Take THAT! You criminal scum!

The police always tell us, when it comes to the use of capsicum spray (what our American cousins call pepper spray) that they follow serious, binding and strict protocols.

Except they don't. What they don't tell you is that if they want to change how they use capsicum spray, they just change the rule book, as shown here.

Let me just highlight something in particular;

The legal centre is representing a number of residents who have been sprayed by police with capsicum, also known as OC spray.

The police manual, a procedure guideline, is regularly changed and updated.

Last year, a line regarding capsicum spray use was removed.

Lawyer Anthony Kelly said a guideline prohibiting the use of capsicum spray when someone "is passively resisting e.g. hanging limp or refusing to comply with instructions" had been removed from the manual.

Mr Kelly said this fundamentally changed the use of the spray, from police defending themselves to using it as a weapon to force compliance with orders.

I guess you can see where I'm going here. If you arbitrarily remove a prohibition against using spray against a passive target, you turn the thing into a weapon of force, rather than a measure of defence. If you have seen even the remotest fraction of imagery or footage out of the US Occupy protests, you will have seen the completely unrestricted use of pepper spray against US protestors. Is that what we want here? Stormtroopers freely gassing any civilian they don't like the look of? Yeah, no thanks.

Still, they'll only use it against protestors and serious criminals right? Um, no.

Legal centre principal lawyer Tamar Hopkins said she was representing a student from the area who was sprayed after passively resisting the attempts of officers to take him to a police station.

The student had been caught travelling on a tram without a ticket and had refused to get off the tram until reaching his destination.

Fare evaders? Fare evaders?! Get fucked. No seriously, just get thee hither to fuckery. Spraying someone who refused to pay the (FUCKING EXORBITANT btw) fares on our shitty transport system, and then refused to get off when ordered to now constitutes a violent threat to the structure of our society?

To be vaguely serious for a bare moment, let me sum this up for you;

THE POLICE CAN REWRITE THE RULES GOVERNING THE USE OF A HIGH LEVEL IRRITANT, WHICH HAS KILLED PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES, CHANGING IT FROM A TOOL OF DEFENCE AGAINST VIOLENT CRIMINALS INTO AN INDISCRIMINATE WEAPON OF FORCE TO ENSURE COMPLIANCE WITH WHATEVER WHIMS THEY CHOOSE TO ISSUE, LEGAL OR NOT.

This is not what we should be seeing in a supposedly free and democratic society. This shit is the purview of the security forces of a tinpot dictator.

Finally, we had the rozzers deliver their stinging and convincing rebuttal;

"[My officers] don't do it to enforce; it's drilled into them that they have to justify use of force in all circumstances.

"That's the reality. It's used for protection or to protect people from themselves.

"Our members get a lot of training now. They are well drilled at the academy."

"It's used to protect people or to protect people from themselves." What a load of blatant crap. What a farrago of facile fuckery. Now if he'd said "My officers use it to punish the weak and make their balls feel really big." I might believe him.