They were smoke canisters per the Park police. No tear gas was ever used. The story is false.
Smoke canisters are a smoke screen. It's used to conceal approaching forces. Why would the park police use smoke canisters?
That is what the Park police said they used. You would have to ask them. My guess is the rioters are stupid like the media. They saw smoke and probably thought it was tear gas. Great way to clear the park without hurting people.
“Tear gas,” an umbrella term for about a half-dozen so-called “riot-control agents” or “less lethal” chemical weapons, most often refers to CS gas, a powerful irritant
devised by two Middlebury College researchers in the 1920s.
But it can also refer to OC, or oleoresin capsicum, an ultra-concentrated form of the compound in hot peppers mixed with carriers that make it stick to your skin and lungs more easily. Both cause tears, and both, in quantity, do a permanent number on lungs and nerves.
The distinction only matters if you’re treating medical damage or covering your ass; the Centers for Disease Control
calls every such chemical “tear gas,” including CS, OC, and others. But for police, “pepper balls”—dense projectiles containing OC,
which the Park Police insist they used—are very convenient. They can be fired again and again from a gun. They hurt. (In fact,
they hurt worse than CS gas.)
CDC call it tear gas...