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I'd like to know the protocol for the deployment of these sound cannons. If they first try to apply officers on the ground to direct crowds, and then deploy son

I'd like to know the protocol for the deployment of these sound cannons. If they first try to apply officers on the ground to direct crowds, and then deploy sonic cannons afterwards when the aforementioned fails, then i personally feel that's justifiable. However i'm not sure I agree with the use of such tech as a first line option, it screams dystopian to me personally.

emodendroket 9y ago
Since the article says nobody was arrested it seems unlikely that the cannon was only used as a last resort on unruly crowds.
jstanley 9y ago
If police are unable to control the crowd, at what point is that simply because the crowd is so large that the police should be unable to control them? If the DDR had this sort of technology, would the Berlin wall still be standing? And, if so, would that be a good thing?
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy.
  - jachee 9y ago
    With the way districts are Gerrymandered, the electoral college and the amount of money required to even come to the fight: This is an oligarchy. More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      Even if she won, she was still the Secretary of State that gave us more predator drones, more bombing and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history). I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties, they just toss a few pandering policies here and there to get people angry, or spin things differently.
      - gaadd33 9y ago
        > and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history). ...That's a negative? Also I didn't think that Obama spent every day at work, at least not from what the news reported.
        libraryatnight 9y ago
        Some dudes I work with went nuts over Obama being a tax burden when he stopped in Hawaii and it was reported he was stoked to have a plate lunch. To be fair though, they kept talking about Hawaii like they didn't realize it's a state.
      - ajmurmann 9y ago
        I think it doesn't matter which side you see it from, democracy in the US is completely broken. In most states your vote doesn't matter. Both parties ended up with candidates that were disliked by more people than liked. Trump keeps bringing up Hillary because she probably is the only candidate who makes him even remotely look good to anyone meanwhile even most Democrats didn't want her. Both parties had to fight off what in essence were third party candidates because it's more viable to hijack one of the big two than running as a third party. And that's completely ignoring that once in office completely unpopular measures get pushed through my either site. It's completely broken!
        djsumdog 9y ago
        Sorry, that should have read "every day at war"
      - root_axis 9y ago
        > I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties So what? Even if one accepts the unimaginative premise that all politicians are equally corrupt, there are very clear differences in the policies they enact, so it is a rational decision to make discerning choices between them; the implied suggestion that it's all a wash is very obviously incorrect.
    - jrs95 9y ago
      And if people were asked about immigration policy instead of told, we both wouldn’t have had a candidate as vulgar as Trump getting the GOP nomination, and we wouldn’t have had the demographic shift that probably resulted in more Democratic votes than Hillary won the popular vote by. Oligarchic forces aren’t just tipping the scales in one direction.
    - abawany 9y ago
      I have been thinking about how to work around the gerrymandering/gigantic 'war chests' that the incumbents have and the following idea comes to mind: run against these incumbents locally in the party primaries to help drain their truckloads of 'campaign contributions' and help give the election candidate a fighting chance to upset this stinking pile of evil.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    > When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy. This is a strong indictment of political science education in this country. First of all, you need to understand that the policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this book - after reading it, you will never again try to explain away an act of government with the same tired logic of, "we get the government we vote for." It is a difficult-to-deny fact that, in the USA, the government frequently and quietly advances policies which do not appear to be derived from any kind electoral mandate, nor are favored by a substantial portion of the electorate. But there's a much stronger argument here, and it's about this completely incorrect assertion of yours: > This is a democracy. While it's true that, in the modern international parlance, the USA is a democratic state, it is not a democracy in the way that you have used that word here - and our founding documents (and the federalist papers) go out of their way to distinguish our form of government from a democracy as such. The difference is this: Even if 100% of the voting public votes for a measure that abolishes the freedom to assemble, the government has no authority and no legal standing to trample any individual's rights. This is the essence of a republic: the powers of the government are limited and enumerated and do not change by dint of a given election. The police presence and tactics at any large assembly in the country since about 1970 has unambiguously been an affront to this right, and the refusal of the courts to recognize this represents one of the most visible abdications of legal reason in modern constitutional law (not the most, but one of the most). If the government wants to bring sonic cannons and rubber bullets and kettling to protests, it needs to first go through the legal process of amending the constitution to remove the freedom to assemble from the 1st amendment. Polls and votes and candidates are entirely orthogonal to this matter.
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      I really agree with this. Specifically, American politics, although technically democratic, is not representational. The US elections are first past the post, where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away) and New Zealand's is MMP (where 50% of Parliament gets equal representation based on party preference and the other 50% get the majority vote). Also, American preferences don't reflect policy. I did a video on a paper/publication that goes over this: http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-difference/ http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen... Maine recently voted for ranked voting, and there are groups like Represent.us that are working to enact anti-corruption legislation at the local and state levels; knowing that anything at the Federal level simply won't pass today. We need new officials elected at the lower echelons under anti-corruption rules and for those rules to then propagate up. It's a very uphill battle considering the amount of power and money to prevent it from happening.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    The crowd was large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice. Hillary got 2,868,691 more votes. This isn't democracy.
    - ajmurmann 9y ago
      And that wasn't even a candidate with a positive approval rating...
      - CalChris 9y ago
        During the election? Yeah. Before the election? No. https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinto... Before the election she was a Senator, a Secretary of State, a First Lady and about 20 times the Most Admired Woman in America. Her unpopularity was manufactured. It says more about the electorate than the woman.
        ajmurmann 9y ago
        That chart shows her popularity dropping starting around 2010 and her unfavorability going up big time in 2015. All before the election.
        CalChris 9y ago
        Now why would that be? Must have been something. Not sure what it was. Maybe you can remind me. It was repeated over and over and over, endlessly. You'd think I'd be able to remember it. I'll think of it eventually.
        ajmurmann 9y ago
        I honestly don't know. Was it the emails? Was it Benghazi? It's also totally irrelevant. During the primaries we had a single candidate with positive approval ratings. After the primaries we had to disliked candidates whose primary strength was that they weren't their opponent. Then the candidate with the higher popular vote lost. It's completely fucked!
- mc32 9y ago
  The DDR "let" people cross the wall. If they had not wanted to allow the people to cross, they would not have let them cross. I mean, it's not like they didn't have storm rifles or were unwilling to fire upon civilians. That is to say, they had more powerful weapons and were willing to use them. They made a choice to let people cross. So it was only after the spokesperson for the Berlin Communist Party announced they would allow free crossing of the wall that people began crossing (en-masse).
  - code_duck 9y ago
    It’s likely that a government in that situation would prefer to use these less lethal weapons. Mowing down the crowd en masse with something like firearms would magnify problems at home and abroad, whereas turning them back with something like a sonic cannon would cause less complications.
    - mc32 9y ago
      Let's suppose Kim, Jung-un has a problem with people crossing over into SK. Do you think he'll use less than lethal weapons, or do you think he'll go for the assault rifles? Parent Post implied that had the DDR had these sonic weapons the Berlin Wall would not have fallen... as if The DDR would not have had the willingness to put a stop to it if they wanted to. What happened is they announced publicly that they had a change of heart and would let people cross. And so people did. If you're leading a country as a stong[man] and you want to retain control, it is imperative you use strong tactics --anything less is seen as a weakness by (good or bad) adversaries, and rightly so.
      - code_duck 9y ago
        I think that the reason the DDR did that was because of their power was already slipping. If they massacred a lot of citizens, they would probably have a revolution on their hands… They practically already did. It’s a difficult comparison to North Korea because the regime is not in that situation. The situation is more nuanced than that. I elaborated on possible motivations for using nonlethal force earlier... In the case of North Korea, they also might prefer to not kill citizens who they use for labor. I wasn’t intending to discuss specific events or political situations, though. I meant to merely touch on the political dynamics of non-lethal crowd control.
- handelaar 9y ago
  As someone who used to organise large demonstrations in London for CND [a UK anti-nuclear org] a long time ago -- there is no point that the crowd is ever so large that a combination of the organasition itself with the police where the crowd "should" be unable to control it. In fact when you're putting together a demo in London you meet the Met police and meeting that requirement is one of the things you discuss with them. On Feb 15 2003 a demo against the impending second war in Iraq was so ridiculously larger than anyone (police and organisers included - it was at least a million people) expected that I personally [long story] caused Waterloo Bridge to be closed at about 2pm. The senior police on the day were so understaffed relative to the crowd size that not only did I close a major traffic artery but we volunteers with some previous experience also got called out by the Metropolitan Police on TV for thanks. Still was a very strange feeling to, after years earlier spending many similar days being condescended at by untrained idiot coppers, suddenly being drafted by their bosses into making major crowd-control strategic decisions when the situation had become incredibly dangerous mostly because those same police had utterly misgauged the turnout(). ( On that day having left the org in question some years previously I didn't believe it was going to be that big either. And had turned down their request to help. Then I was in a bank in town a few days before surrounded by ordinary regular nonpolitical people and everybody in the queue joined in a discussion about which tube station they needed to be at for Saturday. Both I and the org were wrong about how big it was going to be by a factor of between 2 and 5.)
  - mav3r1ck 9y ago
    This sounds like an awesome story. Please do share if you already haven't somewhere!
  - handelaar 9y ago
    (tl-dr: There's no such thing as a crowd that "should" be uncontrollable. Only a demo that was poorly planned by the people who are supposed to ensure that it's safe for everyone who attends.)
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Are demos supposed to always be 'safe'? That seems like pre-emptively neutralizing mass political expression that might actually be motivated by a desire for a change of government. You're basically saying that demonstrations should be gestural, not actually change anything. With that attitude no wonder Blair and Bush pressed ahead with the Iraq war, as there was no danger of having to face any political consequences.
- MaysonL 9y ago
  The DDR was going down, once Hungary opened its borders. There was no wall between East bloc countries, and as many East Germans were leaving as could find cars and gas to get out with.
matt_the_bass 9y ago
From the report and article, it doesn't sound like the LRAD was used as the first line option.
dlandis 9y ago
Just to clarify, you feel it’s “justifiable” to inflict permanent hearing loss indiscriminately on a crowd after some officers have deemed the crowd unruly?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

emodendroket 9y ago

Since the article says nobody was arrested it seems unlikely that the cannon was only used as a last resort on unruly crowds.

jstanley 9y ago

If police are unable to control the crowd, at what point is that simply because the crowd is so large that the police should be unable to control them? If the DDR had this sort of technology, would the Berlin wall still be standing? And, if so, would that be a good thing?

SamReidHughes 9y ago
When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy.
- jachee 9y ago
  With the way districts are Gerrymandered, the electoral college and the amount of money required to even come to the fight: This is an oligarchy. More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Even if she won, she was still the Secretary of State that gave us more predator drones, more bombing and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history). I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties, they just toss a few pandering policies here and there to get people angry, or spin things differently.
    - gaadd33 9y ago
      > and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history). ...That's a negative? Also I didn't think that Obama spent every day at work, at least not from what the news reported.
      - libraryatnight 9y ago
        Some dudes I work with went nuts over Obama being a tax burden when he stopped in Hawaii and it was reported he was stoked to have a plate lunch. To be fair though, they kept talking about Hawaii like they didn't realize it's a state.
    - ajmurmann 9y ago
      I think it doesn't matter which side you see it from, democracy in the US is completely broken. In most states your vote doesn't matter. Both parties ended up with candidates that were disliked by more people than liked. Trump keeps bringing up Hillary because she probably is the only candidate who makes him even remotely look good to anyone meanwhile even most Democrats didn't want her. Both parties had to fight off what in essence were third party candidates because it's more viable to hijack one of the big two than running as a third party. And that's completely ignoring that once in office completely unpopular measures get pushed through my either site. It's completely broken!
      - djsumdog 9y ago
        Sorry, that should have read "every day at war"
    - root_axis 9y ago
      > I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties So what? Even if one accepts the unimaginative premise that all politicians are equally corrupt, there are very clear differences in the policies they enact, so it is a rational decision to make discerning choices between them; the implied suggestion that it's all a wash is very obviously incorrect.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    And if people were asked about immigration policy instead of told, we both wouldn’t have had a candidate as vulgar as Trump getting the GOP nomination, and we wouldn’t have had the demographic shift that probably resulted in more Democratic votes than Hillary won the popular vote by. Oligarchic forces aren’t just tipping the scales in one direction.
  - abawany 9y ago
    I have been thinking about how to work around the gerrymandering/gigantic 'war chests' that the incumbents have and the following idea comes to mind: run against these incumbents locally in the party primaries to help drain their truckloads of 'campaign contributions' and help give the election candidate a fighting chance to upset this stinking pile of evil.
- jMyles 9y ago
  > When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy. This is a strong indictment of political science education in this country. First of all, you need to understand that the policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this book - after reading it, you will never again try to explain away an act of government with the same tired logic of, "we get the government we vote for." It is a difficult-to-deny fact that, in the USA, the government frequently and quietly advances policies which do not appear to be derived from any kind electoral mandate, nor are favored by a substantial portion of the electorate. But there's a much stronger argument here, and it's about this completely incorrect assertion of yours: > This is a democracy. While it's true that, in the modern international parlance, the USA is a democratic state, it is not a democracy in the way that you have used that word here - and our founding documents (and the federalist papers) go out of their way to distinguish our form of government from a democracy as such. The difference is this: Even if 100% of the voting public votes for a measure that abolishes the freedom to assemble, the government has no authority and no legal standing to trample any individual's rights. This is the essence of a republic: the powers of the government are limited and enumerated and do not change by dint of a given election. The police presence and tactics at any large assembly in the country since about 1970 has unambiguously been an affront to this right, and the refusal of the courts to recognize this represents one of the most visible abdications of legal reason in modern constitutional law (not the most, but one of the most). If the government wants to bring sonic cannons and rubber bullets and kettling to protests, it needs to first go through the legal process of amending the constitution to remove the freedom to assemble from the 1st amendment. Polls and votes and candidates are entirely orthogonal to this matter.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I really agree with this. Specifically, American politics, although technically democratic, is not representational. The US elections are first past the post, where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away) and New Zealand's is MMP (where 50% of Parliament gets equal representation based on party preference and the other 50% get the majority vote). Also, American preferences don't reflect policy. I did a video on a paper/publication that goes over this: http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-difference/ http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen... Maine recently voted for ranked voting, and there are groups like Represent.us that are working to enact anti-corruption legislation at the local and state levels; knowing that anything at the Federal level simply won't pass today. We need new officials elected at the lower echelons under anti-corruption rules and for those rules to then propagate up. It's a very uphill battle considering the amount of power and money to prevent it from happening.
- CalChris 9y ago
  The crowd was large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice. Hillary got 2,868,691 more votes. This isn't democracy.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    And that wasn't even a candidate with a positive approval rating...
    - CalChris 9y ago
      During the election? Yeah. Before the election? No. https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinto... Before the election she was a Senator, a Secretary of State, a First Lady and about 20 times the Most Admired Woman in America. Her unpopularity was manufactured. It says more about the electorate than the woman.
      - ajmurmann 9y ago
        That chart shows her popularity dropping starting around 2010 and her unfavorability going up big time in 2015. All before the election.
        CalChris 9y ago
        Now why would that be? Must have been something. Not sure what it was. Maybe you can remind me. It was repeated over and over and over, endlessly. You'd think I'd be able to remember it. I'll think of it eventually.
        ajmurmann 9y ago
        I honestly don't know. Was it the emails? Was it Benghazi? It's also totally irrelevant. During the primaries we had a single candidate with positive approval ratings. After the primaries we had to disliked candidates whose primary strength was that they weren't their opponent. Then the candidate with the higher popular vote lost. It's completely fucked!
mc32 9y ago
The DDR "let" people cross the wall. If they had not wanted to allow the people to cross, they would not have let them cross. I mean, it's not like they didn't have storm rifles or were unwilling to fire upon civilians. That is to say, they had more powerful weapons and were willing to use them. They made a choice to let people cross. So it was only after the spokesperson for the Berlin Communist Party announced they would allow free crossing of the wall that people began crossing (en-masse).
- code_duck 9y ago
  It’s likely that a government in that situation would prefer to use these less lethal weapons. Mowing down the crowd en masse with something like firearms would magnify problems at home and abroad, whereas turning them back with something like a sonic cannon would cause less complications.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Let's suppose Kim, Jung-un has a problem with people crossing over into SK. Do you think he'll use less than lethal weapons, or do you think he'll go for the assault rifles? Parent Post implied that had the DDR had these sonic weapons the Berlin Wall would not have fallen... as if The DDR would not have had the willingness to put a stop to it if they wanted to. What happened is they announced publicly that they had a change of heart and would let people cross. And so people did. If you're leading a country as a stong[man] and you want to retain control, it is imperative you use strong tactics --anything less is seen as a weakness by (good or bad) adversaries, and rightly so.
    - code_duck 9y ago
      I think that the reason the DDR did that was because of their power was already slipping. If they massacred a lot of citizens, they would probably have a revolution on their hands… They practically already did. It’s a difficult comparison to North Korea because the regime is not in that situation. The situation is more nuanced than that. I elaborated on possible motivations for using nonlethal force earlier... In the case of North Korea, they also might prefer to not kill citizens who they use for labor. I wasn’t intending to discuss specific events or political situations, though. I meant to merely touch on the political dynamics of non-lethal crowd control.
handelaar 9y ago
As someone who used to organise large demonstrations in London for CND [a UK anti-nuclear org] a long time ago -- there is no point that the crowd is ever so large that a combination of the organasition itself with the police where the crowd "should" be unable to control it. In fact when you're putting together a demo in London you meet the Met police and meeting that requirement is one of the things you discuss with them. On Feb 15 2003 a demo against the impending second war in Iraq was so ridiculously larger than anyone (police and organisers included - it was at least a million people) expected that I personally [long story] caused Waterloo Bridge to be closed at about 2pm. The senior police on the day were so understaffed relative to the crowd size that not only did I close a major traffic artery but we volunteers with some previous experience also got called out by the Metropolitan Police on TV for thanks. Still was a very strange feeling to, after years earlier spending many similar days being condescended at by untrained idiot coppers, suddenly being drafted by their bosses into making major crowd-control strategic decisions when the situation had become incredibly dangerous mostly because those same police had utterly misgauged the turnout(). ( On that day having left the org in question some years previously I didn't believe it was going to be that big either. And had turned down their request to help. Then I was in a bank in town a few days before surrounded by ordinary regular nonpolitical people and everybody in the queue joined in a discussion about which tube station they needed to be at for Saturday. Both I and the org were wrong about how big it was going to be by a factor of between 2 and 5.)
- mav3r1ck 9y ago
  This sounds like an awesome story. Please do share if you already haven't somewhere!
- handelaar 9y ago
  (tl-dr: There's no such thing as a crowd that "should" be uncontrollable. Only a demo that was poorly planned by the people who are supposed to ensure that it's safe for everyone who attends.)
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Are demos supposed to always be 'safe'? That seems like pre-emptively neutralizing mass political expression that might actually be motivated by a desire for a change of government. You're basically saying that demonstrations should be gestural, not actually change anything. With that attitude no wonder Blair and Bush pressed ahead with the Iraq war, as there was no danger of having to face any political consequences.
MaysonL 9y ago
The DDR was going down, once Hungary opened its borders. There was no wall between East bloc countries, and as many East Germans were leaving as could find cars and gas to get out with.

matt_the_bass 9y ago

From the report and article, it doesn't sound like the LRAD was used as the first line option.

dlandis 9y ago

Just to clarify, you feel it’s “justifiable” to inflict permanent hearing loss indiscriminately on a crowd after some officers have deemed the crowd unruly?

deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago

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