By May 31, 1995, California police officers and sheriff ’s deputies had used pepper spray nearly 16,000 times—
in the last year at an average rate of 24 times a day statewide.
Since 1992, the beginning of a three-year “provisional certification” of pepper spray concerns have mounted
about health risks associated with OC, especially fatalities among suspects in custody who had been sprayed. The
provisional certification is scheduled to expire in on Aug. 1, 1995.
In this report, the ACLU of Southern California identifies 26 deaths among people who were pepper-sprayed
by police officers in the period Jan. 1, 1993, through June 1, 1995. The fatality total suggests that one person dies
after being pepper sprayed for about every 600 times the spray is used by police.
The fatality summary period ended just before the June 4, 1995, death of parolee Aaron Williams, 37, who,
according to witnesses, was savagely beaten, kicked and repeatedly pepper-sprayed by San Francisco Police
Department officers in a case that has provoked a major controversy in the Bay Area.
complete:
http://www.aclu-sc.org/attach/p/Pepper_Spray_New_Questions.pdf
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