, murder. See the anti-“globalization” riots for more examples of what ordinarily peaceful people can and will do.
Sports riots are beyond stupid, especially when it’s in a city of the winning team. It makes me feel so much better to know that no crowd of drunken football fans is ever going to break into my house, but that doesn’t help people that live near stadiums/bar districts and who can’t or won’t defend themselves. It’s one case where I support massive roundups by the police of the rioters, and serious prison time if convicted.
Have you ever been caught in a riot? I have. Ever tried figuring out which direction is safe to go in when people are packed like sardines and mayhem is breaking out all around you?
Even if you’re lucky to be tall enough to see your way out, and you know the neighborhood (neither of which was true in my situation), and nobody is blocking your way, it takes time to make an escape. We don’t know all the details yet - was the victim drunk? Had she tried to make her way out? I was lucky and got away with only a tear gas-related asthma attack, but if I’d been a couple hundred yards from where I was, I could have been the victim of a Molotov cocktail. You’d be amazed how fast a merely tense situation can turn really ugly.
Just so you know (see the page) these things are apparently not paintballs although sized that way. Paintballs have an average weight of 3.2 grams each. These things are the same diameter but weigh 8.5 grams each. The page link even has an energy delivery graph, These balls have 300-400% more energy on impact than paintballs. The gun shoot these 8.5 gram balls out at 90/meters per second or 295 FPS. Why so much heavier than paintballs? They’re filled with bismuth metal!
Their painrball specs
News story I got this from -INVESTIGATION - Different official to head weekend crowd control
And just so it’s not lost in the details notice the ball covering. Clear Polystyrene - a damn hard plastic!. So you have these hard plastic encapsulated. metal weighted, 8.5 gram balls being shot into crowds at 300+ mph.
The mystery of why she died is not such a mystery at this point.
This is the inherent problem with “less lethal” weapons, and drunken mobs. If you dialed the power down to the point where it wouldn’t cause serious injury in an accidental face hit, you can’t hurt anyone enough to change their actions. A drunk guy could walk through a hail of low power paintball shots without caring at all. Slower, lighter rounds are less accurate, carry less payload and are more likely to bounce off without breaking.
Use pure chemicals like pepper spray, and some people will have an asthma attack and die. Use pure energy like a tazer, and someone will have a heart attack. Use a projectile and you’ll get a bad luck shot in the eye. A horse can get spooked and step on / kick someone. Use just people power, and you’ll get an officer separated from his mates, scared, attacked and defending himself with a lethal weapon.
The reality is that you can’t disperse a mob without risking injury/death to the people in the mob. It is that risk that snaps people away from the anonymous mob mentality to realizing they need to go home, now.
Where did it say that a mounted officer was the one who fired?
Thanks, astro. I thought it sounded very odd for that type of weapon to be issued to a mounted unit.
A Boston officer O’Toole… how stereotypical.
Anyway, tragic, but I don’t see the debate. Less-than-lethal weapons are a very good thing. However, they should only be used in situations where one would otherwise use lethal force. Careless use of less-than-lethal weapons is bad for the victim, for the weapons, and for the police, as demonstrated above.
Apparently tear gas / mace aren’t as effective against people under the influence of drugs and alcohol, which is why the police now use pepper-based products.
I’m gonna try to recall it as told by my brother who works in the Texas prison system as a guard. But IIRC they have to use pepper based gas because of the adverse reactions some people experience with gas. Some people apparently are highly allergic which has resulted in deaths of several inmates due to repiratory failures.
Has anybody here been tear gassed? I have.
In Navy basic training, they proved the effectiveness of our gas masks by having us wear them into a chamber filled with tear gas. You’re fine until you’re instructed to take the mask off. Holding your breath won’t help - if the instructors present catch you doing that, you’re held in the chamber until you gasp for air.
Your lungs fill instantly with fluid, and you spend the rest of the day coughing up watery mucus. If anybody had asthma or any other lung conditions (absent in healthy Navy recruits) they would be in distress plenty fast.
Add to that the fact that the tear gas grenades can be picked up and thrown back to the police, and it becomes clear why pepper formulations are preferred.
Judging from the website for the FN303, it looks to be a finned, rifled paintball (the rifling fins will increase accuracy) with the front compartment filled with “birdshot” (granulated bismuth pellets), so you have a combination of the physical impact of the pellets (encapsulated in the projectile, they will not spread until they impact the perp) and the chemical effects of the pepper spray
http://www.fnherstal.com/html/XM/orange.jpg
that’s the “paintball” in question, i can now see how a headshot could cause death
I saw a kid on the news last night who got hit in the forehead between the eyes by one of those things. He’s got a metal plate there now, and, according to doctors, came very close to having bits of the projectile in his brain. That’s no shit.
The lawyer representing the cops says the weapons don’t work as advertised. The manufacturer counters they stressed repeatedly that head-shots are strictly verboten, so there’s no reason why anyone should be unaware of that guidline. There are reportedly other individuals who were hit in the head, though I’ve not heard details of their stories.
None of this surprises me.
I am still waiting to hear from anyone about what they feel are options the police have for crowd control, short of “leave them alone to do damage.”