After World War I, a federal agency made tear gas a ubiquitous weapon of U.S. police departments.
that sting the mucus membranes of the eyes and irritate the upper respiratory tract, emerged largely as a wartime weapon a century ago. How did it find its way to police departments?
Tear gas made its debut in trench warfare during World War I as the first chemical agent to be used in the war, according to an article tracing its transition from a military to domestic technology in the journal. There are some documented cases of the Paris police deploying gas cartridges on a small scale to root out barricaded criminals in the early 1910s, but the French army began using tear-gas grenades on a much wider scale on the front lines in 1914.
The U.S. had been conducting research on tear gas throughout the war and eventually developed a powerful new agent using chloroacetophenone—but because this was right before the Armistice that ended the war, the weapon didn’t see much use on the battlefield. As a result, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, which was created during World War I to research gas munitions, still held a limited supply of the gas as the armed forces returned home.
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