'Less Lethal' Parachute Bullets Being Tested by Trigger-Happy Ferguson Police

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http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/02/04/less-lethal-parachute-bullets-being-tested-trigger-happy-ferguson-police

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Residents say solution is end to racism and police violence, not more funding for weapons

'Less Lethal' Parachute Bullets Being Tested by Trigger-Happy Ferguson Police
Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Nearly six months after a white Ferguson police officer fatally shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, city law enforcement has devised a dubious response to the sustained protests that have swept this Missouri municipality.

They are calling it a "less lethal" gun attachment which purports to slow a bullet when fired, so that it wounds a person, potentially breaks a few ribs, but allegedly does not kill him or her.

Residents and organizers say that the newly-acquired weaponry, reported Wednesday in the Washington Post, merely serves to disguise and deflect from the brutality of a department where not a single officer has been indicted for the killing of Brown and law enforcement officials remain unapologetic.

"This 'non lethal' weapon is about different tools of a brutalizing police, not a solution to police brutality," Lou Downey, organizer with the Ferguson-based Stop Mass Incarceration Network, told Common Dreams. "Expanding the array of weapons to control and brutalize people doesn't change this logic—the logic of an occupying army, where black and brown youth are a subjected population."