Shock the money
An expose of not-so-shocking unreliability of Tasers
A police officer’s most important tool should be his or her people skills.
At least, that was the conclusion of a 1967 report by the federal government called “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society.” It argued that in officer training, “peacekeeping and service activities, which consume the majority of police time, receive too little attention.”
The report also suggested that law enforcement develop “a suitable nonlethal weapon,” according to Pittsburgh-based journalist Matt Stroud’s debut book, “Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing.” Training providers generally don’t make millions. Weapons providers do. So in the ensuing 50 years, guess which option transformed policing?
“Rather than investing, for example, in training to help cops manage stressful encounters with the mentally ill, police leaders spent the money on high-tech crime mapping tools, electroshock weapons and surveillance equipment,” Mr. Stroud writes. “In short, policing became an industry.”
The price tags of the shiny objects just begin to describe the cost, he suggests.
Mr. Stroud has reported for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The Verge, PublicSource and other publications. His work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, including a 2012 series on prison abuse allegations coauthored with this reviewer.
In “Thin Blue Lie,” Mr. Stroud leads us through a century of law enforcement technology, starting with the first crude systems for collecting crime data, and running through the latest cell-site simulators that can snap up the mobile phone numbers of whole crowds of peaceful protesters.
The book’s strength is its roster of memorable characters, none more intriguing than the trio that birthed the Taser.
Tinkerer and inventor Jack Cover saw the 1967 report’s call for nonlethal weapons, and flashed back to a book he’d read as a child, called “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.” He built and patented the Taser, selling the shocker to a few agencies.
It took a “Star Trek” fan named Patrick “Rick” Smith, though, to turn up the wattage and set the Taser to “stun” — perhaps. To ensure that he wasn’t setting it to “kill,” Mr. Smith turned to an electrical engineer named Wayne McDaniel, who specialized in defibrillation research.
Using a mix of press reports and original interviews, Mr. Stroud describes those tests. When a total of five dogs, sometimes hyped up on stimulants, survived a total of 192 Taser shocks, according to “Thin Blue Lie,” Mr. Smith was satisfied. “Let’s go ahead and ship it,” Mr. Smith said, according to Mr. McDaniel’s account to a reporter.
For Mr. Smith and a small handful of family members and other allies, the decision to ship would pay off big by 2004, when they sold $68 million of their stock in the company. But did Tasers save lives, by replacing police-involved shootings with unpleasant, but survivable, shocks?
“After studying 36,112 use-offorce incidents, University of Chicago researchers determined in 2018 that Tasers do not reduce police use of firearms in any significant way,” Mr. Stroud writes.
Meanwhile Tasers “played a role in the deaths of more than 1,000 people” and led to 232 judgments or settlements totaling $172 million paid by law enforcement agencies, he writes, citing press reports and accusations made in lawsuits. Some of the plaintiffs were the grieving families of unarmed people shocked in response to mental health episodes, Mr. Stroud writes.
If Tasers are still less lethal than firearms, they may also be less reliable, per “Thin Blue Lie.” The Los Angeles Police Department found that Tasers failed to incapacitate subjects nearly half of the time. More than half of the zappers rolled off the assembly line with defects, according to lawsuits. “Some Tasers purportedly failed to fire,” he writes. “Some failed to stop firing electricity when users released the trigger.”
Still, police departments love Tasers and other tech — perhaps in part because many officers and brass become salespeople for the manufacturers, Mr. Stroud suggests. For an example of that, he needed to look no further than his own reporting in Pittsburgh, describing the way a body camera company courted a police commander and secured a nobid contract.
Do body cameras, at least, increase accountability and discourage abuse? “When more than two thousand cops were outfitted with body cameras in Washington, D.C., there was no change in their use of force or the number of citizen complaints,” Mr. Stroud recounts.
In Pennsylvania, the body camera makers and their paid police allies successfully lobbied the state to put the footage out of reach of the public and journalists, Mr. Stroud reports.
Even a technology developed to demystify law enforcement encounters came to serve the police and profiteers — but not necessarily the public.