KINIGUIDE Have you ever played paintball? Did you get hit by one of its many colourful pellets?

It stings. It bruises. It ruins your clothes. Add chilli extract to the mix however, and you have a crowd control device in your hands.

That is exactly the proposition that PepperBall Technologies Inc (PepperBall Inc) offers, and its eponymous products are filling the Federal Reserve Unit’s (FRU) arsenals.

In this instalment of KiniGuide, we take a look at pepperballs and their effects.

What are pepperballs?

They are spherical pellets similar to those used in the sport known as paintball, and come with compressed-gas powered launchers for the pellets.

In essence, they are no different from paintball markers except for the fillings used in the pellets, and some adaptations to make the launchers more suitable for law enforcement use - an attachment point for a flashlight and other accessories, for example.

(Paintball markers are often colloquially called ‘guns’, but ‘marker’ is the more widely accepted term among sports enthusiasts. This is in part to distance the sport from the violence associated with firearms and warfare, and in part because of the marker’s original use for marking trees – at least until some foresters thought it would be fun to shoot each other with it.)

Pepperballs are marketed by the US-based company PepperBall Inc as a less-than-lethal alternative to firearms in forcing compliance from suspects, including for crowd control.

The company is owned by United Tactical Systems LLC, which is also based in the US. The Singapore-based IPS Securex Pte Ltd is PepperBall Inc’s sole distributor for the Asia Pacific region.

What did the police buy?...