Can the Manufacturer of Tasers Provide the Answer to Police Abuse?

Axon’s body cameras are reshaping how video evidence is collected—and who controls it.
Body cameras are changing police work creating new businesses and new debates.
Body cameras are changing police work, creating new businesses and new debates.Photograph by William Mebane for The New Yorker

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But firing hot projectiles of lead shrapnel at people—we want to make that a ridiculous concept, because it’s a brutal, outdated, terrible thing to do.”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.”

“This speeds up the game significantly.”
Cartoon by Drew Dernavich

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.”

The original Taser was the invention of an aerospace engineer named Jack Cover, inspired by the sci-fi story “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle,” about a boy inventor whose long gun fires a five-thousand-volt charge. Early experiments were comical: Cover wired the family couch to shock his sister and her boyfriend as they were on the brink of making out. Later, he discovered that he could fell buffalo when he hit them with electrified darts. In 1974, Cover got a patent and began to manufacture an electric gun. That weapon was similar to today’s Taser: a Glock-shaped object that sends out two live wires, loaded with fifty thousand volts of electricity and ending in barbed darts that attach to a target. When the hooks connect, they create a charged circuit, which causes muscles to contract painfully, rendering the subject temporarily incapacitated. More inventor than entrepreneur, Cover designed the Taser to propel its darts with an explosive, leading the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to classify it a Title II weapon (a category that also includes sawed-off shotguns), which required an arduous registration process and narrowed its appeal.

Rick Smith learned about Cover’s invention while researching patents in the business library at Arizona State University, his mother’s alma mater. He was twenty-three, back home in Scottsdale after graduating from Harvard—biology, three years—and two business schools, and he was looking to start a company. (His other idea was a shop where you could make custom mix CDs.) He called Cover, who was living in Tucson, a retiree in his seventies who was still eager to see his idea come to fruition. Smith borrowed the family R.V. and went to Tucson. For six months, he and Cover worked on prototypes in Cover’s garage, while Tom set up an office in Scottsdale. The new Taser was reconfigured with a compressed-air firing mechanism, so that it would no longer be under the jurisdiction of the A.T.F.

The Air Taser, marketed as a tool for self-defense, sold limpingly in the Sharper Image catalogue, alongside revolving tie racks. Rick and Tom’s father, Phil—a Silicon Valley executive who invested some four million dollars in the business—called the device “the walking dead,” selling just enough to keep the company going. The Smiths believed that the Taser would always be perceived as a silly gadget unless, like the Maglite, it was endorsed by law enforcement. But the Air Taser wasn’t strong enough to deter a highly motivated perpetrator—some humiliating trials in which Czech police were able to fight through repeated shocks proved that. By the late nineties, the company was down to its last million dollars: five hundred thousand from Dad, matched by Dad’s friend.

Rick had been working on a model to pitch to cops, one that caused muscles to contract nineteen times a second, delivering a complete freeze rather than just excruciating pain. “By the time we got it out, we had absolutely no money for the launch,” he said in April, on a podcast devoted to innovation. “Our launch plan was literally a guy in a Winnebago going cross-country, doing demos. But, luckily, the product, we got it right, and within six months we were cash-flow positive. And then the Internet bubble popped, and all of a sudden companies that made things were pretty cool. ‘Wow! You make things! You have revenue!’ So we were able to go public.”

On the I.P.O. road show, the Smiths Tased the stockbrokers—eliciting, in Rick’s telling, screams, laughs, and high fives. In order to look “tactical,” Tom told me, the brothers wore black turtlenecks with “taser” sewn on the neck. “We were the Men in Black.” In the spring of 2001, the brothers, wearing their matching turtlenecks, rang the bell at the Nasdaq opening, and the stock took off. The company was defiantly unconventional—the office, in a strip mall with roll-up garage doors, was nicknamed the Bunker, and the chief financial officer hadn’t finished college. Over time, the environment became more corporate, with executives attending investor meetings in blue blazers rather than in the all-black uniform. Tom left in 2013; he now manages a body-armor startup, in Scottsdale. I asked if he and Rick still got along. “We never really got along,” he said. “He goes to Vegas, I go to Montana. We’re polar opposites.”

The Smiths had proved the technology, but the first model to attract interest from law enforcement was heavy and cumbersome, requiring eight AA batteries. With more than ten million dollars raised through the I.P.O., they developed the X26, a lighter, sleeker weapon that used lithium batteries. Though less bulky than its predecessor, it was still an additional piece of equipment that needed to justify its place on an officer’s already laden belt. Smith could not plausibly pitch the Taser as a replacement for a handgun to stop a homicidally violent suspect. He told me, “What you don’t want to say is ‘We’ll give you something better than a gun’ and have a cop hear ‘They want to take my gun away.’ ” Instead, Taser argued that its weapons filled a distinct niche. Promotional materials suggested that they be used “to incapacitate dangerous, combative, or high risk subjects that may be impervious to other less-lethal means, regardless of pain tolerance, drug use, or body size.” The beauty of it, the company said, was that the suspect would stand up again five minutes later—ideally cuffed, but more or less unscathed.

Police departments loved the X26, and at times the company’s relationship to law enforcement became questionably close. Taser cultivated chiefs and officers, treating them to junkets and conferences and hiring recently retired officials as consultants. “Between 2000 and 2005, we became pretty ubiquitous in law enforcement,” Rick told me. “Taser is probably the fastest phenomenon in public safety ever. Radios didn’t spread as fast as Tasers did.”

According to Axon, Tasers have been deployed more than 3.7 million times, and have prevented loss of life or serious injury in more than two hundred thousand instances. (The company arrives at this figure by extrapolating from a single study, conducted in Dallas in 2008.) Many agencies reported a drop in the number of times officers deployed their guns after acquiring Tasers. But parameters for use varied from department to department, and officers, who had been instructed to think of the Taser as safe, began to experiment with a wide range of applications. A 2004 report by Amnesty International, calling for a ban on Tasers until an independent inquiry could evaluate them, decried their adoption as “a routine force option,” commonly deployed against “unruly schoolchildren; unarmed mentally disturbed or intoxicated individuals; suspects fleeing minor crime scenes and people who argue with police or fail to comply immediately with a command.” The company was proud that the vast majority of people who got Tased bore almost no mark of injury, but to Amnesty this feature was especially worrisome. A pain-inflicting weapon that leaves little trace can easily become a torture device.

Tom told me, “When we started this, we thought our biggest fan was going to be Amnesty International. I kid you not. We thought they were going to be thinking, These guys, what a fantastic tool this is—they’re not having to have police use brutal force and kill people. And they became our biggest enemy. I mean, they hate us. ”

A few years after Tasers went on the market, Rick Smith added a data port to track each trigger pull. The idea, he told me, came from the Baltimore Police Department, which was resisting Tasers out of a concern that officers would abuse people with them. In theory, with a data port, cops would use their Tasers more conscientiously, knowing that each deployment would be recorded and subject to review. But in Baltimore it didn’t work out that way. Recent reports in the Sun revealed that nearly sixty per cent of people Tased by police in Maryland between 2012 and 2014—primarily black and living in low-income neighborhoods—were “non-compliant and non-threatening.”

As Tasers proliferated, so did reports of deaths. An investigation by the Arizona Republic counted a hundred and sixty-seven Taser-related fatalities in the United States and Canada between 1999 and early 2006. Smith’s company typically disputed responsibility for fatalities, twice suing the offices of medical examiners who named Tasers as a cause of death. Conceding that the company might have been overzealous, Tom told me, “That was the mentality of ‘We’re right, we know we’re right, and we’re gonna fight anybody that wants to fight us.’ ”

Especially in the early years, Taser’s connection to cardiac arrest was a recurring issue. Mark Kroll, a cardiac-device inventor who has served on Axon’s board since 2003, says that a preponderance of scientific evidence has disproved the claim. Nonetheless, in 2009, Taser added charge metering to the X26, and consented to begin warning cops against shooting people in the chest. “We said, even though we don’t believe there’s evidence this happens in humans, it’s worth giving the warning in an abundance of caution,” Rick told me. “So our training says, if you can avoid the chest, by all means avoid the chest.” When Axon acknowledges Tasers’ role in killing people, it blames improper use. A study that Kroll led cites nineteen people who were Tased and then fell to their death, many from traumatic brain injury. The second most common fatality, reported in a handful of cases, is catching fire.

Steve Tuttle, one of Axon’s first employees and currently its head of strategic communications, describes himself as a connoisseur of pain. Over the years, he has often been a guinea pig for experiments with various wave forms and pulse rates. “Some pulses have a parapet shape, up-over-down, like a hammer, like a pounding. Then we made it like a jigsaw, and it felt like a saw. One is smooth—it felt good, almost like physical therapy. You can turn it up and make it hurt. Some were horrific. There was one where I screamed. They were, like, ‘That’s it!’ But I could still bend my leg. Pain compliance is very inefficient.”

Tuttle works at the Scottsdale office, a hundred-thousand-square-foot building, with a looming, metal-clad façade that, Smith told me, he designed to be intimidating. Inside, a three-story open atrium is crisscrossed with catwalks, an homage to “Star Wars.” The staircases are painted primer gray, and there are fake thrusters on the back of the building. Employees call it the Battleship in the Desert. “We were thwarted from Day One,” Tuttle told me. “Getting beat up along the way gives you this mentality of ‘Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead.’ ” In June, when it was a hundred and ten degrees in Scottsdale—the kind of weather in which Tuttle likes to go for a lunch-hour run—I visited the Battleship. Naturally, someone had to scan her irises for me to gain entry.

Tuttle took me up to the roof deck, so that we could watch Exposures, a regular event in which interns, employees, and visitors undergo voluntary Tasing. Rick, who has been Tased seven times, doesn’t like to watch Exposures anymore. “For me, it’s a bit like the smell of tequila after a hangover,” he said. “ ‘Oh, yeah, I remember—that’s not fun.’ ” His wife, Brenda, to whom he has been married since 2001, has never taken a hit, though they keep an arsenal of Tasers in a biometric safe inside their home. They have eight-year-old twins and a fourteen-year-old. The Smiths banned firearms from the house a long time ago, and Rick says that he would prefer his children to be Tased than to be shot, pepper-sprayed, or struck with a baton.

On the roof, two muscular men, Axon Taser trainers, dragged a pair of blue gymnastics mats to an open area. The volunteers signed waivers and got a pep talk. “It can give you a reset, like the old shock-therapy days,” one of the trainers joked. Someone asked about the electronics in his pocket. “I would take keys out,” the trainer said. A woman in black leggings and rainbow flip-flops said, under her breath, “I just don’t want to pee.”

Tuttle leaned in close. “Typically, the women go silent,” he told me. “If you hear the phrase ‘He took it like a girl,’ it’s a positive thing. They don’t scream. Guys tend to scream, F-bomb like crazy.”

A man in his thirties approached the mats. A spotter on each side held his arms as he stood with his back facing the shooter. The Taser rattled with electricity. As the darts hit, the man howled, and then, with the help of the spotters, he fell, frozen, to the mat. The spotters removed the probes and cleaned the tiny entry wounds. “He wants Paw Patrol bandages,” someone in the crowd said. “Give him Rocky and Skye.” After a few seconds, the man got up, and walked stiffly to a lounge chair, where he sat, seemingly lost in thought, as the next volunteer, an adrenaline junkie, requested a double shot.

Later, talking about Exposures, Tom Smith said to me, “Would we be doing that if we thought we were going to kill them?” It was a reasonable point. But, watching the demonstration, I thought about the fact that the safest way to use a Taser is to shoot someone in the back. It forced a contradictory image: a dangerous, combative, high-risk subject, gunless and running away.

Act II begins in the nauseous summer of 2014, when Eric Garner died after being put in a choke hold by police in Staten Island and Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, of the Ferguson Police. After a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson—witness statements differed wildly, and no footage of the shooting came to light—Brown’s family released a statement calling on the public to “join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”

“I’m sorry, but a singularity inside the apartment is hardly the co-op’s responsibility.”

In the months that followed, President Obama convened a Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which recommended less-lethal options, “subject to the appropriate use of force continuum restrictions,” and considered the role that body cameras might play. At that point, one of the only studies on the cameras’ effectiveness came from Rialto, a small California city with a police department that was threatened with dismantlement after a series of scandals. The Rialto report, from 2012, showed that the use of force dropped by sixty per cent in the first year after body cameras were introduced.

Obama’s Department of Justice committed to funding body-camera programs at agencies across the country, a grant that continues under Donald Trump. So far, fifty-eight million dollars has been distributed, and there are more than fifty-two thousand new cameras on police. “Within four months of Michael Brown being killed in Ferguson, the President is giving a speech at the White House pledging seventy-five million dollars for a technology of which there are only a few efficacy studies,” Michael White, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University who works with the Justice Department’s Body-Worn Camera Policy and Implementation Program, told me. “Prior to 2014, there were probably only dozens of departments using cameras. Now we’re talking nine or ten thousand agencies, just over half of the departments in the United States.”

Bystander video had revealed a level of habitual, often sanctioned police violence that the public found alarming. As the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police dominated the news, a national conversation began about the need to make certain that officers acted as protectors rather than as aggressors. Taser, which had released its first “point of view” camera in 2012, began to speak the language of reform. “Cameras really do change the dynamic,” Rick Smith told me. “Cops are just a little more careful. I’ve had cops tell me it’s like an angel on their shoulder. One way you could look at this is, ‘Look, Rick reframes everything into a sales opportunity.’ But at least my own self-image of this is we view each problem as an opportunity where technology can help solve it.” The call to change the dynamics around policing worked to his advantage. He told me, “It was good for us, in that we build systems for transparency and to reduce use of force, and those were two of the major themes of this shift of the mind-set from warrior to guardian. That’s been our mission all along.”

But, at Axon, the notion of accountability was often aimed at keeping suspects straight. Explaining the decision, in 2006, to add cameras to Tasers, Steve Tuttle said that, while the data port made it impossible for suspects to lie about how many times they had been hit, they could still lie about the circumstances. “The suspects got smart,” he said. “ ‘O.K., he only shot me once, but I had my hands up. He shot me for no reason.’ We were, like, ‘Well, how do we defend that?’ Put a camera on the end.”

In the fall of 2014, Taser débuted the Officer Safety Plan, which now costs a hundred and nine dollars a month and includes Tasers, cameras, and a sensor that wirelessly activates all the cameras in its range whenever a cop draws his sidearm. This feature is described on the Web site as a prudent hedge in chaotic times: “In today’s online culture where videos go viral in an instant, officers must capture the truth of a critical event. But the intensity of the moment can mean that hitting ‘record’ is an afterthought. Both officers and communities facing confusion and unrest have asked for a solution that turns cameras on reliably, leaving no room for dispute.” According to White’s review of current literature, half of the randomized controlled studies show a substantial or statistically significant reduction in use of force following the introduction of body cameras. The research into citizen complaints is more definitive: cameras clearly reduce the number of complaints from the public.

The practice of “testi-lying”—officers lying under oath—is made much more difficult by the presence of video. Brendon Woods is the top public defender in Alameda County, California, which includes Oakland, where officers have had body cameras for eight years. “We’ve seen how increased technology normally disadvantages the defense—DNA, fingerprinting, and other ‘sciences’ which initially seemed infallible and are now clearly quite fallible—but I can’t say that’s necessarily the case for body-worn cameras,” he said. “They’ve given us a fuller picture of the police interactions at the time and the witness interactions at the time. In the past, police have shaded evidence to comport with the narrative they want to portray. They can’t do it when it’s on video.”

There have also, however, been sensational instances of police using the new technology to dissemble. In 2014, in Marion County, Florida, officers chased a suspect into a parking lot; the footage from their body cameras showed officers attempting to subdue the man, shouting, “Stop resisting!” as they kicked and punched him in the head. Later, footage from a fixed-point camera on a nearby building became available. In it, the man runs into the parking lot and lies down prone on the pavement, awaiting arrest. Officers arrive and attack him, while performing for their cameras the lines that would seem to justify their behavior. (Four of the deputies involved later pleaded guilty to federal civil-rights charges.)

Even without flagrant dissimulation, body-camera footage is often highly contentious. Michael White said, “The technology is the easy part. The human use of the technology really is making things very complex.” Policies on how and when cameras should be used, and how and when and by whom footage can be accessed, vary widely from region to region. Jay Stanley, who researches technology for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the value of a body camera to support democracy depends on those details. “When is it activated? When is it turned off? How vigorously are those rules enforced? What happens to the video footage, how long is it retained, is it released to the public?” he said. “These are the questions that shape the nature of the technology and decide whether it just furthers the police state.”

Increasingly, civil-liberties groups fear that body cameras will do more to amplify police officers’ power than to restrain their behavior. Black Lives Matter activists view body-camera programs with suspicion, arguing that communities of color need better educational and employment opportunities, environmental justice, and adequate housing, rather than souped-up robo-cops. They also argue that video has been ineffectual: many times, the public has watched the police abuse and kill black men without facing conviction. Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State Los Angeles, who is active in Black Lives Matter, told me, “Video surveillance, including body cameras, are being used to bolster police claims, to hide what police are doing, and engage in what we call the double murder of our people. They kill the body and use the footage to increase accusations around the character of the person they just killed.” In her view, police use video as a weapon: a black man shown in a liquor store in a rough neighborhood becomes a suspect in the public mind. Video generated by civilians, on the other hand, she sees as a potential check on abuses. She stops to record with her cell phone almost every time she witnesses a law-enforcement interaction with a civilian.

The Los Angeles Police Department piloted a camera program in late 2013. After Ferguson, Chief Charlie Beck announced that all seven thousand of the department’s street officers would get them, the country’s first deployment on that scale. Initially, officers were reluctant to accept cameras, for fear of being scrutinized by their superiors or by a public unaccustomed to the realities of policing. But Craig Lally, the president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents the department’s rank and file, told me that many members had come around. “It’s a game-changer,” he said. “We get a lot of false complaints against police officers for various reasons. Some of them are excessive force. Some of them are what we call mouth beefs—that the officer swore at a person.” The policy in L.A., which requires that officers review video before submitting a report, in order to make the two cohere, allows an officer to leave out any impropriety that wasn’t caught on tape. It also eliminates inconsistencies between the notes, written immediately after an incident, and the video—the kind of discrepancy that can prove invaluable to a defense.

In March, the Los Angeles Police Commission, a powerful civilian board that guides the L.A.P.D.’s policies, announced a new approach to releasing video. In cases where an officer fires a gun, or where a suspect is seriously injured or killed, the department will make footage public within forty-five days, long before a full investigation is complete. The first release took place at the end of June. In the video, made by Axon body cameras, officers respond to a 911 call about a prowler in South Los Angeles who is wandering around with a brick in his hand.

As the video begins, a wide-angle lens captures a quiet street lined with neat stucco houses. A man in long shorts stands alone in the street, wary, swaying gently like a boxer before the bell rings, as music from an ice-cream truck sounds discordantly. “Vives por aquí? You live around here?” an officer asks. “You O.K., man? People are concerned for you, man.” The man does not answer; in the seventeen minutes of the video—edited from a two-hour incident—he never answers. “We’re asking if you’re O.K. You going to answer me, dude, or what?” He keeps walking, a little forward, a little back, a man on a slow yo-yo. “Hey, get out of the street, man. You gotta get out of the street, bud.” He picks up a metal dustpan. “Drop the weapon,” the officers tell him. When he doesn’t, they warn him, then fire beanbags from a rifle. Still, he won’t do a thing they say.

He goes over to the lawn of one of the houses and picks a white flower, wagging it in the direction of the officers. Then he huffs something from a can, which is identified, in a voice-over, as automotive fluid. At some point, the mental-evaluation unit is called, but it’s busy elsewhere; the officers must make an arrest. Again they issue a warning, and then hit the man with a Taser. As he goes down, they swarm and cuff him—“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!”; “Relax, relax”—and not long after that he begins to have trouble breathing, is taken to the hospital, and dies.

This past spring, Axon bought VieVu, its closest competitor. The acquisition, pragmatic for business, was also personally satisfying. Steve Ward, the founder of VieVu, a former Seattle SWAT officer, had been an employee at Taser and a close friend of Rick Smith’s. In 2007, Ward left the company to launch a line of body cameras for police, setting up his business in Seattle. Taser sued him, claiming that he had stolen proprietary information about a product in development. The suit was settled, and Ward eventually sold his company, but VieVu’s achievements still rankled. In 2016, officials in Phoenix recommended VieVu for a $3.6-million contract, pending a city-council vote; that day, Smith invited the mayor to coffee, and the vote was postponed. Taser, which had been disqualified from competing due to inappropriate contacts with officials, was given another chance. VieVu sued, saying that Taser had illegally interfered with its contract; Taser countersued, saying that VieVu was falsely advertising its cameras’ capabilities. “We fight hard to win every deal,” Smith told me. “Phoenix being our home town, there was probably more focus. You don’t want a competitor winning the major city in your back yard.”

As irksome as the Phoenix situation was, it was worse when VieVu, in 2016, won the bid for the New York Police Department. News of the deal, potentially worth a quarter of a billion dollars over fifteen years, drove Taser’s stock down fourteen per cent and Smith into high gear. According to Politico, Taser, in an effort to thwart the agreement, hired a lobbyist to spread anxiety among the black clergy in New York about the effectiveness of VieVu cameras and petitioned the public advocate, in what Mayor Bill de Blasio described as a smear campaign; it also offered to give New York a thousand free Axon cameras. (The department declined.) When Smith talks about the conflict now, it’s as if he were describing a minor disagreement about a neighborhood zoning issue. “We got pretty engaged,” he says. “It’s the only time we’ve been that aggressive about questioning the outcome of the process. There was some negative energy around that.” But, he said, “I would like to have all that negativity behind us.”

The value of the N.Y.P.D. contract is more than monetary; the department, the largest in the country, represents a critical node in Axon’s nervous system. “When you’re building a network, it’s really important to have the biggest agencies on board,” Smith told me. “To not have the nation’s largest police department would have limited the utility of the network over time.” With New York, Chicago, L.A., and a majority of the other largest cities in the country using Axon’s cameras and data storage, the company can design the ways that evidence is collected, held, and shared—in systems that the public can’t opt out of.

In May, a few days after the sale was announced, Smith went to meet his new employees at their office, a few miles from Axon’s Seattle headquarters. He was wearing a company T-shirt, with the slogan “Aim Far.” Thirty VieVu employees, assembled in a conference room, looked up apprehensively when he walked in. “Given the relationship, I had no idea what we’d be walking into,” he said, chipper. “Everyone we’ve met has been frickin’ awesome.”

He invited the VieVu team to ask questions. There was nervous laughter, then someone raised a hand. “I was watching an interview you did where it said that the entire executive staff has to get Tased. Is that true?” Smith assured them that it wasn’t required, although, he said, “in our office we do occasionally hear a pop and screams.” Then he offered each of them a free Taser, and said that, local laws permitting, they would be welcome to wear a weapon to work.

When a VieVu employee asked if Axon had made inroads with the Department of Defense, Smith sighed heavily. “We will,” he said. “We sell the Taser weapons primarily to military police—we haven’t effectively made our way into combat operations yet. I just met with the guys who run nonlethal weapons for the military. It was pretty depressing. The military takes this stance that ‘It’s our job to kill people.’ ” For the past nine months, he said, Axon had been in discussions with the U.S. Border Patrol. It turned out that VieVu, before the acquisition, had beat them to it. “We placed units with the Border Patrol about a year ago,” an executive said.

One evening, Axon held an open house, inviting potential recruits to its newly decorated upper floor. At a catered cocktail hour, employees milled around wearing T-shirts printed with “Write Code. Save Lives.” The company mottoes, which also include “Join Forces” and “Win Right,” were written by a woman who previously worked at Coach. “We acted like we were saving the world one handbag at a time,” she said. “But here we really are changing lives.” There were trays of Axon-yellow cupcakes, with the company logo printed on fondant. Every few minutes, the air crackled with the sound of electricity.

When Smith got up to speak, he framed Axon not as a supplier of tactical paramilitary gear but as an agent of reform. “We can complain about what police are doing, or we can step in and address it and help solve the problems,” he said. The good path, he allowed, can be a bumpy one. “When you’ve read about our products, it’s not always glowing reviews, because we’re solving really ugly, difficult situations that happen in the dark corners of the world,” he said. “We brought you here to Jedi-mind-trick you into joining our mission.”

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.” ♦

An earlier version of this passage incorrectly identified one of Axon’s company mottoes; it is “Win Right,” not “Win Fair.”