When a coalition of the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front began a strike at San Francisco State College in 1968, their efforts were initially limited to a relatively small number of students and a handful of professors. However, it quickly evolved into a massive demonstration and ultimately became the longest campus-based strike in American history. As the intensity of protest grew, the College administration soon turned responsibility for maintaining order over to outside agencies. Officers from the San Francisco Police Department, the California Highway Patrol, and other agencies arrived and prepared to engage in what was then termed “riot control.” Contemporary photographs and eyewitness reports show that this largely consisted of baton charges and the dispersal of CS (or tear) gas. Modern crowd-control doctrine teaches a broader array of techniques—many of which are less viscerally disturbing when captured on video—which raises a sharp question about the tools police use against demonstrators: has the modernization of these tools made policing more humane, or merely more publicly palatable?

The protest poster Happiness Is a Warm Club captured the perception many people in the crowd held. Baton charges are nominally meant to push a crowd out of a given area. In practice, they rarely work except against the thinnest of groups. Those closest to the police line often do retreat, but they quickly have nowhere to go; the larger body of people behind them cannot move fast enough, nor do they feel the same sense of immediate threat. Once the front line became effectively stuck, policing would characteristically degrade into baton strikes which were widely described as indiscriminate. Because these blows did not seem directed toward achieving a clear tactical goal, many concluded that officers were taking personal satisfaction in inflicting pain.

Despite ample photographic and filmed evidence of such excesses, the press paid them little attention at the time. Without meaningful public criticism of these tactics, they persisted largely unchecked. Decades later, the proliferation of cell phone cameras, security video, and eventually police-worn body cameras transformed what could be documented and shared. Combined with social media, these technologies helped generate backlash in the public discourse toward crowd control that resembled a melee. Batons are still used, but generally in different tactical configurations, particularly alongside riot shields that are now ubiquitous.

To fill the space left by the retreat of overtly hands-on force, a lucrative industry has emerged to supply higher-technology tools. Common examples in the United States include pepper-balls fired from paintball-style markers, disorientation devices such as flash-bang grenades and blast balls, and a range of “less-lethal” impact projectiles including rubber and plastic bullets and beanbag shotgun rounds. Conducted energy weapons like TASERs are sometimes included, though they are less commonly used in crowd settings. Additional devices continue to move through testing and evaluation.

From the perspective of police agencies, these tools offer clear advantages: they promise greater control with fewer visible injuries, they can reach people at distances unreachable by batons, they reduce danger to officers, and—critically—they remain more tolerable to the general public watching from afar. New terminology reinforces this softer image. Actions involving pepper-balls, flash-bangs, and beanbag rounds can all be encompassed by neutral-sounding phrases like “crowd dispersal,” making the underlying use of force less visible.

Investigations by human-rights observers have shown a different reality. Amnesty International’s review of U.S. protest policing found dozens of events in which force was applied in ways that violated basic principles of legality, necessity, proportionality, and accountability. Their researchers identified well over a hundred instances in which U.S. officers misused tear gas, pepper spray, kinetic impact projectiles, or batons—including documented cases of police firing projectiles at people’s heads or upper bodies, contrary to safety guidance from manufacturers. In cities such as Minneapolis, Denver, and Portland, these actions were applied indiscriminately against demonstrators, observers, and sometimes medics. The organization argues that such tools, even when labeled “less-lethal,” routinely cause harm when used without strict discipline.

Medical and public health reviews support this view. Severe injuries—from shattered bones and eye ruptures to traumatic brain injuries—have all resulted from these so-called less-lethal methods. A number of deaths attributed to these tools have also been described. Tear gas and blast devices disperse into broad areas that cannot be targeted with precision, affecting bystanders as readily as participants. Their use has been linked not only to physical harm but also to psychological trauma, with Amnesty International noting post-traumatic stress symptoms in people subjected to repeated deployments of chemical agents or impact rounds.

Nor is the strategic efficacy of these weapons settled. Rodriguez and White at University of Colorado at Boulder examined thousands of US protest events in 2020 and 2021, and found that police deployments of tear gas and impact munitions frequently resulted in increased size and number of subsequent demonstrations. Those later protests also saw higher rates of injuries to both protesters and officers. These findings undermine the common assertion by police that less-lethal weapons can stabilize volatile situations.

Their broad public acceptance may also weaken the restraint that officers might otherwise exercise. Federal protest responses illustrate this problem vividly. US Congressional analyses of law enforcement operations responding to protests during a similar time period (especially Portland, OR) describe extensive use of pepper-balls, CS gas, and various impact munitions by federal tactical teams, sometimes without clear identification, adequate reporting, or demonstrable necessity. Courts have, in several instances, found these practices excessive or unconstitutional. The same reviews emphasize that descriptors such as “less-lethal” lack standardization and do not necessarily reflect the real medical risks involved.

The broad acceptance of these methods by the populace, may, in fact, produce less restraint on the part of the police than they might otherwise demonstrate. Recent developments, such as the heavy-handed federal implementation of immigration raids and response to associated protests, suggest that police may be reverting to more aggressive tactics; pepper-balls shot at close range to the head, volleys of stun grenades in enclosed urban spaces, and liberal use of beanbag and foam rounds have all been used.

These developments suggest that the shift toward new technology has not reduced the coercive power of the state so much as rebranded it. The outward form may appear more sophisticated, but the essential dynamic remains familiar: tools that can inflict intense pain or injury continue to be deployed in ways that undermine public trust, endanger the people they strike, and often inflame the protests they are meant to control. The riot police of today may employ weapons that look cleaner on camera, but the underlying philosophy, and the potential for abuse, remains unchanged.

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