Why do Police Officers Use Pepper Spray?

When pepper spray became a mainstream law enforcement tool in the 1990s, it was hailed as a relatively peaceful alternative to harsh physical violence.
But as demonstrated by the routine spraying of Occupy Wall Street activists, culminating in the horrific assault at the University of California, Davis, pepper spray can too easily become a tool of first and excessive resort.
“I can’t get into the head of people using it in New York and Davis and around the country, but it seems that rather than turning to other tactics, they turn to the simple tool,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina. “There’s an overreliance on technology.”
The incident at UC Davis, where campus police officers sprayed Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream directly into the faces and mouths of sitting students, provoked both moral disgust and a renewed attention to the physical dangers of pepper spray. Far from being what one Fox News pundit called a “food product,” pepper is a dangerous and sometimes deadly weapon.
Receiving relatively less attention is the psychology underlying pepper spray use, which hasn’t been studied much but parallels the use of Tasers. Like pepper sprays, Tasers were supposed to be tools of intermediate physical force, an alternative to hitting a resisting suspect with batons or grappling them to the ground. But Tasers also became alternatives to less-violent tactics and were used in situations where suspects had not physically resisted arrest.
Rather than talking, police too often go straight to the electricity — and the same may also happen with pepper spray.
“When you have something that is readily available to you, something that’s on your belt like pepper spray, and you have a confrontation in front of you — the first thing you’re going to do, because you’re human, is use whatever is right there,” said Ana Yáñez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a non-partisan group that has successfully lobbied to make pepper spray less readily available to law enforcement officers in that state’s youth correctional system.
“All of the training that you might use, anything that allows you to use your other skills, goes out the door,” Yáñez-Correa added. “The first thing you do is say, ‘I’m going to pepper-spray that kid.’ That’s a natural response...”

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Brandon Keim @'Wired'