Savages. 
You use bayonets to avoid collateral damage. Since this isnât war, the local environment is probably something you donât get to write off. Secondly, there are very often people in the crowd who arenât actually rioters (something which is often convenient for the rioters), towards whom you have a duty of care.
Grapeshot is notoriously non-discriminatory. Bayonets are (as is quaternary weaponry), heh, surgical.
But what if the grapeshot are actually tiny vector control cores linked into the threat-assessment network?
Presumably equipped with some other systems too, otherwise what are they gonna do, bounce at them? 
:
(Thatâs when you roll in a DaalĂpel. But theyâre in a different part of history right now.)
âThatâs why weâre here. To do the things that must be done, the things you hate to admit must be done.â
-Unknown VIII Legion Officer
Oh, no. No, no, no. Thatâs how you end up with warrior castes and militarized police and all the shit that goes on out of sight and out of mind on Earth, and thatâs not the Imperial way at all. They have a citizen constabulary and a citizen military and those things which cannot be done in the light had best not be done at all.
No hidden agendas, veils of ignorance, or special privileges here. It is every citizen-shareholderâs right and solemn duty to stand firm against those who do not respect and enjoy the peace.
Itâs just that some of them, like the Home Guard, come pre-equipped with bayonets.
The non-rioters in the crowd possibly have the awkward of trying to decide whether they should be helping jump the rioters (since that would probably fall under mutual-defence obligations?) or clearing out of the way to simplify the job for the professionals, or maybe promptly surrendering in case theyâve been mistargetted?
I suspect âwhat to do in situations like thisâ is something a local would have learnt while growing up, but it does seem the sort of mess than an immigrant could get caught up in and make the âwrongâ choice. Presumably this is something that can be cleared up afterwards; I canât see the Empire penalizing people who made a good-faith attempt to do the right thing but jumped the wrong way due to lack of training. Not when you can fix that by giving them some training, and then making a note that others in that situation may also have a knowledge gap. Improving systems and all that.
At least in the context of spacers, this has been addressed:
Mutual Annihilation | The Associated Worlds
Once the Riot Act has been read, ideally you want to stop where you are, confine yourself to necessary acts of self-and-others defense, and surrender in good order for the relatively short time it will take for them to ascertain that you are not, in fact, a rioter.
In practice, though, riots are sufficiently a Thing That Does Not Happen that no-one has any idea how to respond properly in the moment (and out in the satrapies, for other reasons), so those enforcing things are trained to be careful and professional when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff. As you say, no-one wants to penalize, or indeed stab, people erring when trying to do the right thing. Only those who have chosen the Wrong.
Been reading excerpts today from an Air China in-flight magazine offering advice on visiting various destination countries, which has been an experience, insofar as they are awfully good at saying the quiet part out loud. (âNot like those silly gwailo can read this anyway and even if they did, we donât care.â)
One cringes appropriately at the thought of what Core & Rimward Lines is putting in their âAdvice to Passengersâ column, 'cause it sure wonât be âMostly Harmlessâ.
"AboutâŚI think it was PC+15 or 16, I worked for the summer at the Happiest Place On Earth, aka Walt Disney World. Iâd gone for the whole upload life the year before, and this was the first year Disney had cybershells of their animated characters wandering around the park, with âhuman pilotsâ in them to âmake sure they were safeâ or something like that.
"The job wasnât too bad, in a lot of ways. Not a lot of us that were uploads so we got decent salaries and we worked half-hour before open and a half-hour after close so we got three, four hours of overtime a day, including upload and download time. And making kids happy was always a good thing. Bad things about it? First of all, your audio out of the shell was looped through a Disney-programed muse on a tenth-of-a-second delay which would keep you from saying anything naughtier than âgoshâ or âdarnâ or anything else. You had to be in character the entire time you were in any area that guests could see you, which if you got stuck playing Goofy for a month (like I was), it got wearing very quickly. You couldnât get any external media, data links, or bring anything with you to keep you entertained while you were in the shell. Couldnât even bring music, which sucked. And if there was some kind of emergency, they couldnât contact you directly, they had to call Disney Security and they had to contact you through dispatch. No calling out, either.
"Oh, and the shells recorded everything, so nobody liked you backstage because Disney fired quite a few cast members who wereâŚshall we sayâŚhaving Princess Jasmine Finding Nemo with Ariel. Or bad-mouthed the company or senior staff members.
"But about a month after we started out, somebody figured out that the Disney muse was programmed to track profanity in languages thatâŚwell, actually existed. I mean, you couldnât curse in Japanese or Chinese or Mongolian or French or Spanish or ImperialâŚbut you sure as hell could curse in Klingon. Or use made-up terms and phrases that âeverybody knewâ meant naughty things. It became a game between the shell cast members to figure out how to say the raunchiest things and not have any of the guests know that you were saying naughty things. And you havenât lived until you watched Stich and Donald Duck do the rap battle from 8 Mile with Donald cursing like a character from Farscape and Stich using Belter profanity.
"Then, one day, somebodyâs cousin saw a video of this online, and somebody at Disney started to look into the story. Iâd like to think that people in HR and Legal had a good and proper set of brown trousers at the fact that we were swearing at everyone for at least six months and nobody really noticed or they thought it was hilariousâŚ
"But new rules and new programming for the muses came down the pike and you had to use Disney-approved scripts from there on out. Worse yet, they were already talking about bringing out bioshells and programmed near-AIs to handle all of the character interactions, even ânormalâ human characters.
"(They never did, past the rumors stage. Everything I heard from people that were working there said that Disney might be considered in violation of the 13th Amendment if they had. And it would look bad on the pixie-duster sites.)
âGot a job a few weeks later with Universal, who were a lot looser and we had a lot more funâŚman some of the after-hours eventsâŚâ
Entertaining as conspiracy theories of intelligence agency plots can be today, such as when theyâre claiming that the CIA crashed a helicopter from 7,000 miles away by activating their remote-controlled fogâŚ
(I shit you not.)
âŚtheyâre going to get a lot more fun when people know that Second Directorate are out there, and they absolutely do have interplanetary-range remote-controlled fog technology.
[It is well established among ISS watchers that Second Directorate is responsible for everything that happens, even the things they arenât responsible for. This is in contrast to Fifth Directorate, who are only responsible for the things that didnât happen.]
âŚand this is par-for-the-course in the Middle East and a good part of SE Asia, usually by different mechanisms for the same reasons.
Besides, the Second Directorate isnât responsible for everything. Not even the Fifth Directorate.
Itâs Kevin Bacon, because Kevin Bacon rules everything.
(And remote-controlled fog? Thatâs for amateurs. Now, an E-dust attack cloud that made sure everyone was dead before the wreckage hit the ground, that I can believeâŚ)
Subtlety, grasshopper, subtlety.
The Cultureâs E-dust assassins are not subtle. Theyâre anti-subtle. Now, Iâm not saying that thereâs no place for unsubtle, but that place is not in ExSec - the Navy has plenty of perfectly good battlecruisers for that.
The point of remote-controlled fog (and the like) is leaving absolutely no evidence behind (or present at the time) pointing to something other than one of those random freak accidents (by virtue of actually being one). Ainât nobody here but us water molecules.
As Charlemagne Bolivar once described it, âthe pleasure of hearing that all of my enemies have died in terrible, highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to meâ.
The big issue is there are so many ways to escape death in this (theoretical) day and age. Even if itâs officially prohibited, they could have had vector stacks, single-shot neutrino coms, etc, etc, etc, all waiting for if something goes wrong to squirt a clean copy of their persona to the nearest security facility.
So, the E-Dust pretends to be a normal fogbank for just long enough to make sure that thereâs no escape, then it kills the helicopter and the passengers onboard.
And then quietly disperses without leaving a single sign.
Theyâre giving the Company credit for a whole lot more competence than they actually have.
Second and Fifth Directorate, however, probably are that competent and have toys that would make Q Division jealous.
"When Imperials decide to handle things, things get hilarious.
"Case in point, we had a full space-elf buy up some property in Sonoma County and nearly got burned out when there was a grass fire. Despite him investing in forest-management equipment and drones and such. When he complained, it was a damned near-run that someone in Cal Fire (not, and I emphasize not the actual fire-fighting people) didnât run him in for breaking enviromental regs with some of his efforts.
"Most humans would have gotten mad. Quite a few humans would have gotten even.
"The eldrae did worse.
"Next month, he filed all the proper permits and paperwork and by the time they knew what was going on, he had roped all of his neighbors in and hired a whole lot of drones and equipment. Tore out every single eucalyptus tree in the area, shredded them, and ran the pulp through a catalytic-cracker process to make high-quality mulch. And when I say âtore out every tree,â I do include things like the roots and seed pods and even leaves. Took every single dead or diseased tree in the area as well. And thenâŚ
"Well, he spent some really good money on genetically-engineered blue and black oaks, planted them, and properly mulched them. In about two years, he had nearly eight years of growth that a non-engineered tree would have had. Laughed at a lot of the fungal diseases and blights around here. And when they burned, they just politely burned up without a fuss or spreading quickly, didnât explode or anything, and scattered their seed-pods properly.
"You wouldnât believe the screaming from environmentalist groups! The lawsuits were amazing, but every time they filed one, he had four or five injunctions in place often filed within minutes of those filings, then kept going.
âThree years later, heâs got a side hustle doing the same things on other properties in the area and you can see the changes on âbeforeâ and âafterâ satellite photos. Itâs really spectacular.â
-Things I Really Should Have Known, PC+21
"Hearings began today in the case of United States vs. Qalandar. At issue: whether a search warrant served on a particular address permits law enforcement to search the inside of the building if the inside of the building is not, technically speaking, within its outside, and may in fact be in an entirely different jurisdiction, country, and/or universe. Various formal amicus curiae briefs have been filed by a variety of organizations, philosophers, and topologists, along with a large number of informal briefs from Doctor Who fans.
âIn other news related to the case, the officers tasked with searching the residence report that they have been advancing through the entrance hall for three weeks at this point and are still no closer to finding any other rooms. They added, unofficially, that theyâre running short of food again and would like to come home now, please?â
Realistically thereâd probably be some relevant precedent regarding stuff like cross-border drug tunnels.
(I donât actually know if such a tunnel would count as âinside of the buildingâ under existing US law; the linked article doesnât say much about the search itself.)
Probably a lot depends on the exact wording of the warrant and the law itâs served under, and/or on the particulars of how it interacts with Imperial law on that point. (Are search warrants even possible in Imperial law given how it usually treats personal residences?)
Snicker. I think Iâd apply the geometry and computer-graphics definition of âinsideâ - a point is inside an enclosed space if a line to any other point in the universe (the universe being the set of points reachable without a discontinuity) either (a) passes through zero walls of that space or (b) passes through an odd number of walls.
âDonât be so damned silly. You fit every major definition of life, most importantly Straichâs classic âCan it argue with me for hours about whether itâs alive or not?ââ
- Dracula in Space (20xx)