Mountain Spirit's Blog

By Randall Richards, Mountain Spirit Media
In a recent piece by Oscar Francis of the Otago Daily Times he reports that,
“Police have confirmed sound cannons were deployed against protesters at the Parliament occupation in Wellington earlier this year. A document released under the Official Information Act (OIA) revealed two long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) were deployed on the last day of the protest, March 2″…. (read the rest of the article here)
The article has a few “inaccuracies”. The first statement that contradicts what eyewitnesses experienced is in the second sentence of the piece where LRADs were only deployed on the last day of the protest. One facilitator/administrator at the protest stated seeing the devices starting around mid-way through the protest. Two teachers from Geraldine also reported seeing the devices well before the March 2 date stated above. Additionally, nurses and a doctor at the protest’s medical tent reported people presenting with burns and hearing issues. These signs and symptoms were also reported at similar protests in Australia.
The second misrepresentation presented in Francis’ article states, Police “clashed with crowds of protesters who lit fires and threw cobblestones.” Two independent eyewitnesses who I interviewed, who were immediately next to the tents said that the people lighting the tent/s on fire and adding fuel to the fire/s “were definitely new to the protest grounds, and wore black masks, similar to what Antifa protestors wear.”

Dan Murphy of Queenstown, NZ, supplied these stills from his video of the devices being used on protestors in Wellington during the protest against mandates.

This last image, from Tactical Solutions’ webpage shows their LRAD product, which presumably supplies the New Zealand Police Force. The page’s opening statement reads “used by police forces for non-lethal and non-kinetic crowd control, as a defensive deterrent and for protestor management.”

I’ve also interviewed a number of people in my local community who were adversely affected by these devices. After having returned home after the protest, there were reports of tinnitus, headaches, exhaustion and disorientation. This author certainly has tinnitus as well, which could be attributable to these acoustic devices.