Photographer Tony Murray still suffers the effects of being hit by a baton round last July, but a senior officer defends their use
Tony Murray was about to call it a day after yet another 12 July covering clashes between police and youths in Belfast when he felt something suddenly strike his thigh.
"It was like getting hit with a 10lb block hammer," says the photographer, who had just been on the receiving end of an attenuated energy projectile (AEP), the relatively new type of baton round supplied to police across the UK as a replacement for arsenals of older plastic bullets.
The latter, along with the rubber bullets of the early 1970s, are blamed for causing some 17 deaths and hundreds of injuries in Northern Ireland.
The continued use of baton rounds remains highly controversial. The Children's Law Centre, a Belfast NGO, lists incidents such as a 17-year-old who suffered severe liver damage in July 2010 after being hit twice and a 13-year-old it says was among young people injured the previous year.
Calls for a complete ban on the weapons persist, echoing those from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and UK parliamentary findings.
Gary White, a Police Service of Northern Ireland chief superintendent with experience of commanding police during some of Belfast's most serious riots in recent years, insists that AEPs need to remain a part of his force's arsenal. He says their tactical use is in maintaining distance between police lines and individuals in crowds preparing to hurl missiles, including explosive devices.
White said: "I really don't want to fire these things, for lots of reasons. For one, there is the potential for people at the other end to get hurt. So we invest an enormous amount of energy to try to ensure that we are in a situation where we don't need to."
Users are trained to fire at a target's "belt buckle area", below the ribcage.
A void in the projectile's nose is designed to collapse on impact, spreading the energy. It is a feature White likens to that of a crumple zone in a Volvo car.
While recognising that families have been bereaved, he points out that it has been 20 years since someone has been killed.
Nevertheless, proponents of a ban point to research by doctors at four emergency hospitals Northern Ireland which suggested in 2007 that AEPs caused more harm than the baton rounds they replaced.
Still feeling the effects of his injuries from last year, Tony Murray is adamant about what might have happened if he had been hit seconds earlier as he knelt down.
"It's simple. If these things were to hit anyone in the head, they would kill them," he said.