- In the early 1990s,
two of my high school football teammates
were shot and killed in a road rage incident
in Scottsdale, Arizona.
And I just became passionately interested
in the gun violence problem.
I believe the way we really solve problems permanently
and deeply is through technological change.
In a society that has a lot of violent crime,
has a lot of public safety challenges,
what's happening with all of the anger
and pain around police force incidents,
I think there's clarity of need to drive that change
because gun control in the United States,
the political movement, has not made a significant impact
and I wanted to take a different approach.
What if we could make the bullet obsolete?
I was at a dinner once and somebody asked me this question,
"What do you believe that nobody else believes?"
And my answer after thinking about it
was, "I believe we're approaching the end of war
and the end of killing as an acceptable aspect
of human society."
Everybody looked at me like I had lost my mind.
- This is as Rick Smith.
He founded Axon and brought the TASER device
to market in 1993 as a firearm alternative.
- So the firearm is the primary defensive weapon
because of its reliability.
It is very effective at killing people.
Now, one of the problems
is the firearm is not only the tool of last resort,
it's also the tool of first resort.
Our vision long-term
is we want that firearm to start collecting dust
because we make non-lethal weapons that are so good,
people don't have to resort to using the pistol.
- Today, the TASER device is carried
by 70% of police officers in the United States,
but Rick would be the first to tell you
that they're not perfect
and they haven't replaced guns.
Not yet.
For police officers using force exists on this spectrum.
It's called the Use of Force Continuum
and it helps guide their actions in the field.
And most importantly, when they should use deadly force.
- So if you think of the Use of Force Continuum,
it is this relationship between the effectiveness
of a weapon and its injury rate.
If we plot this on a chart,
we would say, well, down in the lower corner
are those weapons that are low-injury
but they're also not all that effective.
Now we come up and we get into the next category
where things are more effective
but they have higher injury rates -
a baton strike or rubber bullets and beanbags.
And then as we move up further, we get into lethal weapons.
This relationship between injuries and effectiveness,
it's not some law of nature.
It's not immutable.
We are changing it.
We are creating weapons that are more effective
and don't cause more injuries.
We just got to keep doing that.
I want to get to a world
where the tool of first resort is not a gun.
We're about halfway there
but we still have work to do.
Our job's not done.
The good news is we've figured out the hard part
and that is the electrical effect
that can reliably stop anyone
in a laboratory.
- Get on the ground! Get on the ground!
- Thick clothing or poorly spaced probes
can make the TASER weapon less effective,
creating situations that put both civilians
and officers in danger.
- It is not as reliable in the real world yet
as a firearm.
The thing we haven't figured out yet
is: how do we get that effect onto the target
every single time through the clothing, reliably?
- But effectiveness
isn't the only concern people have about the TASER weapon.
- Now, I'm not telling you TASER energy weapons
are risk-free.
We've identified around 26 deaths
where the TASER clearly caused a death.
There's a lot more nuance to this. The risk of the TASER,
the electricity actually getting into the heart
and causing a sudden cardiac death is extremely low,
like less than one in a million.
And one thing we know,
if electricity does cause cardiac arrest,
it happens immediately.
So I can't tell you that the risk is zero.
It's, it's heartbreaking
when we do see an incident where somebody dies.
I mean, we got in to do this work
to prevent that from happening
- Out right now. Out of the car.
- A better TASER energy weapon could stop killing
but it won't prevent misconduct.
- Information can only make us smarter.
And that's why today when we launch new technologies,
we've created things
like an artificial intelligence ethics board,
or even more recently,
we created a community advisory board
with lots of representatives,
particularly of communities of color
that are sharing with us
what their concerns are about new police technology.
And the body camera
I think gives a sense of comfort that,
all right, there's going to be some oversight
and it's not just one person's word against the other.
If we understand those concerns, we can build in safeguards,
we can address it through training.
We can even change product features
to make our devices harder to abuse or use in the wrong way.
It's pretty obvious that a world
where people kill each other is an ugly thing.
It's a problem that's worth solving.
We're still motivated by wanting the world to be better.
This isn't just a wild dream.
I can see a pathway to get there.
I think a world without the TASER weapon
is one that is far more dangerous than the one we live in.
Thanks for watching this video.
If you liked it, share it with a friend and check out
Freethink.com for stories of people moving the world.