According to Daily Mail, Pitchess Detention Centre at Los Angeles County Jail will soon be employing a brand spanking new “nonlethal” weapon to break up fights. The Assault Intervention Device emits a laser that can travel up to 100 feet. Prison officials assure us that the laser is “excruciatingly painful” and that when people are hit by it, they “instinctively move out of the beam’s way to try and escape the pain.”
The ADS was apparently modeled after Raytheon’s Active Denial System which was used by the military Afghanistan.
Prison officials believe it will help them break up fights more quickly and with fewer injuries.
A friend of mine has a shock collar for his dog, who is quite rambunctious and sometimes won’t respond to anything less than a jolt of electricity to the neck. Before he let his children touch the remote control, he made them hold the collar and feel for themselves what they would be inflicting on the dog if they ever had to use it.
At the very least, no cop should be allowed to use this without experiencing it. But they should be testing it on each other in ways that don’t make people chuckle about it, as in this video.
Instead, they should put twenty cops in a cramped cell, selecting two to place in the middle of the cell, one big, and one small. Then the big one should grab the little one and attempt to hold him or her immobile facing the pain ray. Now the pain controller should swing the ray around the cell, trying to zap the big guy, meanwhile hitting everyone else in the cell. Let them do this for three or four minutes and laugh uproariously at the ensuing chaos. Then put that on YouTube.
I’d watch it.
Did you ever see this video? The cop goes on about how tasers are “safe,” but when they do a demonstration, they have two cops holding the volunteer by the arms so that he won’t fall over and get hurt.