Two months ago, London mayor Boris Johnson declared its support to the water cannon as a potential anti-riot weapon for the London police. This comes as an additional step toward the universal militarization of the police (see past article) conveniently combined to a capitalist arm market in which too many have too much to loose not to encourage the conditions that require their use. In an article entitled “White-washing the water cannon: salesmen, scientific experts and human rights abuses” for Open Democracy, Anna Feigenbaum establishes a short history of the use of this weapon in the United Kingdom as well as points out a lack of research on its effects on the bodies affected by it.

It was only last year that the hundreds of thousands occupiers of Gezi/Taksim and other public spaces of Turkey were violently attacked by zealous policemen — so zealous sometimes that they would hide their matriculation — often armed with these water cannons. The latter had the particularity not to be loaded with plain water but with water mixed with chemicals that triggered burns on the bodies targeted (sometimes even inside buildings) by them. Associated to the ubiquitous teargas canisters, the Turkish modified water cannons were paradigmatic of the will to control the atmosphere of the public space by acting on its toxicity as Philippe Theophanidis brilliantly pointed-out in his Funambulist Paper, “Caught in the Cloud: The Biopolitics of Tear Gas Warfare.”

This modification by the Turkish police of the fluid triggered by the cannon is highly illustrative of the point made by Feigenbaum in her article: what defines the label “less lethal” for the marketed militarized police weapons corresponds to a virtual use of it “by the book,” i.e. by following the instructions that do actually match the label. When one sees the amount of severe wounds or deaths that occurred through the use of these “less lethal” weapons like electroshock guns or rubber bullets, we realize that these instructions are not often followed, and that policemen might actually use these weapons even more eagerly that they are being told that they are more harmless. The use of the water cannon is certainly following the same logic....continue reading

> via The Funambulist