to you about today is some of the problems that the military of the western world australia united states u k and so on face in some of the deployments that they 're dealing with in the modern world at this time if you think about the sorts of things that we 've sent australian military personnel to in recent years
and so there 's a bunch of problems that come up for military personnel in these situations because they 're doing things that they haven 't really been trained for and they 're doing things that
those who do them in their own countries are trained very differently for and equipped very differently for now there 's a bunch of reasons why we actually do send military personnel rather than police to do these jobs if australia had to send a thousand people tomorrow to west papua for example
we don 't have a thousand police officers hanging around that could just go tomorrow and we do have a thousand soldiers that could go
so when we have to send someone we send the military because they 're there they 're available and heck they 're used to going off and doing these things and living by themselves and not having all this extra support
so they are able to do it in that sense but they aren 't trained in the same way that police officers are and they 're certainly not equipped in the same way police officers are and so this has raised a bunch of problems for them when dealing with these sorts of issues
one particular thing that 's come up that i am especially interested in is the question of whether when we 're sending military personnel to do these sorts of jobs we ought to be equipping them differently and in particular whether we ought to be giving them access to some of the sorts of non lethal weapons that police have
since they 're doing some of these same jobs maybe they should have some of those things and of course there 's a range of places where you 'd think those things would be really useful so for example when you 've got military checkpoints
if people are approaching these checkpoints and the military personnel there are unsure whether this person 's hostile or not say this person approaching here and they say well is this a suicidebomber or not have they got something hidden under their clothing what 's going to happen they don 't know whether this person 's hostile or not if this person doesn 't follow directions then they may end up shooting them
and then find out afterward either yes we shot the right person or no this was just an innocent person who didn 't understand what was going on
so if they had non lethal weapons then they would say well we can use them in that sort of situation if we shoot someone who wasn 't hostile at least we haven 't killed them
another suggestion has been since we 're putting so many robots in the field we can see the time coming where they 're actually going to be sending robots out in the field that are autonomous they 're going to make their own decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot without a human in the loop
and so the suggestion is well hey if we 're going to send robots out and allow them to do this maybe it would be a good idea again with these things if they were armed with non lethal weapons so that if the robot makes a bad decision and shoots
the wrong person again they haven 't actually killed them
you 've got non lethal shotgun rounds that containrubber pellets instead of the traditional metal ones and this one in the middle here the large truck is actually called the active denialsystem something the u s military is working on at the moment
it goes out to a really long distance compared to any of these other sorts of things and anybody who is hit with this feels this sudden burst of heat and just wants to get out of the way
as i said the military and the police are very different
yes you don 't have to look very hard at this to recognize the fact that they might be very different in particular
the police and knowing because i 've actually helped to train police police in particular western jurisdictions at least are trained to de escalate force to try and avoid using force wherever possible and to use lethal force only as an absolute last resort
and since we 've already had so many problems with police use of non lethal weapons in various ways i thought it would be a really good idea to look at some of those things and try to relate it to the military context and i was really surprised when i started to do this to see that in fact even those people who were advocating the use of non lethal weapons by the military
so i actually started to investigate some of those issues and have a look at the way that police use non lethal weapons when they 're introduced and some of the problems that might arise out of those sorts of things when they actually do introduce them
and of course being australian i started looking at stuff in australia knowing again from my own experience about various times when non lethal weapons have been introduced in australia so one of the things i particularly looked at was the use of o c spray oleoresin capsicum spray pepper spray
by australian police and seeing when that had been introduced what had happened and
and i went and had a look at some of the figures here now when they introduced o c spray in queensland they were really explicit the police minister had a whole heap of public statements made about it they were saying this is explicitly intended to give police an option between shouting and shooting
so i went and looked at all of these police shooting figures and you can 't actually find them very easily for individual australian states i could only find these ones this is from a australian institute of criminology report as you can see from the fine print if you can read it at the top police shooting deaths means not just people who have been shot by police but people who have shot themselves in the presence of police
but this is the figures across the entire country and the red arrow represents the point where queensland actually said yes this is where we 're going to give all police officers across the entire state access to o c spray so you can see there were six deaths sort of leading up to it every year for a number of years
so it wasn 't that queensland had
in fact if you have a look at the studies that they were looking at the material they were collecting and examining you can see the suspects were only armed in about fifteen percent of cases
this was something explicitly introduced to be an alternative to firearms but it 's being routinely used to deal with a whole range of other sorts of problems
now one of the particular issues that comes up with military use of non lethal weapons and people when they 're actuallysaying well hey there might be some problems there 's a couple of particular problems that get focused on
so one of the problems that 's been suggested with non lethal weapons is that they might be used indiscriminately that you use them against a whole range of people because you don 't have to worry so much anymore
and in fact one particular instance where i think that actually happens where you can look at it was the dubrovka theatre siege in moscow in two thousand and two which probably a lot of you unlike most of my students at adfa are actually old enough to remember so chechens had come in and taken control of the theater they were holding something like seven hundred people hostage they 'd released a bunch
and it 's no surprise that people died because you don 't know how much of this gas each person is going to inhale what position they 're going to fall in when they become unconscious and so on there were in fact only a couple of people who got shot in this episode
so this was one particular problem they talked about that it might be used indiscriminately second problem that people sometimes talk about with military use of non lethal weapons and it 's actually the reason why in the chemical weapons convention it 's very clear that you can 't use riot control agents as a weapon of warfare
the problem with that is that it 's seen that sometimes non lethal weapons might actually be used not as an alternative
another problem that i just want to quickly mention is that there 's a whole heap of problems with the way that people actually get taught to use non lethal weapons and get trained about them and then get tested and so on because they get tested in nice safe environments and people get taught to use them in nice safe environments like this
i confess this particular case was actually
and it 's all captured by the video camera running in the
united states it happened in canada as well and a colleague of mine sent me this one from london but my personal favorite of these ones i have to confess does actually come from the united
the last thing that i would just like to say when i 'm talking to the police about what a perfect non lethal weapon would look like they almost inevitably say the same thing they say well it 's got to be something that 's nasty enough that people don 't want to be hit with this weapon so if you threaten to use it people are going to comply with it
but it 's also going to be something that doesn 't leave any lasting effects
in other words your perfect non lethal weapon is something that 's perfect for abuse what would these guys have done if they 'd had access to tasers or to a manned portableversion of the active denial system
a small heat ray that you can use on people and not worry about it so i think yes there may be ways that non lethal weapons are going to be great in these situations but there 's also a whole heap of problems that need to be considered as well thanks very much
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