From the perspective of LRADs replacing other forms of PA, they should actually be an improvement in hearing safety, since the actual sound pressure should be lower for any given application.
There are forces that seek to stop such reviews or even skirt oversight in principle, such as police unions...
And for anyone not familiar with it, there was an excellent documentary on Netflix about the use of the Taser. It argued (and it argued well - I agree with it) that the Taser was attractive because it was less lethal than a gun, but it largely did not replace the gun, it replaced other submission methods. And it ended up being MORE lethal than those submission methods. And that's a problem if you misrepresent that.
Now, I still think police should carry tasers because they're effective on a large spectrum of intermediate / gray area in the use of force continuum and it's much safer for police than many alternatives. But my point is that it's really bad to just think "less than lethal" is a cure-all. "Less lethal" can be lethal (or in this case, permanently disabling). There should still be a high threshold for deploying it.
I don't necessarily think that these kinds of non-lethal weapons can't be used in a "safe" or situationally appropriate way. The problem is that all of these non-lethal weapons have safety guidelines that need to be followed or else they're actually quite dangerous and have high rates of injury (even severe injury). As US law enforcement has shown repeatedly over recent weeks, they're not following any of these guidelines. People are being blinded because they're shooting rubber bullets at people's heads (against guidelines). They can't be trusted with these tools.
I don't think it's solely a US problem either. French police is incredibly eager to liberally apply pepper spray to defenseless protesters (who've committed the heinous crime of exercising their right to free speech and their right to assemble). People are also injured whenever German police use water cannons.
But the thinking is that if you use things against someone using deadly force on you, that's a bad strategy and you might die. If you use these things against someone not using deadly force on you, you're escalating, risking their life, and you're risking assault charges yourself. You need to be completely peaceful, de-escalate (and in some states, retreat), and then when it's time to use force, you make it deadly.
Now police officers are in a different situation but I think the continuum of force here needs to be at least a little more similar than it is. The way they're reacting to these protests is like they're trying to illustrate the protester's point for them. And one may say they're reacting to the riots and the looting, but for the most part they're not immediately present for all that anyway. There is no reason (except to simply submit a general population into not resisting them overall - and honestly that's exactly what they're doing) for you to be using "less-lethal" projectiles out of a firearm against crowds of unarmed people.
There was also a Twitter from a field medic describing the woman's heart stopped repeatedly. I'll look if I can find it but, frankly, there's a lot of noise about protests.
Edit: it was a Reddit thread, not a Twitter thread. [1]
Also edit: there might have been other instances too. This is just what I remembered seeing the other day.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eA27bZl_8Y
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gywxhz/folks_i_nee...
Officially the use of rubber batons (bullets in common parlance) in Northern Ireland killed 17 people; although one would be wise in doubting the veracity of English reports on English behavior in Northern Ireland.
These tools are quite dangerous.
This passive voice enrages me, it is more appropriate to say the police murdered a woman with tear gas. There were people with agency who actively made decisions which directly caused this woman's death.
The inconvenient thing about guns is that they leave dead bodies behind. If police use guns in inappropriate situations, the bodies will be there to incriminate them even though the law in some jurisdictions makes it difficult to prosecute police for murder.
With a LRAD, there is no body. An inappropriately targeted victim has to come forward and press charges. They may not want to do that for a variety of reasons and, if they do press charges, wantonly causing someone hearing damage is a less serious charge than murder.
If you're a police officer, it's a lot easier and less risky for you, personally, to fire a LRAD at someone than a rifle, even though they were designed to be used in similar situations.
The law needs to treat the inappropriate discharge of "less than lethal" weapons much more seriously than it does now. The police, evidently, need serious consequences to be in place.
I am starting to think a certain, broad class of Americans is less litigious than, perhaps, the other.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France
This needs a real world citation.
Wiki seems to me missing it too.
"This article is missing information about non-loudspeaker / anti-personnel uses and hearing damage. (June 2019)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device
Then, if there are any actual facts not political facts, we can talk about refusing police access to non-lethal weapons and only giving access to guns and what that might mean.
The problem with less lethal crowd control tools is that police use them in situations where they would never use a real firearm, creating injuries that wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is really problematic when the police are angry at the protestors, as it gives them a way to inflict revenge pain without the PR fallout of opening fire with rifles.
There is evidence that even on a regular basis, tasers have not replaced firearms, but instead have replaced other means of de-escalation and constraint. The result is that more americans might be dead because we’ve handed out tasers to cops without a second thought.