It's for your own good - really

The militarization of local police forces continues apace. As reported in the April 30 issue of New Scientist magazine,

the research arm of the US justice department, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is funding research into three ... devices, all of which are intended to be used by the nation's police forces to bring down suspects and control crowds.

One is a radio-frequency weapon apparently similar to one made for the Marines, designed to cause severe pain at a range of about 2000 feet (600 meters) by heating skin with a 95-gigahertz microwave beam. (Presumably, the police one, designed to be portable, would have a more limited range.)

Another is described by NIJ as a semiconductor laser "man-portable heat compliance weapon" for "force protection, crowd control, and access denial." Little is known of this one because, the magazine says, "there is no known weapon, military or otherwise, that appears to work this way."

Further clues to the nature of these two devices can be gleaned from a November 2004 report produced by the NIJ's research division. In it, Joe Cecconi of the NIJ described a possible directed-energy prototype weapon as being shotgun-sized, producing an area of intense heat 15 centimetres in diameter at a range of 16 metres, with a magazine capable of delivering 12 shots each of less than a second.

Finally, there's a laser which stuns the victim by producing what's being called a "plasma flash bang" at the point of impact; again, it's a weapon similar to one designed for the Marines, this one called the Pulsed Energy Projectile system.

New Scientist notes that NIJ has provided so little information about these weapons that it's impossible to judge their effects or their safety. But additional concerns have already been raised about them: Neil Davison of the Bradford Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project at the University of Bradford, UK, notes that it's quite possible that such weapons, despite the intense pain they may cause,

may not leave any identifiable traces, [so] allegations of abuse will be hard to prove.

He also notes there has long been a demand for a capability to turn the power output of these weapons up or down. "Some of these weapons may have a 'lethal' setting," he warns.

Set your phasers to kill.

One of my biggest and oft-expressed concerns about such "less lethal" weapons (the preferred term now that the description "non-lethal" has proven bogus), one that is still rarely addressed but is beginning to gain traction, is that they will become weapons of convenience rather than of necessity - as tasers already have. That is, they will be used not only in situations where potentially lethal force otherwise would have been used but in situations where no force otherwise would have been used. They will simply become a quick and easy way to "enforce compliance" - that is, to obtain meek submission to authority. And the potential for control not only of "suspects" but of others, particularly of demonstrators and other dissidents behaving in ways disapproved by authority, is both obvious and ominous.