Rick Smith, who made a fortune selling conducted-energy weapons—stun guns—likes to say that he is a “techno-optimist.” Human beings create problems, technology solves them, and a few bold thinkers get phenomenally rich in the process. Forty-eight years old, with a coplike, jacked physique, Smith is a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Taser International, which supplies police departments with weapons that are less lethal than firearms. “A hundred years ago in New York, they had a major problem,” he said. “Horse manure was spreading disease. You can imagine if you’d gone around New York and told people who love their horses, ‘We’re going to take your horses away.’ There’s the same dynamic with Americans and guns. What happened a hundred years ago was that we had a technology shift.” He paused, dwelling for a fraction of a second on the implication that cars had saved the world. “Now, that introduced some other problems,” he continued breezily. “And hopefully now we have some new technology to solve the carbon problem.” Solutions that create problems in need of solutions: that, he told me, is the definition of business.
For twenty-five years, Smith said, his mission—rarely expressed, for fear of alienating customers and irritating the National Rifle Association—has been to make the bullet obsolete. “Today, would you keep a sword by your bed?” he asked me. “No! It’s ridiculous. But firing hot projectiles of lead shrapnel at people—we want to make that a ridiculous concept, because it’s a brutal, outdated, terrible thing to do.”
Critics argue that, in the wrong hands, Tasers can be equally brutal. Civil-liberties and anti-torture groups have long complained that police officers, rather than resorting to Tasers strictly as an alternative to deadly force, often use them in situations that would never warrant firing a gun. Two years ago, after police in North Carolina Tased a mentally ill man five times in two minutes while trying to pry him off a stop sign—he was pronounced dead at the hospital—the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that using a Taser against someone resisting arrest was “unconstitutionally excessive.” A recent Reuters investigation found that, since 1983, a thousand and five people had died in the United States in incidents that involved Tasers, as part of a “larger mosaic of force.”
Tasers are carried by some six hundred thousand law-enforcement officers around the world—a kind of market saturation that also presents a problem. “One of the challenges with Taser is: where do you go next, what’s Act II?” Smith said. “For us, luckily, Act II is cameras.” He began adding cameras to his company’s weapons in 2006, to defend against allegations of abuse, and in the process inadvertently opened a business line that may soon overshadow the Taser. In recent years, body cameras—the officer’s answer to bystander cell-phone video—have become ubiquitous, and Smith’s company, now worth four billion dollars, is their largest manufacturer, holding contracts with more than half the major police departments in the country.
The cameras have little intrinsic value, but the information they collect is worth a fortune to whoever can organize and safeguard it. Smith has what he calls an iPod/iTunes opportunity—a chance to pair a hardware business with an endlessly recurring and expanding data-storage subscription plan. In service of an intensifying surveillance state and the objectives of police as they battle the public for control of the story, Smith is building a network of electrical weapons, cameras, drones, and someday, possibly, robots, connected by a software platform called Evidence.com. In the process, he is trying to reposition his company in the public imagination, not as a dubious purveyor of stun guns but as a heroic seeker of truth.
A year ago, Smith changed Taser’s name to Axon Enterprise, referring to the conductive fibre of a nerve cell. Taser was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Smith lives; to transform into Axon, he opened an office in Seattle, hiring designers and engineers from Uber, Google, and Apple. When I met him at the Seattle office this spring, he wore a company T-shirt that read “Expect Candor” and a pair of leather sneakers in caution yellow, the same color as Axon’s logo: a delta symbol—for change—which also resembles the lens of a surveillance camera.
Axon occupies two floors of an office tower near Amazon’s headquarters. Two years ago, it was named Seattle’s “Geekiest Tech Office” by Geekwire, a technology-news site: its entry portal, inspired by the air lock in “Alien,” is scarred with fake battle marks, and the conference rooms have names like Hedy Lamarr and Ada Lovelace. There is a Ping-Pong table, bottomless La Croix. Accompanied by an Axon employee who scanned her irises at each doorway (“Thank you—you have been identified”), Smith and I headed for the “library,” a windowless sanctuary with green-shaded banker’s lamps and leather armchairs. He invited me to inspect the oil paintings, pastoral scenes with hidden futuristic details. His favorite is a robo-dog amid a pack of setters.
As we sat at a polished wooden table, Smith described the frustrations that police face in trying to manage the data they collect. “Many say they spend half their time typing away on a keyboard,” he said. “What we’ve realized is that these cameras could automate all the information flow of policing.” Axon employees sometimes call the platform Dropbox for Cops, because it allows a department to share video, statements, and other information with the district attorney, easing prosecution.
Already, Axon’s servers, at Microsoft, store nearly thirty petabytes of video—a quarter-million DVDs’ worth—and add approximately two petabytes each month. When body-camera footage is released—say, in the case of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man killed by police in Sacramento, or of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, this past fall—Axon’s logo is often visible in the upper-right corner of the screen. The company’s stock is up a hundred and thirty per cent since January. (Disclosure: I own approximately eighty-four dollars’ worth of Axon stock in a mutual fund.)
Axon’s products are designed to transform police work. Already, it is testing software, aided by artificial intelligence, that can automatically transcribe dialogue and collect identification information, capabilities that could one day obviate written reports. In the near future, its software may be able to search databases to create a detailed portrait of a suspect, including a Facebook-like network of his prior arrests, properties he is associated with, and people to whom he is connected. Smith said, “If we do our job right, police officers should be really engaged, and the tech should start to melt into the background, rather than intimidating in the foreground. That’s where you balance the sci-fi stuff with the world we want to live in. We don’t want to build the dystopian world.”
Since entering the cloud, Smith has recast his company’s proposition. “Our mission has expanded,” he said. “We are the tech company that’s going to make the world less violent.” When conflict is the precondition of the marketplace, the solution to violence promises to be long and lucrative. “We see an opportunity to build the public-safety nervous system,” Smith has said. He understands that this makes some people uneasy.
The video that George Holliday captured from his balcony, in the spring of 1991, showing Los Angeles Police Department officers attacking Rodney King, has been hailed as the first viral cop video and the birth of citizen journalism. It is a defining moment for black activism, and a significant one in Axon’s prehistory. In some frames of the video, a long, silvery thread is barely perceptible: wire from the precursor of the modern Taser. The L.A.P.D. was the first department in the country to use the devices, starting in the seventies. In a memoir, Officer Stacey C. Koon describes shooting King with two Tasers. When he tried to use one of them a second time, it failed: “it threw a new rush of voltage into Rodney King before the TASER expired.” At that point, the officers resorted to beating and kicking King into submission. Because of that, Tom Smith, Rick’s older brother and co-founder, says, “We had a reputation issue within law enforcement to overcome. As we brought Taser to law enforcement, they were, like, chuckling and laughing that it doesn’t work.”
Since entering the cloud, Smith has recast his company’s proposition. “Our mission has expanded,” he said. “We are the tech company that’s going to make the world less violent.” When conflict is the precondition of the marketplace, the solution to violence promises to be long and lucrative. “We see an opportunity to build the public-safety nervous system,” Smith has said. He understands that this makes some people uneasy.
The video that George Holliday captured from his balcony, in the spring of 1991, showing Los Angeles Police Department officers attacking Rodney King, has been hailed as the first viral cop video and the birth of citizen journalism. It is a defining moment for black activism, and a significant one in Axon’s prehistory. In some frames of the video, a long, silvery thread is barely perceptible: wire from the precursor of the modern Taser. The L.A.P.D. was the first department in the country to use the devices, starting in the seventies. In a memoir, Officer Stacey C. Koon describes shooting King with two Tasers. When he tried to use one of them a second time, it failed: “it threw a new rush of voltage into Rodney King before the TASER expired.” At that point, the officers resorted to beating and kicking King into submission. Because of that, Tom Smith, Rick’s older brother and co-founder, says, “We had a reputation issue within law enforcement to overcome. As we brought Taser to law enforcement, they were, like, chuckling and laughing that it doesn’t work.”
Since entering the cloud, Smith has recast his company’s proposition. “Our mission has expanded,” he said. “We are the tech company that’s going to make the world less violent.” When conflict is the precondition of the marketplace, the solution to violence promises to be long and lucrative. “We see an opportunity to build the public-safety nervous system,” Smith has said. He understands that this makes some people uneasy.
The video that George Holliday captured from his balcony, in the spring of 1991, showing Los Angeles Police Department officers attacking Rodney King, has been hailed as the first viral cop video and the birth of citizen journalism. It is a defining moment for black activism, and a significant one in Axon’s prehistory. In some frames of the video, a long, silvery thread is barely perceptible: wire from the precursor of the modern Taser. The L.A.P.D. was the first department in the country to use the devices, starting in the seventies. In a memoir, Officer Stacey C. Koon describes shooting King with two Tasers. When he tried to use one of them a second time, it failed: “it threw a new rush of voltage into Rodney King before the TASER expired.” At that point, the officers resorted to beating and kicking King into submission. Because of that, Tom Smith, Rick’s older brother and co-founder, says, “We had a reputation issue within law enforcement to overcome. As we brought Taser to law enforcement, they were, like, chuckling and laughing that it doesn’t work.”
Bringing in talented engineers is crucial to Smith’s vision. The public-safety nervous system that he is building runs on artificial intelligence, software that can process and analyze an ever-expanding trove of video evidence. The L.A.P.D. alone has already made some five million videos, and adds more than eleven thousand every day. At the moment, A.I. is used for redaction, and Axon technicians at a special facility in Scottsdale are using data from police departments to train the software to detect and blur license plates and faces.
Facial recognition, which techno-pessimists see as the advent of the Orwellian state, is not far behind. Recently, Smith assembled an A.I. Ethics Board, to help steer Axon’s decisions. (His lead A.I. researcher, recruited from Uber, told him that he wouldn’t be able to hire the best engineers without an ethics board.) Smith told me, “I don’t want to wake up like the guy Nobel, who spent his life making things that kill people, and then, at the end of his life, it’s, like, ‘O.K., I have to buy my way out of this.’ ”
Tracy Ann Kosa, a privacy researcher and a member of the ethics board, sees the potential of Axon’s technology to exacerbate power imbalances between the police and civilians. “The data belonging to the police department—that’s one of the big philosophical concerns I have,” she told me. “There are lots of ways to put controls around access to data, but the larger issue is that once you release that into the wild it is up to each department and each office and each government to figure out how they’re going to do it. That’s the place where we will see the explosion of any issues that already exist in the system, with much bigger consequences.” She told me that, at the first meeting of the board, “We did discuss this—who are we designing for? The end customer shouldn’t be law enforcement. It’s the larger population.” She went on, “There’s going to be a lot of disagreement between the board and the company, and that’s a good thing.”
Axon employees, like those at other companies trying to craft a responsible approach to A.I., talk about the importance of having a “human in the loop.” Who that human is matters a great deal. Regardless of the technology Smith introduces to police, the way that officers view their role will determine how the products function and what they come to mean.
In June, Axon hosted its annual conference, Accelerate, at a golf resort in Scottsdale: a lot of scalp, very little body fat, and never a long line for the ladies’ room. In its third year, Accelerate had grown to thirteen hundred client cops, including a few international agencies; London Metropolitan, which owns twenty-two thousand Axon body cameras, sent a team.
Smith cruised through the hotel basement, on his way to an “ideation session” led by an expert from Google. The room was full of police officers, trying to design a product to address a need they had decided on as a group: how to reassert the rule of law. (Other problems that made it to the whiteboard: “getting older,” “too much equipment,” “scentless mary jane.”) The Google expert handed out materials—rainbow-colored glitter pipe cleaners, Play-Doh, pompoms, construction paper—and the officers broke into teams to try to figure out how to get back some respect. A sergeant with the L.A.P.D. said to Smith, “You put a Taser on every policeman. Why can’t you make everyone love every policeman? We’re back to where we started, when everyone hated us in 1990. We need a hero. A way to become Superman.”
Smith stopped by a table where a team had come up with a hands-on way of reëstablishing authority: a modified wheelchair for transporting combative prisoners. A muscle-bound man with a shaved head explained that the chair could be loaded, backward, into a police car, using a system similar to that on a public bus. The suspect’s arms, legs, and feet would be bound to the chair, making it safer for the officer and more comfortable for the prisoner.
“Now, would this be every police car, or just one you call for when you have a bad dude?” Smith asked. It would depend on the size of the department, the officer said, adding that combative prisoners were becoming more and more common.
“Have you seen anything like this?” Smith asked. The officer had not. “Awesome,” Smith said. “That dog could run!”
The next day, Smith appeared onstage in a large ballroom, wearing a “Join Forces” T-shirt. This year, as the company celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, he has outed his covert mission—making the bullet obsolete—to the audience that has always meant the most to him. Within a decade, he told the crowd, Tasers will outperform handguns at close range. “We’re going to give you something so good you’re actually going to feel more comfortable using it, because it’ll drop the target faster,” he said. “And you won’t have to make a life-or-death decision in the dark when your adrenaline is pumping.” He said, “I’ve seen the technology that will get us there.”
Aglow in Axon-yellow light, Smith introduced the latest array of gadgets and features. The future, according to the vision he laid out, would be shaped by a police monopoly on video. A role player ran through the crowd, impersonating a perp; the cops were encouraged to snap a photo on their iPhones and upload it to Axon Citizen, a new offering designed to make bystander video accessible to the nervous system. At a signal from Smith, a drone flew in from stage right, filming the crowd. A live feed was visible on a large screen at his back: announcing Axon Air!
Smith argued for an ecosystem of devices and applications—networked, efficient, and tailored to law-enforcement needs. “As things become connected, they become intelligent and powerful,” he said. “It’s the processing of information, and there’s nothing more powerful in this world than nervous systems. It’s what’s led to all of human progress, our rising dominance on the planet.” He ended his remarks on a note of appeal. “We need your help,” he said. “We can build this stuff, if you tell us what to build.”
Source: New Yorker
Author: Dana Goodyear
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