Hong Kong police monitoring body highlights dangerous effect of water cannons on protesters
Monitoring group highlights dangers as police submit a bid to buy three riot-control vehicles for the maintenance of public order
A police monitoring group has warned that the use of water cannons during crowd-control operations could be highly dangerous to protesters, and could even result in death.
The group, Civil Rights Observer, is sounding the warning as police seek to buy three water cannons at an estimated cost of HK$27 million to strengthen their armoury.
The group conducted a study of water cannons in use elsewhere. It found that at their lowest power, jets of water could hit a human body with 145kg of force at a distance of five metres and 127kg at 10 metres.
"Imagine what would have happened on September 28 [last year] if water cannons were used instead of tear gas," said Andrew Shum Wai-nam of the Civil Rights Observer, referring to the first day of what became the 79-day Occupy protest at three different locations in the city.
"People might have been hit by debris or even barricades bouncing around [after being hit by a water jet], and many could have been injured instead of having difficulties breathing," he said.
The study by Dr Tsing Nam-kiu of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Hong Kong and engineer Albert Lai Kwong-tak of the Professional Commons lobby group was based on the technical specifications of the RCV6 water cannon manufactured by Turkish company Mogol Makine, which they said was the current standard for crowd-control vehicles.
