How dangerous is pepper spray?

Studies suggest the use of pepper spray on peaceful protesters, such as the UC Davis students, is likely to make them more violent

The controversy of the policing of student protests at University of California, Davis, has highlighted one of the more sinister trends in recent protests: the liberal or even enthusiastic use of weapons like pepper spray to force protestors to bend to the will of the police, even in the absence of any obvious violence or threat.

I was stunned and appalled by the UC Davis Police spraying protestors, and struck by how many brave, curious people recorded the events. I took the four clearest videos and synchronized them. Citizen journalism FTW. Sources below.
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briocloud, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Uj1cV97XQ
jamiehall1615, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I
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OperationLeakS, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjnR7xET7Uo
asucd, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

The fog of protest can all-too-easily obscure the truth of what happens, but in the era of Twitter and YouTube we can see a protester's-eye view of the action for perhaps the first time in history. What we're seeing does not show the police in a good light.

The term "pepper spray" is grossly misleading. It conjures up images of chopping onions, or going to the bathroom after handling chillies without properly washing your hands first.

For some Republican Congressmen it may suggest a healthy portion of vegetables packed into a convenient dispenser, like a sort of gaseous pizza.

In reality, calling the weapon used against UC Davis students pepper spray is like saying that Goldfinger threatened James Bond's crotch with a laser pointer. Deborah Blum has written a great article about this over at Scientific American (worth reading in full), in which she points out that at roughly 5.3m Scoville units – around a thousand times more potent than Jalepeno peppers – the spray carried by law enforcement officers is a "potent blast of chemistry."

In history it has been used as a form of torture, and many would argue that its use in recent times carries similar intentions – not a way to preserve peace, but a means to break up peaceful protests .

So how safe is pepper spray, and is it being used appropriately? Like all supposedly non-lethal weapons, pepper spray has risks, and in some cases it can lead to fatalities, as even the Department of Justice admits(pdf). Reliably assessing that risk turns out to be quite difficult, though.

Of course we know that any use of pepper spray can involve pain, discomfort, temporary blindness and respiratory issues, but statistics from the field seem to be thin on the ground. At UC Davis 11 students were treated by paramedics while two were hospitalized.

How many of those sprayed away from a friendly campus receive comparable treatment, and who is counting them?

Deaths involving the police can result from a complex combination of causes. By 1995 the ACLU in Southern California had identified 26 deaths connected with pepper spray use in 30 months (pdf).

A more recent North Carolina study cited by the DoJ looked at 63 deaths in custody (pdf), and suggested two may be partly attributable to the weapon. In both of those cases the victims were asthmatic, as were some of the more seriously affected students at UC Davis.

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in these sprays, is known to cause distress to the lungs and airways. Clearly, certain groups will be at much greater risk from its use, but again there seems to have been no real effort to quantify this risk.

Of course, risks have to be weighed against benefits, and risks can be reduced with good training and tactics. It's here that perhaps the biggest failings have occurred, as research from street trials in the Netherlands backs up (here and here.


As you might expect, the Dutch studies that pepper spray helped to subdue aggressive suspects, but when it was used against those who were already peaceful – like the students at UC Davis – it made them aggressive. If the Dutch findings are right, police officers wading into a peaceful protest and spraying people are more likely to cause violence than to stop it; use of pepper spray in these kinds of situations isn't just excessive and unfair, but also stupid.

“Listen, guys. I’m just gonna sit here until we can work this system out so it benefits everybody, not just the fat catsAAAUUAUAUAUAGAGAGGAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

And while the benefits of sprays in the right situations were clear, controlling officers once they had these weapons proved to be difficult. Across the forces studied, some 6% to 15% of uses of pepper spray were against suspects that posed no threat to either officers or civilians. Often suspects were sprayed from too close a distance or for too long.

Worryingly, an "unknown number" of officers took to carrying their sprays while off duty. Research into pepper sprays has tended to focus on their health effects, but perhaps it should also look at its impact on the psychology of the officers carrying them.

It would clearly be preferable if the police didn't have to carry pepper spray, but there are doubtless times when its use is appropriate. The issue here isn't whether the police should ever use pepper spray; it's why they chose to use it in this instance, at a peaceful campus protest.

It's understandable that police responding to a protest want to be ready for any eventuality – if you want peace, prepare for war – but it seems the officers didn't just turn up at UC Davis prepared for a fight, they came looking for one. That made them dangerous with or without pepper spray. Source