- Taser, taser, taser.
- Good.
- Our communities are faced with crisis—
and we have an opportunity to change the way police,
police in America.
- All right.
- Good job.
- Police officers lose their lives,
and community members lose their lives.
How do we prevent both from happening?
- Gun-related deaths between the police
and civilians are going up.
Axon believes their improved TASER weapon
can prevent fatal police-civilian encounters
where their past models have been ineffective or unreliable—
but no technology on its own can prevent these deaths.
- Axon, maker of great technology.
Police departments, elected officials,
and beloved community members
are gonna come together
and think about how we can end these tragedies.
- The goal is audacious:
A “moonshot” to cut gun deaths
between the police and the public by 50%
over the next 10 years.
This unique coalition of stakeholders, often at odds,
are coming together behind a plan built
around data, technology, training, and trust,
they believe just might work.
- Moonshot goal is something that
I so strongly believe in.
- I've gone to too many funerals.
I'm tired of the killing.
- Imagine if we collectively decided
that lives are so valuable, that we'll never take them—
that would have a chain reaction.
- We've come to TASERCON in Las Vegas,
where Axon is revealing to the public,
for the first time, their new TASER.
- I'd like to introduce the TASER 10.
- With an increased operating distance
and more shots per magazine,
Axon hopes that their new T10 just might be the game-changer
they've been talking about for years.
In 2021, more civilians were killed by police
than in any of the previous five years,
and more police officers were intentionally killed
than in any year since 1995.
Axon's Moonshot campaign is a public commitment
to dramatically reverse these trends.
- TASER 10 is a first, giant leap
in technology towards our Moonshot.
This is the workhorse that's gonna get us into lunar orbit.
We see three main elements to our Moonshot:
Tech, like the TASER 10, training, and then truth.
How can we use data
to understand the problems we need to solve?
- It's hard to believe,
but today no complete centralized database
of police-civilian fatalities exists.
The Moonshot campaign is building one,
and will make it available to the public.
- The best data today on officer-involved shootings comes
comes from the Washington Post,
and on officers killed in the line of duty,
comes from the Fraternal Order of Police.
We've actually partnered with the
Institute for Intergovernmental Research.
They're a think tank research house,
and we've actually funded them to go
out and survey a bunch of sources.
- We're getting all these partners around this goal.
We had to have a single source of truth,
where folks could see that the number was either going up
or down, and make it available to anybody.
- The goal isn't just to have a number,
but to understand what is influencing these situations.
And I think the more we dig in and get rigorous
about the data,
we're gonna know what problems to go solve.
- 'Get on the ground.'
- 'Today's the day.'
- 'Get on the ground.'
- Axon already gleans insights
from its own data collected by TASER weapons
and body-worn cameras in the field.
- We've seen over a thousand cases where police have tried
to use a taser, and it ends up going to lethal force.
- 'Drop...
- Drop the knife!'
- 'Drop your knife.
- Drop the...'
- These learnings influence the design
of new weapons, including the T10.
- When we think about, how do we reduce the number
of gun-related deaths between police and the public,
one of the main things that we can influence is the cause
of ineffective deployments of our previous
TASER energy weapons.
- Ineffective deployments are most often caused
by the current TASER weapons' limited,
effective operating distance,
a probe's failure to puncture through thick clothing,
or the inability to individually target those probes.
They also have a maximum of only two shots.
- With TASER 10, we now have ten probes,
so you have ten opportunities to be effective.
- Taser, taser, taser.
- Good.
- It's maximum range is 45 feet.
That's almost double the distance
of our existing weapons.
Creating that 45 feet makes that a lot safer for the officer
'cause they're able to put themselves
in more of a distance;
they could take cover if they need to.
- I like that at this distance I can miss,
and it's not the end of the world.
I don't have to worry about throwing
in a second cartridge or going to a different use of force.
- We are actively working towards ensuring
that we are shrinking the number
of situations where an officer may have to make a decision
between transitioning to a more lethal device.
- T10 does not matter, unless it reduces lethal,
officer-involved shootings.
- Two, three.
- Just to your knees.
- Relax - Right there, lift you up.
- All right.
- Nice job.
- Inside TASERCON, we are running what's called
a "Master Instructor Course."
That's how we train the trainers.
- The most transformative new technology we see
that can impact training is virtual reality.
VR has the ability to create highly scalable
and immersive experiences.
- TASER 10 integrates with Axon VR training.
What we're trying to do is ensure
that officers continue to build their skill set.
- Slide the whole unit kind of up and down your head.
- VR can give officers a chance to train
with their TASER weapons much more often
than they're currently able to in a live environment.
It could also give them the ability to rehearse interactions
with citizens in crisis.
- Someone going through a mental health crisis,
they're 16 times more likely to be involved
in a fatal encounter with police.
- We wanna make sure officers have an opportunity to train—
even if it's in a virtual environment—
on how to deescalate a situation, not just verbally
but also with the opportunities the TASER gives them.
- They're given an audible warning—
and then a thousand lumens of streaming light.
So as a deescalation piece, this is huge.
- Training, as well as policies,
are also needed to prevent abuse.
- It's really important to be clear about the difference
between users and tools, and the TASER is a tool.
We can bring the TASER to perfection,
but if the user has a different purpose
or intention for that tool, it can always be misused.
- You can't just train somebody once,
and expect them to last ten years.
You have to train and retrain
in order for it to be effective.
- Taser, taser, taser.
- Tech alone is never gonna solve any problem
that involves complex social dynamics.
It's gonna require technology, training, policy,
public acceptance, oversight.
- Good work, brother.
So unload for me.
Everything we've done
since you've picked T10 up, has been digitally recorded.
- That's awesome.
- Now you add a camera to that, suddenly we've got,
probably the most amazing witness you can ever want
that's gonna produce factual evidence.
- I know what it's like to lose a family member.
- My father was killed in the line of duty.
- My own brother was murdered.
- I lost a family member to gun-related violence
with the police.
- I had a couple friends that were shot and killed.
It's not like the movies,
where there's clear good guys and bad guys.
It really affects not only the people that are killed,
but the people that survive.
- [Director]: Why is it that a- like a for-profit business
is the one that’s leading what you would think might be a
public interest campaign or a political campaign?
- When you see a problem and you can wrap a business model
around it, that forces us to really think about
are we solving a problem that's so valuable,
somebody would pay for it?
When we work on a new product
to make a more effective TASER,
the police buy it;
that funds our R&D.
Today, we have 3,000 people working on this.
I could never have built a nonprofit at this scale.
Constructive capitalism actually can work.
We're trying to focus in on:
How can we stop these really awful things from happening?
- Hey, we're at the U.S. Conference of Mayors,
and next we're going to a research forum.
- Convening stakeholders, especially community members
and police departments, is a central tenet of
the Moonshot campaign.
- The goal is driving productive conversations
even with people that have
dramatically different viewpoints.
- [Director]: Do you think it’s possible for police
and communities to work together constructively
and productively on an issue like this?
- I think it's absolutely possible;
there have to be some concessions.
Everyone has to come together.
- Trust requires honesty, and is gonna take, really,
some cultural humility, where I have respect
for your culture and you have respect for mine—
and I have a willingness to learn about yours,
and you have a willingness to learn about mine.
Then we can take some real steps forward.
- Everyone has to be okay with change,
which is hard, but like things have to change.
- I am the product of a fallen officer, as a father.
He was a four-and-a-half-year officer, and he was 27.
This is not just about the lives in the community,
but it's equally about the lives of police officers.
No one is asking a police officer in this country
that if someone is firing a weapon, to then use a taser.
What we're saying:
that there are times when a weapon is not justified.
There's something else that can be used
because you're not sure whether it's a gun
or a cell phone in someone's hand.
There were oftentimes in my career
that we shot and/or killed individuals
who later we found were having an episode
from mental illness.
It is not easy to take a life.
To say that there's an alternative to using my firearm,
and taking someone's life is huge for officers.
They're human.
My life was turned upside down by loss,
and I want to make sure that no one else
has to experience that kind of pain and that kind of loss.
- Be number five, you be number six please.
Doors closed.
Hey, range hot, range hot.
We still need to make sure that it works.
- Range is cold.