A defining research printed within the winter version of Isis, a journal of science and medication, has discovered that pepper spray, a chemical weapon routinely utilized by police departments throughout the U.S., is a deadly substance.
The research was authored by Terrence Keel, the founding director of the College of California, Los Angeles’ BioCritical Research Lab at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. Keel is a nationwide skilled on the intersection of legislation enforcement and “race science” and examines how this deadly substance got here to be thought to be benign, and what that notion stays.
“The info immediately contradicts the false narrative that governments and police departments throughout the nation have pushed for many years,” Keel stated. “Pepper spray kills. The very fact is incontrovertible, so the one query now’s how we reclassify and regulate this substance to cast off its use completely.”
Keel cites two causes for the usage of pepper spray: one, the historic perception that Black individuals are much less delicate to ache, and two, the work of coroners and health workers who view individuals via a police lens. The research talks extensively about the usage of pepper spray in opposition to Black our bodies versus others and as an instrument of torture.
Keel and his allies in his marketing campaign in opposition to the usage of pepper spray hope the research will spur annual publicly accessible statistics on the usage of the product by legislation enforcement, require health workers and coroners to incorporate the presence of pepper spray in post-mortem reviews, and assist laws limiting the usage of pepper spray as a chemical weapon utilized by legislation enforcement.
