U.S Police Will Fight Riots With an Israeli developed tool

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This tool is called Skunk, a foul-smelling liquid. Technically nontoxic but incredibly disgusting, it has been described as a cross between “dead animal and human excrement.” Untreated, the smell lingers for weeks.

The Israeli Defense Forces developed Skunk in 2008 as a crowd-control weapon for use against Palestinians. Now a company out of Bethesda, Maryland, is importing and providing it to police departments in the United States, including the Ferguson PD.

Skunk is composed of a combination of baking soda and amino acids, The program manager Stephen Rust said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Armament Systems Forum on April 20. “You can drink it, but you wouldn’t want to,” said Rust, a retired U.S. Army project manager.

According to Defense News the Israelis first used it in 2008 to disperse Palestinians protesting in the West Bank. A BBC video shows its first use in action, sprayed by a hose, a system that has come to be known as the “crap cannon.”

In some ways, Skunk is less physically dangerous than tear gas or rubber bullets. It doesn’t sting, but rather triggers a flight response in the amygdala. That could make it usable in combat settings where other crowd-control agents like tear gas are forbidden by the Chemical Weapons Convention, or CWC. “If a particular mal-odorant is disseminated with a concentration that does not activate the trigeminal nerve, it may not require designation as an RCA [riot control agent] under the CWC,” Kelly Hughes, a spokesman for DOD Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, told New Scientist in 2012.

But what seems like a viable alternative to bullets in a war zone becomes more disturbing in the hands of domestic police forces, particularly those who have soured relations with the communities they serve. “We’ve provided some Skunk for the law enforcement agencies in Ferguson. They did not use it yet but they do have it,” said Rust.