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"FacebookPinterest\n\n\"A battleship in the desert.\" That's what the CEO told the architect he wanted. A battleship-shaped headquarters for Taser International, a monument to the company's titanic struggles. It was 2004, and questions about the Taser's safety had led Amnesty International to call for a ban. Rick Smith had founded the company with his brother, Tom, and his father, Phil, in 1993, and in little more than a decade had grown it from a backyard start-up to a public company worth $2 billion. Success had not come easily, though, and the trials never ceased. The company was a magnet for lawsuits and a cause for alarm among civil libertarians. The Smiths firmly believed that their nonlethal weapon was making the world a safer place\u2014and that in return they were being persecuted for it. Rick, the younger and more brooding of the brothers, remembers those dark days: \"We're saving lives, don't you get it? It kind of reminds me of Bruce Wayne in Batman, this sort of tragic thing where he's trying to stop the criminals but the media and the general public think he's a vigilante, a bad guy.\"\n\nScottsdale's zoning board nid the battleship plan, the Smiths say, so Rick built a high-tech fortress, a 100,000-square-foot steel-and-glass tribute to all that Taser stands for: protection, security, law and order. From the outside, the building looks like a cross between a samurai helmet and a medieval castle keep, dipped in silver and flanked by two immense glass wings. Inside is a soaring forty-foot atrium, a floor-to-ceiling scrim of chain mail, and a wall of flat-screens playing endless loops of CGI bad guys getting Tasered.\n\nThree stories up, the elder Smith brother paces a catwalk bridge. Tom is intense, and intense looking: all jaw and forehead, with narrow hazel eyes that seem barely to move. \"We wanted the catwalk where Luke Skywalker and Vader were fighting,\" he says.\n\nThe building contains Taser's factory, ecutive offices, research and development (a floating tinted-glass room called the Black Box), and Training Academy\u2014a high-tech classroom where law-enforcement officers from around the country learn to use the weapons and to marvel at Taser's on-site gadgetry. \"Retinal scanners!\" one exclaims; \"a soundproof room with no doors!\" says another, enthralled by the headquarters' overpowering aesthetic, a mash-up of Get Smart and 24, decked with Newspeak. taser: saving lives every day reads the atrium's looming banner, which features two giant, square-jawed heroes in SWAT gear, Tasers on their hips.\n\nThe next night, while flying his jet to Washington, D.C.\u2014in the morning he'll address an elite group of police officers at the FBI Academy\u2014Tom tells me that the building's sci-fi embellishments are less important than its glass facade, which symbolizes what he calls Taser's culture of \"openness\" and \"transparency.\"\n\nTom and Rick Smith have invited me to spend a week in their world, allowing unprecedented access to the company as they prepare to launch new products that could vastly expand their influence in American society. The products, called Axon and Protector, intend to take electronic surveillance to confounding new heights. Axon is a camera mounted on a cop's radio earpiece that can record video of all interactions with suspects and store them indefinitely on a database called Evidence.com. Protector is Big Brother on a BlackBerry, an overprotective parent's digital dream come true: a twenty-four-hour surveillance program that allows adults to monitor and control kids' cell phones, driving, and whereabouts. Both products promise safety at some expense to privacy and civil liberties. As if to preempt the inevitable criticisms, the Smith brothers seem eager to show that they have nothing to hide.\n\nOn our five-hour cross-country flight, Tom repeatedly affirms his own transparency, and I can't help but push back a little. What wowed those pie-eyed policemen back in Scottsdale was not openness but state-of-the-art stealth, a quality that complicates Tom's claims of transparency.\n\n\"We have a certain customer,\" he says.\n\n\"It's Disneyland for cops,\" I say.\n\nTom chuckles. \"Basically,\" he says.\n\nPatty Smith was scared. She may have seemed like the kind of person who had nothing to worry about: living in a mansion in Scottsdale where, most days, the sound of sprinklers turning on and off was the only disturbance of the peace. But in 1991, when two of Rick's former high school football teammates were shot in a road-rage incident, Patty began feeling vulnerable. Her husband, Phil, a West Point grad and Silicon Valley CEO, commuted to his job in California, where he worked all week; Rick, who'd graduated from Harvard in three years, was now in Belgium studying for his MBA; Tom was on the corporate ladder at Arthur Andersen. When Patty told the Smith men she wanted to take up self-defense, they tried to help\u2014they bought her pepper spray, a gun, a pair of Dobermans\u2014but it seemed like nothing could make her feel safe again.\n\nRick, remembering a scene in the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer, suggested a Taser. In the mid-1970s, Jack Cover, an Apollo-mission scientist, had built and sold the TF-76 TASER (an acronym for Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle, after a favorite book from boyhood), but a fatal flaw limited its market prospects. Because the weapon fired with gunpowder, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms classified it on a par with real firearms, making it hell to get a permit for. Hence, no Taser for Patty. Rick thought there was something off about a world where it was as easy to buy a .44 Magnum as a Taser\u2014as easy to buy a weapon that would kill as one that would merely hurt. So he set out to right that wrong.\n\nThen 23, Rick moved back to Arizona and tracked down Jack Cover, who was living in a little house in Tucson and barely squeaking by. Rick persuaded Cover that they should go into business together, then borrowed his parents' camper and parked it behind Cover's house. Using parts they bought at Ace Hardware, the two spent a couple of months perfecting a prototype\u2014a Taser that used compressed air rather than gunpowder to fire its electrified metal hooks.\n\nSoon Tom left his job at Andersen to pitch in, Phil took the helm as chairman (and invested much of his personal wealth in the business), and the Smiths commenced eight years of frustration courting the mass consumer market. The first Air Taser\u2014$249 at The Sharper Image\u2014looked like a high-priced novelty item. So did the company's other early offerings: peephole kits and the Auto Taser, an electrified version of The Club that shocked would-be car thieves. (\"You can't kill 'em,\" the ads said, \"but now you can grill 'em.\") Sales were abysmal. The family business turned into such a money pit that at one point Patty actually stopped speaking to her sons.\n\nPatent issues prevented sales to domestic police until 1998, but at that point the weapon was still so weak that cops were skeptical, and the Smiths' sales demos regularly devolved into humiliating scenes. When Rick asked for a volunteer to take a hit at a Use of Force conference in Texas, a muscle-bound, mustachioed man named Hans Marrero stepped forward. Rick pulled the trigger, the darts hit their mark, and according to company lore, Hans calmly said, \"Sir, this is very painful, sir. Most people would be on the ground right now,\" as 200 Texas cops burst out laughing.\n\nOver a beer that night, Marrero, a Marine gunnery sergeant and former chief instructor of hand-to-hand combat at Parris Island, told the Smiths, \"I've been training to become a warrior since I was 3. I was beaten with bamboo sticks.\" They told Hans they wanted to make a Taser that could take anyone down. Hans offered to be their guinea pig. A few months later, the Smiths filmed a promotional video in which a shirtless Marrero, in short gym shorts (with on-screen text that read \"Hans is considered to be one of the TOUGHEST men alive\"), gets zapped by the new Advanced Taser M26. That day, Rick recalls, Hans said, \"Sir, I want to work for you. This could change the world. You've made it so warriors don't have to kill people.\" Taser sent that video to law-enforcement agencies around the country as a preview of its road show, which followed a simple formula: In every town, Hans and the Smith brothers went to the police department and threw down the gauntlet. \"Bring us your stud,\" they'd say, and invite the whole squad to witness a spectacle of manly strength laid low. Hans would fire his Taser at the local alpha dog, who would writhe and whimper on the floor.\n\nThen Rick and Tom would start writing out orders.\n\nNow that they'd refined their weapon, they promoted it energetically, with boasts whose legality would be investigated by the Arizona attorney general. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the company's safety claims, and Taser took heat in the press for giving stock options to cops who helped persuade their squads to Taser up. Though frequently embattled by controversy, the Smiths have never been charged with a crime, and they have steadfastly maintained their innocence of any deception or wrongdoing.\n\nSeptember 11 was Taser's lucky day. In a country newly obsessed with security, police orders steadily increased. The Smiths made a key friend in former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who, long before he went to prison (for eight felony charges, including criminal conspiracy and tax fraud), sat on Taser's board. Today, officers of 15,000 law-enforcement agencies around the world carry Tasers, which range in price from $799 to $1,599. Replacement cartridges cost around thirty bucks a pop. (Some police de\u00ADpartments use similar weapons made by Stinger Systems, but Taser controls over 95 percent of the world's market in electronic control devices, or ECDs.) Every three minutes, somewhere in the world, a law-enforcement officer fires a Taser, inflicting devastating pain without, in the vast majority of cases, any permanent physical injury.\n\n\"Dog Tasered\"\u2026\"Sex Predator Gets Tasered\"\u2026 \"Racist Cop Tasers Young Black Male to Death\"\u2026 Online videos depict victims of almost every conceivable constituency, and many of the clips have become monster hits. The most famous (which Tom refers to as the company's \"coup de gr\u00E2ce\" and has been viewed more than 6 million times) was filmed in 2007 at the University of Florida, when a student screamed, \"Don't tase me, bro!\" while being forcibly removed from an auditorium where John Kerry was speaking. Two months later, the New Oord American Dictionary chose the verb tase as its runner-up Word of the Year. On TV (24, Lost, South Park, House, CSI) and in movies (Con Air, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Meet the Fockers, Snakes on a Plane), Tasers have become a fixture of pop culture, especially in comedy, where the Taser is an easy, all-purpose sight gag: cartoon violence for real people. In the most memorable scene in last year's top-grossing comedy, The Hangover, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis get tased by grade-school kids egged on by a meathead cop who shouts, \"Right in the nuts!\" and \"In the face! IN THE FACE!\"\n\nWhen Rick saw the scene, he cringed.\n\nTom wasn't bothered. \"It was hilarious,\" he says. \"Why fight it?\"\n\nThe pigs got coke. The sheep got meth.\n\nThe animals were stand-ins for drug-addled perps in safety studies funded by Taser International. Many people who have died after being tased were high on cocaine or crystal methamphetamine. Among the pigs that got tased, researchers found that cocaine actually seemed to reduce the likelihood of ventricular fibrillation, a precursor to cardiac arrest. The meth-addled sheep also fared well. When they got tased, none of the sixteen ovine subjects (all of which were anesthetized during the experiment) showed signs of ventricular fibrillation. Not all of Taser's safety studies involve illegal drugs: In one, five 50-pound dogs (also anesthetized) were tased 236 times each. None suffered cardiac arrest.\n\nSo far, Taser has spent more than $5 million on safety studies. In the fourth quarter of last year alone, seven papers published in peer-reviewed medical journals reported findings of Taser-funded experiments, all of which suggest that it's extremely difficult to cause physical damage with the weapons.\n\nYet the fact remains that of the more than 1 million humans who have been tased, more than 400 have died\u2014possibly as a result. The weapon's culpability in those deaths remains bitterly debated and as yet undetermined. Coroners have found the weapon responsible for only a tiny fraction of these deaths, but a continuous barrage of lawsuits have alleged product liability by Taser International or excessive use of force by police using Tasers. Almost all of these suits have been settled or dismissed, and Taser has kept redesigning its weapons\u2014adding \"accountability features\" such as a data port that records the time, date, and duration of every trigger squeeze\u2014to discourage inappropriate use as well as lawsuits.\n\n\"Sometimes people concentrate on the plane crashes and forget about all the planes that take off and land safely,\" says Steve Tuttle, a longtime Taser vice president who, as head of \"stratcom\u2014that's strategic communications,\" tends to Ta\u00ADser's image. The plane-crash line is an in-house aphorism\u2014Rick, Tom, and one of their regional sales managers all say the same thing\u2014but it's a valid point. A clear majority of independent medical studies show that Tasers are safe for use on healthy people. But not everyone is healthy. People who die proximate to being Tasered tend to be extremely thin or overweight, drunk or on drugs, highly physically agitated, or some combination thereof. Even for those people, says Taser chief counsel Doug Klint, the weapon is no more likely to cause death than taking Tylenol is. Moreover, Taser's animal studies suggest that the weapons pose infinitesimal risk. Nevertheless, it takes a leap of faith to apply those findings to humans, and it would be unethical to re-create in labs the conditions of actual deaths that have followed Taser exposures.\n\nTaser has consistently and aggressively challenged those who disagree with the company's decrees regarding safety. When medical examiners list a Taser as a cause of death, the company has often responded that the true cause of death is \"excited delirium\"\u2014a term that is not recognized by the World Health Organization or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but that some doctors have used to explain situations in which drug use, psychosis, or ill health triggers a shutdown of critical functions during struggles with police. The company has even gone so far as to sue coroners who list the Taser as a cause of death in autopsy reports. Jeffrey Jentzen, former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, characterized the company's actions as \"dangerously close to intimidation\" when Taser lawyers succeeded in reversing the judgments of an Ohio coroner. Recently the company tried to put similar pressure on the government of British Columbia, petitioning the province's Supreme Court to throw out the findings of an extensive independent study that concluded the weapons could kill, and accusing a lawyer and a doctor involved in the study of bias and dishonesty. A lawyer for the B.C. attorney general's ministry called Taser's legal stratagems \"offensive and abusive.\" The court has agreed to review the study's findings but concluded that Ta\u00ADser's allegations against the experts were \"scandalous and vexatious\" and ordered Taser to pay part of the men's legal costs.\n\nLast October, Taser issued a rare product warning that, when possible, the weapon should not be fired at a person's chest. The Smiths say this statement was a matter of liability management, not an admission of risk. A Pasadena, California, attorney named John Burton, though, sees the change in policy as an implicit confession. In a Santa Cruz, California, courtroom in August, Taser will face a jury for the first time as the sole defendant in a personal-injury trial. Burton will represent Steve Butler, a 48-year-old California man who went into cardiac arrest and suffered permanent brain damage after receiving eighteen seconds of exposure to a Taser fl6 when, while drunk, he refused to get off a bus. (Taser says Butler had a preexisting heart condition.)\n\nBurton's argument is that Taser lied to police about its weapons' safety. In a plain\u00ADtiff's memorandum, Burton claims that Taser \"deliberately placed profits before safety by concealing and misrepresenting the cardiac risks\" of the Taser fl6. The memorandum cites documents suggesting that Taser knew its weapons could cause ventricular arrhythmia, which can lead to cardiac arrest, but withheld this information from its customers and issued \"fraudulent TASER training materials\" to police that claimed \"the Taser fl6 was tested extensively on human volunteers\" and that instructed users that it was safe to fire at the chest. Even Patrick Tchou, a cardiologist who performed one of the key safety studies for Taser, is quoted in a court document as having written that \"at the minimum, we cannot categorically say that [inducing ventricular arrhythmia] is not possible.\"\n\nOne night over dinner in Scottsdale, Rick makes a surprising admission. \"Can electricity from the Taser cause ventricular fibrillation? Can it cause cardiac arrest in a person? We can't say no,\" he says, \"but I think the risk is so low as opposed to all the other causes\u2014stresses, drugs, and whatever else.\" If that's what Rick Smith believes, he has yet to brief the rest of his company on his new position. Taser's instructions for policemen still admit no such possibility. At headquarters, I took the company's class that qualifies cops to teach their departments how to use the weapons. For multiple-choice question number 18\u2014\n\nThe TASER\u2026affect[s] the:\n\n A) Motor nervous system only\n\n B) Sensory nervous system only\n\n C) Sensory and motor nervous systems\n\n D) Cardiac system\n\n\u2014the \"correct\" answer was C. When I asked one of my fellow students about that, he told me that the issue of Tasers causing any potential damage to the heart was \"a made-up thing.\"\n\nAs of its last SEC filing, Taser was a defendant in forty-four product-liability cases. There is no official tally of suits against law-enforcement agencies involving Tasers, but news reports this year have mentioned at least nineteen, and almost every week brings more.\n\nIf business intelligence is measured by the ability to turn liabilities into assets, then Rick and Tom Smith may be geniuses.\n\nTaser is currently in beta testing for a new product that could solve the legal problems that the company's other products helped create: Axon, the mini\u00ADcamera that can record every interaction between cops and civilians, is being pitched to police departments as the ultimate accountability feature. If everything's on-camera, the logic goes, nobody can lie about what happened, and everyone on both sides of the badge will be held accountable for his actions. Last year in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Axon's first real-world test culminated in a case that emplified the product's value. An officer who responded to a domestic-violence call shot and killed the husband of the woman who'd phoned in the complaint. The man's family later said the shooting was unjustified, but Axon video clearly showed the officer was in the right. The husband aimed a gun at the cop and refused, nine times, to drop his weapon. An investigation that could have dragged on for months was quickly resolved, and the prosecuting attorney deemed Axon a \"quantum leap\" forward in crime investigation.\n\nIt's also a giant leap forward in risk management. Though most cops don't like doing their jobs on-camera, a lot of them will sign up for Axon for the same reason they assented to the now common dashboard cams: fear of getting sued or accused of wrongdoing.\n\nAnother new product, Protector, a \"family safety platform,\" aims to bring a similar notion of accountability to the home. Beginning in August, for as little as $9.95 per month, Protector will make technological surveillance an everyday fact of private life, transforming a teenager's cell phone into a tracking device that can send parents a constant stream of information about what their child is doing, where, and with whom. To demonstrate Protector, Tom Smith and Steve Tuttle guide me to the office of the man who designed it, Dan Kennedy. In front of a life-size statue of Han Solo (frozen in carbonite to be delivered to Jabba the Hutt), Kennedy shows me the prototype.\n\nProtector offers parents something like omniscience regarding their offspring's lives and almost omnipotent control of kids' digital habits. To stop distracted driving, Protector can shut down a teenager's phone when she gets in the car\u2014or allow only 911 calls, or calls home, or hands-free calls. To combat \"sexting,\" Protector reviews all text and images that pass through your kid's phone for sexual content\u2014and to \"prevent the [kid] from being an idiot,\" as Tuttle puts it, diverts any offending material directly to you. Protector's pattern-recognition software can \"look for everything from contrast level to skin tones. We'll tell you if this is a nipple; then we'll push that to a parent,\" Kennedy says, though he admits the program does send some false alarms. \"It has a problem with beards,\" he says.\n\nProtector, which Taser recommends for parents of children ages 8 to 18, also gives parents an edge in some time-honored battles between generations. You can establish an approved geographic \"zone\" where young Johnny is allowed to travel, receive alerts when he approaches its perimeter, or check his exact location on a map that tracks his movements. You can set up his car to allow virtual backseat driving, sending you \"acceleration warnings, drifting warnings, or weaving alerts.\" You can create an approved-call list or block certain numbers (helpful for tidying messy breakups). You can record your child's calls or monitor, interrupt, or even terminate calls in progress. Or program the phone to shut down at curfew, or during the school day, or during dinner (\"One-click Family Time\").\n\n\"Now, that's a pretty Big Brother way of doing things,\" Kennedy grants. \"But for a little kid, very appropriate. For an 18-year-old, you get into a really uncomfortable overparenting situation. A lot of people, when they first see this product, they go, 'Oh, brought to you by the people who want to electrocute you.' But it can be right-sized for your parenting system.\"\n\nTom points out that Protector is not spyware; the application and all the settings a parent makes are always fully visible on a kid's phone.\n\nThe Smiths allow that Protector will enable some parents to raise vile traditions such as diary reading to whole new levels. They say Protector's infringements of privacy, and its potential to create misunderstandings between parents and kids (a \"weaving alert\" might mean Suzy's driving drunk, or it might mean she swerved to miss a deer), are trumped by its promise to prevent the worst possible outcomes of texting-and-driving or of trading naked pictures online. \"We're providing a new capability that can absolutely save lives. Does this infringe on privacy? Absolutely,\" Rick says with a laugh. \"Parenting in itself is the ultimate infringement on privacy. The prisons are full of people whose parents didn't infringe on their privacy.\"\n\nThe Smiths believe Protector is the logical next step in pursuing the company's mission: \"Protect Life and Protect Truth.\" Protector and Axon also represent a major shift for the company, diversifying Taser's products by creating a complete circuit of safety-information services. One of Protector's most amazing, if disconcerting, features is that it wires families directly to the police. \"If something happens to your kid,\" Tom says, you can press Protector's \"emergency\" button and instantly upload all records of her communications and whereabouts to law enforcement via Evidence.com, the Taser-owned database where Axon video is stored\u2014which will also accept crime tips. If you see a suspicious white van parked across from the school playground, snap a picture and upload it to Evidence.com, where it will be geo-tagged and stored so that later, if children start disappearing from the area, cops can get a jump on the case.\n\nIn one of the first advertisements for Protector, a fat, bearded, shirtless guy with tattoos of bats on his hairy man-boobs appears next to the phrase Meet your kid's new texting buddy. That message, the new information pipeline between families and police, and the \"emergency\" button that triggers it symbolize the basic currency of Protector and of the company as a whole. Rick and Tom Smith don't just sell protection; they also traffic in fear. It was fear that first inspired the brothers, and now, with Axon and Protector, they're allaying fear with one hand and inflaming it with the other.\n\nIf the new products take off, it probably won't be long before the information pipeline between Protector and Evidence .com saves a kid's life. It's almost as likely that some parent will press the \"emergency\" button and implicate her own kid for doing something illegal, or that an innocent sap in the wrong white van will get ensnared in some interstate Amber Alert. Kids who once learned lessons by trial and error, by losing their parents' trust and working to regain it, will instead be subject to rules enforced with microchips. Sam Walker, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, an expert on police accountability, sees Protector's linkage between families and law enforcement as a dangerous innovation. With Protector, he says, Taser is \"playing upon people's fears, selling them some expensive technology that offers the hope of solving their problems, controlling their kids, when in fact raising children is difficult work. And it's human work. A piece of technology is not going to solve the problem for you.\" Protector will inevitably fail at some point (smart kids will figure out how to slip a nipple past the censor), and there will be human errors, frivolous complaints, and abuses of the technology. And each new problem will create more legal exposure for Taser International. Fear and protection are as tricky to balance as transparency and stealth.\n\nYet those polarities lie at the heart of a central riddle of our time\u2014what guarantees safety in an uncertain world?\u2014and the prize for solving that riddle could be a jackpot. The week Protector was announced, Taser stock jumped more than 22 percent.\n\n\"Sorry I gotta leave. I'm gonna go tase an 8-year-old,\" says the grinning policeman, shades on, loping out into the sunshine.\n\nTom's paying the Lakeland, Florida, police department a courtesy call, thanking them for being the first agency to order full deployment of the new Taser X3, which can fire three times without reloading. (Until now, Tasers have been single-shot.) \"From the muzzle-loader to the semi-auto,\" Tom says each time he's introduced to a policeman, almost every one of whom, on learning that Tom is Taser's chairman, does exactly the same thing: tries to say something funny about the weapon. A big hairy cop who looks like Tigger roars, \"I love poppin' people!\"\u2014and when Tom asks him how Tasers could be improved, Tigger answers, \"Just make 'em bigger!\" A second officer, avuncular and gray, appreciates how Taser YouTube videos lighten the mood in a college class he teaches\u2014\"So funny\"\u2014then tells an awkward story about getting tased in training and freaking out because he thought he'd peed his pants.\n\nPolice tend to joke about Tasers in a way they would never joke about their other weapons. Tasers change law enforcement the same way drones change war, by expanding people's power to use force from a safe distance. \"Before the Taser, most police officers had no way to use force at a distance, except deadly force,\" says Rachel Harmon, an expert on legal regulation of the police who teaches at the University of Virginia Law School. Aside from the Taser, \"every other tool a patrol officer has for inflicting nondeadly force puts him at risk.\" A perp who feels no pain, who's drunk or is whacked-out on meth or cocaine, can fight right through pepper spray. He will keep swinging with one arm even if the other gets broken by a baton. Try to put a carotid hold on him and he could butt your head so hard you'd bite clean through your tongue. \"The incentive to accept those risks is pretty low,\" Harmon points out, \"and that's not about being a bad cop. That's about wanting to go home to your family. Tasers help that.\"\n\nWhen departments deploy Tasers, rates of injury to both officers and civilians tend to fall dramatically: an 80 percent drop in officer injuries in Orange County, Florida; an 82 percent drop in serious injuries to suspects in Austin, Texas. Cops say Tasers stop some conflicts from escalating to the point of deadly force, and though that's hypothetical, it seems likely to be true. Still, leading criminologists say there's no evidence that Tasers have reduced police use of deadly force, and there is some evidence that they have increased the amount of overall force. (In the year after the Phoenix Police Department began using Tasers, their use of firearms, batons, pepper spray, and physical force all decreased, but the total number of incidents involving police use of force went up 22 percent; officers used Tasers more than they used all other types of weapons combined.)\n\nBecause Tasers can allow officers to use force more safely, Harmon points out, \"they may sometimes use Tasers in situations in which they would otherwise work harder to avoid any use of force or use less force.\" Geoffrey P. Alpert, who wrote one of the standard textbooks on use of force, makes the point more directly: \"Because cops don't want to get their hands dirty, they just use electricity,\" he says. In a paper to be published this summer in the journal Police Quarterly, Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, and Roger Dunham, a sociologist at the University of Miami, suggest that having Ta\u00ADsers makes police vulnerable to what they call \"lazy-cop syndrome,\" where officers reach for their Tasers early in encounters with suspects and rely on the weapons too much. This, they speculate, may weaken their other conflict-resolution skills.\n\nTim Longo, the chief of police in Charlottesville, Virginia, voices similar concerns about the weapons, though he prefers the word complacent to lazy. When Charlottesville first got Tasers, he worried that officers might think, \"Why am I going to waste my time talking this guy down when in five seconds I could get his attention and it's all over?\" To avert that possibility, his department stepped up training in physical-arrest skills and verbal de-escalation of conflict.\n\nIf Tasers let police avoid risk by using force from a distance\u2014giving them the option to pop a perp where, Taser-less, they might have avoided force altogether\u2014the weapon can skew a cop's basic sense of the risk inherent in his job. In the worst possible scenario, suspects are made to pay the price for this sense of security, in the form of a unique and immobilizing kind of pain.\n\nI asked to take a hit, because I thought I couldn't write this story if I didn't. In the Taser Training Academy classroom, with a guy on either side to break my fall, a company instructor, Rick Guilbault, made the warning Taser teaches every cop to make before he fires: \"TASER TASER TASER!\" The cartridge explodes; the current clicks and then goes silent when the circuit completes, when two no. 8 fishhooks traveling at 160 feet per second, connected by copper wires to the weapon, pierce my butt and leg. I do not feel them hit me, but suddenly my body is rigid, falling, and no longer mine. Despite having resolved to take this as quietly as I can, I holler\u2014louder, louder\u2014wail and beg, saying Please stop, please please please please please, begging like I'm a baby. Like I'm a tube of toothpaste squeezed in a fist, but with the cap still on. I have to jump out of my body, but I'm trapped inside it. The pain of this entrapment isn't localized; it's general. It doesn't feel like something coming from outside me; it feels like the whole inside of me's been taken over. Being tased is less like being punched than like what I think it would be to be possessed. Its main effect is to erase freedom by devastating the brain's ability to control the body. Instantly I was not in charge of me, and there was nothing I could do about it.\n\nFive seconds later, it was over. I had two small bruises, and I was sore like I'd done a hard leg workout. Even under the best possible conditions, when you know it's coming, when people catch you when you fall, getting tased is a haunting head trip, and I would not wish this pain on anyone.\n\nEmpathy may have a role in curbing excessive Taser use. Anecdotally, Rick Guilbault says, \"agencies that either require officers to take an exposure or have a really high rate of guys volunteer\u2014they seem to have a lot less trouble with inappropriate use.\"\n\nA Taser is, however, still a thing that some cops are choosing to play with, and with disturbing frequency, as if it were a carnival game or horseplay. Earlier this year, a Collier County, Florida, deputy was reprimanded for shocking a female colleague on the rear end in what he later told investigators was \"a spur-of-the-moment thing.\" A remarkable number of reported cases of recreational tasing involve cops and children. In April, at a high school career fair in Lake County, Colorado, a sheriff's deputy tased thirty high school students one morning because they wanted to know what it felt like. In January in Illinois, several students alleged they were shocked by a cop whose visit to a Kankakee Junior High School class began with the question \"Who wants a Taser?\" Last year Sergeant Walter Schmidt in Carrabelle, Florida, made similar demonstrations during a \"Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day\" tour of the prison where he was employed. Another Florida officer was fired for tasing a 15-year-old at a birthday party.\n\nThough Taser employees refer to such abuse of the weapon as \"lawful but awful\" (another company catchphrase), Taser's founders appreciate the entertainment value of their signature product. When Tom Smith mans the Taser booth at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there is usually a line of people stretching far down the length of the convention hall, waiting for him to give them what he calls \"a ride.\"\n\nOn TV, smoke pours from where the plane crashed into the building. At the Lakeland airport, we see the breaking news from Austin, Texas, where a man with a grudge against the IRS made a kamikaze crash into their office building. Tom, shaking his head, says, \"You never know what somebody is thinking inside their own mind.\" Deadpan, he adds, \"Until we get the Vulcan mind meld.\"\n\nHe's kidding, but some of the company's actual plans for the near future do sound almost that far-fetched. For Axon 2.0, Taser plans to add license-plate-recognition software linked to augmented-reality displays on which cops can access criminal histories, warrants, and license information of every car they see. Next comes facial-recognition software, at which point \"every cop will be RoboCop,\" Steve Tuttle proudly predicts.\n\nRealizing such visions depends in part on Taser's continued success in navigating the legal minefield of liability, and for the battleship in the desert, there is no peace in sight. If Protector and Axon increase the company's legal exposure, litigation will demand increasing amounts of the Smiths' energy, especially given their open-door policy of providing strategic advice to police departments that get sued for incidents involving Tasers.\n\nAfter Lakeland, Tom flies on to Jacksonville, Florida, for a meeting with the police chief about a lawsuit. While he's driving us from the Jacksonville airport to a steak house for dinner, more breaking news comes on the radio: The next week, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda will testify before Congress, following explosive disclosures of his company's recent history of intentionally deceiving the public about safety.\n\n\"What?\" Tom blurts, aghast. \"Why would he do that? No good could come of that.\"\n\nToyoda will make a kind of samurai move, apologizing for the damage and suffering caused by his company, seemingly for honor's sake, with tears in his eyes. Right now, in the car, though, I'm as surprised by the announcement as Tom seems to be, and I ask what he thinks Toyoda might be thinking.\n\n\"Can you imagine any reason why he'd do that?\"\n\nTom doesn't answer. When I ask again, he answers quickly.\n\n\"Not a one.\"\n\nMichael Joseph Gross wrote \"Sextortion at Eisenhower High\" in the August 2009 issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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