Pepper Spray and Policing in the Age of Aerosol Weapons
Jonah Walters, Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA
Pepper spray, or "oleoresin capsicum" (OC), is the most common chemical munition in the US. Police and corrections officers deploy pepper spray in as many as a third of all reported use-of-force incidents. This practice is justified by a durable popular consensus that regards pepper spray as a fundamentally non-lethal alternative to nightsticks and firearms. But pepper spray can, and does, kill. How did aerosolized chili pepper become central to law and politics in the twenty-first century? And why is it still considered reliably "less than lethal," despite robust evidence to the contrary?
This presentation locates pepper spray's origins in the widespread use of chili pepper as a remedy for racialized diseases in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. It further traces pepper spray's historical development through the twentieth-century era of anti-riot policing to today's age of aerosol weapons.
Presenter Biography
Jonah Walters is Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Society and Genetics and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies at UCLA. His research analyzes the intersection of policing and technology, tracing the historical development of "less-than-lethal" police weapons, including pepper spray and Tasers. His writing has appeared in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science, the Guardian, Longreads, Jacobin, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.