Water cannon are still in large scale use in Chile, Belgium, the Netherlands and other parts of the world.
Australia The
New South Wales Police Force purchased a water cannon in 2007 and had it deployed on standby during an
APEC meeting in Sydney that year. It was the first purchase of a water cannon by a police service in Australia. However, it ended up not being used during the APEC meeting, and was never used during any instance of civil unrest. Eventually it was retired and converted to a water tanker for fire department use.
Germany The annual riots on 1 May in Berlin, the Schanzenfest fair in Hamburg, which regularly ends in riots, or other demonstrations, are usually accompanied by water cannon, which support riot police. The most commonly used water cannon in Germany over years was the
Wasserwerfer 9000. Since 2019, the only water cannon type used by riot police, which are around 50 units in total, is the
Wasserwerfer 10000.
Hong Kong water cannon shooting blue-dyed water during the
2019–2020 Hong Kong protests Three truck-mounted water cannons, officially called 'specialised crowd management vehicles' (SCMVs), were purchased by the
Hong Kong Police Force in 2016. The vehicles were built in France using
Mercedes-Benz truck chassis, and were delivered in 2018 at a combined cost of HK$16.59 million. On 20 October 2019, the gate and steps of
Kowloon Mosque in
Tsim Sha Tsui were stained when police shot blue-dyed water at a group of pedestrians standing outside. A large number of protesters went to the mosque to help clean up, a process made more difficult by the pepper solution in the water. The police later issued an apology for the incident, saying that they had not intended to hit the mosque. Bet Alpha Technologies, a company owned by
Kibbutz Bet Alpha, has sold water cannons to Russia, China, Turkey, the United States, Latvia, Zambia, Argentina and Swaziland amounting to millions of dollars in sales. The
Israel Police have made extensive use of water cannons during demonstrations. Its water canons are capable of spraying jets of water,
paint (used to mark protesters for later arrest),
gas, and
Skunk in long or short pulses in an effective range of 40 meters. They are controlled by a
joystick and set of cameras, and they are equipped with a
mine plow, which allows the vehicle to break through and push through hard barriers like
barricades placed on the road. During the
2023 Israeli judicial reform protests, the
Israel Police allegedly violated its own procedures when on several occasions they fired water streams directly toward protesters' heads, causing damage to the vision of some of them.
Thailand During the
2020 Thai protests, on 16 October 2020, the police used water cannon claimed to have water containing an irritant that made protesters' eyes sting to disperse a peaceful protest in Bangkok.
Turkey The
Turkish police water cannon
TOMA has been used against protesters many times, including the
2013 protests in Turkey, and are often present at protests of all sizes.
United Kingdom Only six water cannons are operational in the United Kingdom, all held by the
Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI); these are Somati RCV9000 Vehicle Mounted Water Cannons built on
GINAF chassis, which after extensive evaluation by a
Defence Scientific Advisory Council sub-committee as a
less-lethal replacement of
baton rounds, began to enter service with the PSNI from 2004 onwards. Water cannon use outside Northern Ireland is not approved, and would require the statutory authorisation from the Home Secretary for use in
England and Wales or the parliament of Scotland for use in Scotland. In June 2014, London's
Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime Stephen Greenhalgh authorised the
Metropolitan Police to buy three-second-hand
Wasserwerfer 9000s from the
German Federal Police.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson said that the purchase had been authorised before Parliamentary approval, as the three cannons cost £218,000 to purchase and would require a further £125,000 of work before being deemed suitable for service, as opposed to £870,000 for a single new machine. But after a study of their safety and effectiveness, Home Secretary
Theresa May said in Parliament in July 2015 that she had decided not to license them for use. They were sold in November 2018 with the intention of them being dismantled for spare parts. The resale resulted in a net loss of £300,000.
United States Truck-based water cannon, and fire hoses used as improvised water cannons, were used widely in the United States during the 1960s for both riot control and suppressing peaceful civil rights marches, including the infamous use ordered by
Eugene "Bull" Connor in
Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The newsreel footage of police turning water cannons and police dogs on civilians—both student protesters and bystanders alike, including children as young as six—widely viewed as shocking and inappropriate and helped turn public sympathies towards civil rights. Water cannons were used in November 2016 during the
Dakota Access Pipeline protests. In August 2020, state senator Floyd Prozanski suggested water cannons be used by police against protesters in Portland, Oregon. The
New York City Police Department previously had a water cannon made from a 1982 Oshkosh P-4 as part of their Disorder Control Unit, which was in their fleet until at least the 2000s. There are no recorded instances of it ever being deployed. ==Mining==