Non-lethal force

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Non-lethal force is force which is not inherently likely to kill or cause great bodily injury to a living target. In the past, police (or soldiers in Military Aid to the Civil Power) called to a riot, were primarily limited to use of bayonet or sabre charges, or firing live ammunition into the mob. To control the violence with minimal risk to human life, non-lethal riot control technologies were developed in the 1960s. Similarly, police officers on patrol were traditionally armed with a baton or a pistol, which seemed to represent an excessively dangerous response to many common problems. Thus in the 1980s and 1990s non-lethal personal sidearms, such as pepper sprays and stun guns, were developed for use by police and also self-defense by private citizens. Note that "non-lethal force" may have some risk of causing death: in this context "non-lethal" only means "not intended to kill". For this reason, two new terms, "less than lethal" and particularly "less-lethal", were coined and are now being used in place of "non-lethal" by many weapons manufacturers and law enforcement agencies (and even those who oppose their common use in riot control).

A report prepared for the European Parliament classified non-lethal weapons as techniques of political control. In an appraisal of those techniques, the Omega Foundation recognized non-lethal crowd control weapons, prisoner control technology, interrogation technologies and surveillance technologies, including human recognition and tracking devices and global police and military telecommunications interceptions networks, as elements of a growing arsenal of non-lethal political technology that can pose a threat to civil liberties.

Weapons not designed as lethal instruments often nevertheless prove fatal. An estimate by the International Association of Chiefs of Police suggested at least 113 pepper spray related fatalities had occurred in the US, mostly from positional asphyxia. Amnesty International in 1997 released a report titled USA: Police use of pepper spray is tantamount to torture.