Army Need Riot Test Dummies: The Army Will Pay You to Riot
How does the US Army know if its less-than-lethal armaments are effective without being deadly? Live fire training exercises employing a mob of volunteers, of course.
That's right, if you are over 18 and live in the greater New Jersey area, you too can get $20/hour to be whacked with batons and shot with rubber balls! The testing takes place in a non-descript one-story building, known as the Target Behavioral Response Laboratory, located a few miles from Picatinny Arsenal, the Army's research and development center. Here, a nine-member team of engineers study how effective non-lethal technologies perform and, more importantly, the psychological reasons they do.
"I can't just shoot a laser or loud sound at a piece of wood and expect it to run away," John Riedener, the lab's technical director told NJ.com. "We need to know how well it chases someone away. It's all about data, controlled experiments. It's about the probabilities of what can happen." To that end, the Army actively recruits volunteers from local colleges and libraries to pretend to be part of an angry mob, paying them $20 an hour with the small chance of permanent injury (though all tests are supervised by the Picatinny's Institutional Review Board).
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