Previously on Taser Incorporated.
I want to start by addressing a couple of questions we've been receiving over email. The first one is our chest hits with the Taser dangerous and the answer to that is definitively no.
The company was formed in order to do something favorable for law enforcement. Right, We're going to give you a device that won't kill people, and it ends up killing people. So now what they do is they put the onus on the officers.
My understanding that any shot is acceptable, it's preferred to try to aim for lower center mass.
Show me where it says any shot is acceptable.
In this bulletin, it says when possible and also says preferred to indicate any area.
So it doesn't say it's acceptable, doesn't it. It was much easier to pen it all on Runnels and say he shouldn't have shot the kid and held the trigger down for twenty four seconds, which is all true.
Do you feel like they got away with it a little bit? Oh? Yeah, by design?
Yeah, he got what it really.
I went to talk with the Masters family late last year. I wanted to understand how Matt's still a cop after everything he's been through during Bryce's trial, he told me that he was done, but it's been seven years and he hasn't quit.
My perspective changed definitely, Like and I tell people at the time, you don't get a free pass anymore just because you're a cop. Obviously, when I first got on the department, I would consider it a good old boy club, you know. I mean, cops took care of each other, They took care of each other's families. And I really stopped doing that after this happened to Bryce.
Now he works as a detective in the narcotics unit, and he says he thinks a lot more than he used to about the people he's investigating.
I mean, I'm very careful to keep the case, you know, going in the right direction, but I'm also scrutinizing the reason for the stop, whether there was good reason, suspicion, or probable cause.
Matt will drop a case if he thinks the arresting officers did something wrong. Sometimes when he calls it out, he gets shipped from his fellow cops. But Matt just focuses on what's right.
I mean, what happened when Bryce taught me to have empathy, you know.
This is the side of Matt that Stacey fell in love with. They spend a lot lot of time together during the summers. The whole family likes to float together in the above ground pool Bryce bought for them in the backyard. They call it the spa. The three of them like to put movies on an outdoor projector set up next to the pool and sip cocktails in the water.
We watch a lot of movies.
That's kind of our thing, swimming and movies. Bryce bought a house a few miles away with some of the money he got from the lawsuit against.
Runnels, and I'd basically just pay mom and Dad's dead off, got my house in my car, and then put the rest in the bank.
He spends a lot of time with us.
He's always watching my snapchats and knowing what leftover dinners he needs to show up for.
And so we're lucky.
Heard from him tonight.
Yeah, I'm surprised that he hasn't interrupted us. As I left, Matt handed me the brown Accordion folder stuffed with all his taser research, these studies articles, years of obsession. Matt doesn't stay up late reading taser studies anymore, but there are certain details of what happened that he can't let go of, like the fact that Rick Smith never acknowledged what happened to his family.
I would love the opportunity to sit across from Rick Smith and you know, let him, let him have a piece of my mind.
I'd like to sit across from Rick Smith too, but he's declined to talk to me. What would you say to him?
My thing would be the question, why didn't you tell the truth from the beginning? Why did you Why did you continue to develop and make that weapon when you knew that it had the possibility to kill somebody? My biggest question is with me, why was it all about money?
This is absolute Season one Taser incorporated a story about unchecked power. I'm Nick Beredini. Episode six, Live, Long and Prosper. It's been a full thirty years since Rick Smith first launched the Airtaser thirty four thousand. That's the model he built in a garage with the inventor Jack Cover. He was twenty five years old. Back then, it was winter and his weapon was about to go on sale in the Sharper Image catalog. At the time, he planned to
sell the Airtaser to regular civilians to protect themselves. This was going to be his moment, the first step in his dream to make the bullet obsolete. But there are some pieces of this history that I haven't told you about yet. The plan for launch day was to shock a famous local reporter during the news the part.
Station don't miss Steve Filmer's task on air tasers. That story and more on Bob News tonight, After Er.
And after Er, the taser segment begins. A woman in jeans and a pink sweater points the air taser straight ahead the reporter, Steve has khakis in a leather jacket. He straps on one of those face shields that cops attached to riot helmets. The camera cuts wide as he gets ready to charge at the woman. Barbara's got the air taser. I'll rush her from twenty yards. Steve drops
to the ground about five feet from Barbara. He flops around like a fish out of water in the grass as the electric current runs through his body.
That was not pleasant.
Those nine seconds were devastating, but I'm okay. A phone number flashes on screen. Rick says he was waiting in a call center with his employees. Everyone was ready at the phones. He expected a flood of orders to come rushing in.
Well.
These air tasers are being made by a company here in Scottsdale. The price is two hundred and fifty dollars. Until now only police could carry this weapon, but starting tomorrow you can carry it for self defense twelve months to no reporter see filmer tells you what you need to know before you buy one.
The segment aired and the phones remained silent. Finally a call Rick picked up. He wanted to be the one to greet the first customer for his brand new taser, but Rick says when he picked up, he heard his mom's voice ask how's it going, Ricky. He says she was the only call they got all night. It wasn't just that the first taser was a bust. You might remember that things were so bad. Rick wanted to quit
his company. But then, he says, he learned that the bank was going to take everything from his father if his company failed.
Millions of dollars went into this, basically wiping.
Out my dad.
Imagine the pressure. Rick was a kid in his mid twenties running a business. If his family went broke, it would be Rick's fault. Rick says he only had one million dollars to save the company. Five hundred thousand from his dad and a matching five hundred thousand from their only other investor. He had one play left. He used that money to go all in to make a new, more powerful taser, one that would work for cops, which meant that had to be able to stop anyone, even
the ripped marine Hans Morrero. It was called the M twenty six, and that's because it was powered by twenty six watts of electricity, almost four times stronger than the air taser. Nobody was fighting through this thing.
The M twenty six was a big success for one reason. That M twenty six worked.
So well that he was able to market it to police departments all over the country, and it saved the Smith family from financial ruin. But Rick wasn't actually the first person to build a taser that worked, or the first person to amp up the power. Before Rick and Jack Kover first developed their taser in Cover's garage, Cover had worked on his first model with another company called Tasertron.
Tasertron's technical advisor was a guy named Jim McNulty. Jim told me that cops had asked for a taser that was powerful enough to stop anyone.
Officers want someone down on the ground, they considered them not to be a threat once they're.
Down on the ground. So Jim told me, Jack Kover and Tasertron tried to give cops what they wanted. They wanted them to fall down, so they doubled the power. Tasertron increased the power of its weapons from about five watts to about ten. But when cops started to actually use that taser out on the streets, that's when you started having your first deaths. They were about eleven of them.
Coroners in southern California cited these tasers as a cause or contributing factor in at least five deaths between nineteen eighty six and nineteen eighty nine. Jim McNaulty said, as that's why Taser Tron stopped selling them. But about a decade after those reported deaths, Rick Smith made an even more powerful taser, the M twenty six, And the M twenty six wasn't just ten watts. It was twenty six
years later. After the M twenty six came out, Jim McNulty sued Taser International to try and stop Rick from irresponsibly dominating the market. Jim testified that Rick had given cops what they wanted, more power. Rick was there when Jim told the judge that kind of power can be lethal, but Jim lost the case and Rick didn't change his design.
When Taser International first released the new M twenty six taser in late nineteen ninety nine, Rick went all out to assure cops in the public that the taser was safe. To accompany the release, he published a document he called Medical Safety Information. This would be one of the first documents to go in the company's research compendium. This was
essentially his proof. In this document, Rick Smith compared the process of developing the more powerful taser to the research a pharmaceutical company does to get FDA approval for a new drug. He wrote, it was the same approach as is used in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. But Rick Smith didn't get anything like FDA approval for the M twenty six taser. He hardly had to prove anything to anyone. A new drug takes on average about ten
years to go from concept to FDA approval. There's peer reviewed animal studies, clinical human research supervised by doctors in control groups. FDA approval is extremely cautious. But a taser is not regulated by the FDA. It's not considered a medical device, even though it sends an electric current through the human body. It's also not regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms because it doesn't use gunpowder
like the original tasers did. The very first taser was technically a consumer product regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but even they never did any sort of testing. No independent regulatory agency ever did a study on the twenty six. So at the start, everything Rick promised was based on
a few studies that Taser conducted by itself. The first one was on a pig, the second one was on five dogs, and finally there was Taser's version of a human study, which was just those first nine hundred or so tough guy cops who volunteered to get a quick shock and didn't drop dead. That's nothing like how tasers were really used in the real world. Cops taste some people for over a minute. I felt like my own heart stopped when I finally realized this was it FDA
level testing. There were no clinical trials and there were no peer reviewed studies. When Attorney John Burton, who spent years of his life battling Taser International in court saw that Rick compared his testing to an FDA review. He couldn't believe it either.
There are just certain things I think you just don't lie about. I mean to me, so when I say they've done FDA level testing and the current is not sufficient to affect cardiac rhythms, and they're selling this to tens of thousands of people with these representations, I just assume they're true, and I wouldn't think somebody would lie about that.
About ten years after Rick Smith built the M twenty six, John was representing the family of Darryl Turner, the seventeen year old who had died from a taser shot at the grocery store where he worked, and he questioned Rick about his decision to increase the taser's power.
Okay, basically, you cranked out the power of the air taser thirty four thousand, four times.
We increase the energy and the power by roughly four times, and the output charge by roughly three times.
And then looking at this one pig.
That you did this experiment, John spends at least an hour asking Rick if he thinks the testing they did was enough, it's.
Exactly the same mechanism of product development that I learned developing a project management system for a pharmaceutical company exploratory research, computer modeling, animal safety studies.
Human In the video, Rick looks defeated. There are dark circles around his sunken eyes, his normally coofft black hair is falling down over his face. Burton continues pressing Rick, and so.
Why did you think that this new device that had four times of power was going to be safe to use on human beings?
Because Rick explains to Burton for the umpteenth time that everything he did was above board. He had the taser tested on animals and compared the weapon's power to existing research on electricity.
Output of this device. It showed significant safety margins, so all of the review of the literature in the candidate.
At this point, Rick seems to snap to attention. He stares straight into the camera that's recording his testimony and launches into a kind of monologue.
And as we sit here today, the result of this work is we've developed a technology that, if you include the Mputy six in the next twenty six, is deployed by five hundred thousand police officers and over sixteen thousand agencies. We've had over a million volunteers and over a million field uses. We've prevented conservatively forty to fifty thousand lethal force incidents from recurry.
It's almost like Rick doesn't understand why he's under attack.
I'm very proud. I think you would be hard pressed to find any other scientific development in the field of modern policing that went through a similarly rigorous approach and has had the success rate where we have rede from being usually.
It's been years since this step position. I'm on the company's website and there's a page that says, as of twenty twenty five, the taser has saved more than three hundred thousand people from death or serious bodily injury. It's a staggering number. Maybe it's enough to convince you that tasers are worth risking a Bryce Masters or a Darryl Turner for the greater good until you see how the math just doesn't add up. I need to get into
the stats for a second. Rick Smith claims tasers have saved more than three hundred thousand lives from death or serious bodily injury since cops began using his company's weapon twenty five years ago. That means an average of roughly fifteen thousand people every year that used to keep a ticker on the website's homepage that counted down to the next life saved one every twenty nine and a half minutes. Sounds amazing, but dig just a little deeper and it
falls apart. The company calculates the three hundred thousand lives saved using one study. That study looked at four hundred and twenty six taser uses by Dallas cops between two thousand and four. In two thousand and six, officers reported that five point four percent of the time using the taser prevented them from using lethal force. Rick took that one study and he applied the results to an estimated
five and a half million total taser uses worldwide. If you multiply five point four percent times five point five million, you get about three hundred thousand people people supposedly spared a cops bullet. Its creative math, there's no comprehensive evidence that tasers reduced shootings at all. Six years after Dallas PD got the taser, the department was still shooting about the same amount of people as they did before they
got the taser. One University of Chicago study looked at thirty six thousand use of force incidents by Chicago PD cops and found tasers did not reduce shootings. Stanford researchers reviewed around one hundred and fifty different taser studies and found the same. The Washington Post host which was doing arguably the best job of tracking fatal police shootings, showed that over the last ten years, police shootings are actually going up, even though more departments than ever have tasers.
By using numbers like three hundred thousand lives saved, they're implying that the taser has reduced gun violence. This number helps Rick Smith tell a powerful story, the kind of story he's told since the beginning, to help him sell tasers and make money. And they made a lot of money.
After Taser went public in two thousand and one, it transformed from an eight million dollar company to a one point nine billion dollar unicorn in less than three years, and all that money got them media attention.
The stock was skyrocketing.
In two thousand and four, an investigative reporter named Robert Anglin walked into Taser International's headquarters. He was one of the first people I turned to is I was trying to make sense of the company and what I'd gotten myself into fifteen years ago. He went to Taser to write a puff piece about this successful local company.
It was this local company makes good and I'm not a business reporter by any means. That wasn't why I was asked to go. They wanted, the editor at the time, wanted a profile of this company would tell us what makes a tick. I didn't realize at the time that that would be the first step in a two year long investigation of the company.
At the time, Taser International was the talk of Wall Street. Traders were going crazy for the stock. Shares that sold for less than four dollars in February two thousand and three fetched one hundred and thirty five dollars a year later.
Throughout the day, the Smiths and Steve Tuttle kept insisting that no corner, no medical examiner, had ever cited the stunt gun in an autopsy report. And this was like a drumbeat. It wasn't just a throw away, you know, factoid. Every ten or fifteen minutes they were raising the issue. No corner had ever sighted this gun. The gun can't kill, the guns never killed, the gun won't kill. And you know, it's it's kind of a case, at least in my
thinking of the Lady Duck protest too much. So towards the tail end of the day, I asked them for the autopsy reports, and I got a lot of blank stares in return.
Englyn kept following up, and he remembers eventually they sent him like five reports.
So I took it upon myself at that point to wait on doing the company profile and began looking into these deaths and track everybody who died and then get the autopsy reports from those jurisdictions.
Taser employees weren't telling him the full story.
During my investigation, I found there were deaths that Taser hadn't bothered put on their report. And then, of course, once I started getting the autopsy reports that corners were infect citing Tasers as causes of deaths, contributing factors to deaths, are saying they couldn't rule it out.
When he took his findings back to Taser, he couldn't believe the response.
When a medical examiner had blamed death on the gun, they would say that medical examiner doesn't have the experience or the or the qualified training to blame a death on a gun.
Englen wrote articles questioning the company's claims. By the fall of two thousand and four, the stock price was down about fifty percent. That's when Taser International issued a press release October eighteenth, two thousand and four, an independent study by the Department of Defense found Tasers were safe.
As a consequence of that release, They're stock skyrocketed.
Over the next month. The stock shot up over sixty percent.
Executive members of Taser's staff sold stock, made it millions upon millions of dollars in stock sales.
Rick and his family sold over one million shares. That made them almost sixty million dollars combined.
And later, when I obtained copies of the actual safety study and began interviewing people surrounded with that safety study, what became obvious and apparent was that there had not been a safety study. It wasn't true. A, the study wasn't independent. B. The government scientist involved in the study didn't even look at stunt gun safety. They were looking at whether it was applicable for use in the military.
Government scientists acknowledged they had never studied the safety of the sun gun, so to suggest that the government affirmed safety the stunt gun. Safety was false. As it turned out, Taser was involved in every step of this study.
It was a literature review, not a medical study, and almost all of the literature the DoD reviewed came directly from Taser International, and it was organized by Taser's own employees.
Every level of this study involved some members of Hayser's staff.
As Anglin uncovered the truth, the stock collapsed again.
At one point, Rick Smith accused me of costing them more than five hundred million dollars in shareholder value. I was besieged with calls from people's shareholders, especially shareholders who saw the value of the stun gun dropping off like a stone. The Attorney General of Arizona began an investigation while I was investigating the company. The SEC began an investigation of Taser while I was investigating the company.
Well.
In those two investigations, our documentation was cited as part of the reason. So the stock really took a tremendous fall.
Taser International lawyers sued the Arizona Republic for libel, but the case was dismissed.
Obviously, the relationship between me and the company deteriorated. I am not on their Christmas list to this day.
I don't think I am either. And when Taser doesn't like you, they don't just stop sending Christmas cards. They go after anyone who challenges their claims. Journalists, critics, medical examiners, and cops too. Even Oakland PD's Mike Lenicio became an enemy. Mike eventually found a way around the non disclosure agreement he signed to attend Taser International's tests. He started telling other cops, especially his officers in Oakland, about the cardiac
risks he'd seen firsthand. He even started sharing information with the lawyer suing Taser International, John Burton. Soon after Mike took over Oakland's Taser program, he began independently testing tasers to make sure they were within the electrical specs set by the company. That's when he noticed something strange.
Next thing, I know, I'm getting these anonymous written complaints. And again it's a little unusual if they're from out of state. You know, why would someone out of state who has no contact with me as an Oakland police officer, why would they care what we're doing in Oakland?
Right The implication of the complaint was that he was using police resources to run an unregulated company and make money behind the department's back. Each time Internal Affairs would investigate, Mike would answer the same questions and provide the same evidence, and he would be cleared.
And so I think the third one I was still working. The fourth one, I was retired. So I called my attorney and he says, you're not. He says, you're retired. I said, I know, just humor me, please, here's okay.
Mike explained he still wanted to go through the process again to clear his record.
So we go down there, we go through the whole thing again. I don't know about a month later, I guess I get another letter from my AA and a mail.
So this is the result of the investigation.
And on this one, you know, it says I'm exonerated from the charges. I scan over the header and the box that says complainant, it says Steve Tuttle.
Steve Tuttle, the same Taser VP of Communications who told Robert Anglin no coroner had ever cited the taser as a cause of death. The same man I spoke with when I went to Taser.
They went to Great Links to ruin my reputation, you know, to get me fired, to you know, get rid of me, dispose of me.
Mike sometimes testified as an expert in lawsuits against Taser International, and he told me he started bringing that piece of paper with Steve Tuttle's name on it to every single court appearance and deposition. That way, if Taser's lawyers tried to discredit him, they would be in for a surprise. One day, he says, he was answering questions from Taser's lawyers in a deposition when they asked, have you ever had any any I A complaints filed against you?
If you ever had any discipline? I said, I A complained?
And what like?
What sense?
He says, have you ever had any discipline.
Filed against you? And this was my opportunity. I've been carrying around this piece of paper for months, and I said, would this include the ones that you guys filed against me? Steve Title filed against me? Do I include those? No further questions. He completely dropped that subject and moved on. So I finally did get vindicated.
I guess you'd say, despite everything, Mike still thinks the taser can be a good tool. For police.
I have nothing against the product. I have nothing against it. You know, it's a I think the product is a useful product when deployed properly. But I also think that a lot of the information that I had to discover on my own should have been disclosed.
I think Rick Smith didn't disclose the taser's risks because they weren't a part of the story he wanted to tell. Rick Cherry picks and embellishes the parts of his story that help him promote tasers. Even the story he's always told about his introduction to gun violence isn't quite true. It's the one about how he came up with the idea for tasers after learning two kids from his high school,
Todd and Corey, had been shot and killed. Over the years, he's repeatedly referred to Todd and Corey as his friends and used their photos and presentations, like during speeches at the company's annual conference.
In December nineteen ninety Two of my high school friends were shot and killed only a few miles from here in what started as an altercation.
And Corey weren't really his friends. He knew of them, but didn't know them. In twenty twenty, three, Todd's father told a reporter from Reuter's that Rick's company quote ran a whole advertising campaign based on the murder of my son. They profited off that, and they didn't ask for permission. It's been over twenty five years since Rick Smith began selling tasers, and he's still talking about the taser as
if it can solve all gun violence. He still maintains it's safe, like when he talked about the taser safety record on his podcast.
Taser has a lower injury rate than playing collegiate volleyball. You are more likely to get injured in volleyball practice than being hit by the taser by police in the street. And that's so incredulous. I have to stop saying it because people paint me as being cavalier and insensitive.
I think the comparison is insensitive. College volleyball isn't inherently violent, and playing it is a decision you make for yourself. The taser is a weapon, it's funded by taxpayers and the hopes it will help protect them. I'm not saying tasers haven't saved anyone. It's hard to verify Rick's story. He told in the first episode about the thirteen year old girl who was suicidal holding a knife. Cops taste her instead of shooting her. I am sure that there
are true stories like that. I've seen video footage of people who were tasered by cops instead of shot. But it also seems to fit this pattern of Rick only telling the parts of the stories he wants to sell. I think Rick Smith wants this thirteen year old girl to be part of his legacy. But if Rick wants to take credit for saving her life, shouldn't he have to take responsibility for what happened to someone like Bryce Masters. I've never heard him acknowledged that taser has caused even
one cardiac arrest. Instead, it's the families of two cops, Timothy Runnelds and Matt Masters, who have to live with the consequences. By the time a Kansas City jury watched a video of Bryce getting tasered and going into cardiac arrest, Rick was focused on a new opportunity. The company had a new name and a new prize product on the market,
the Axon body camera. Rick Smith says he actually got the idea for body cameras from, of all people, his legal adversaries, John Burton and Peter Williamson Rick told this story on his new podcast. He said he thought of body cameras after one of their lawsuits against Taser.
This was to defend our customers and ourselves from all the horrible allegations and like, look, let's just record what's happening.
The idea was to protect cops.
Look, I believe in the goodness of police. I work with them every day. It's an honorable profession. So look, yeah I'm biased. If I hear a story, I naturally buy a stories. I bet some dirt bag is lying about the police because the police were honorable.
Bodycams were not an overnight success. Police departments were hesitant to buy them. Cops didn't like the idea of being filmed at their job all day, but within a few years cops wouldn't have much choice.
Protests have broken out near Saint Louis, Missouri, over a police shooting that killed an unarmed African American teenager, eighteen year old Michael Brown.
Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Rochesters of different ages and races demanding answers in the shooting death of eighteen year old Michael Brown at the hands of a policeman.
A couple months after Michael Brown was killed, Rick one on a morning talk show in Mesa, Arizona. He explained why body cameras were good for the public, not just police, and.
The idea is, you know, there's a big problem with mistrust between police and their communities. For example, in Ferguson, I think would be a very different story. We would know what happened if there was a video of that incident, and there was not, so we burning.
The Obama administration poured millions of dollars into police agencies so they could buy body cameras, and most police departments bought them from the company they already had a relationship with Taser International. Other companies had developed bodycams, but Taser International used them to innovate how police footage was stored. The Axon cameras didn't record data to tapes or discs.
They could connect to the company's cloud, So now the company was offering a tech ecosystem to make storing the footage easy. Rick said it was like going from a walkman to an iPod. So the Axon body cameras weren't just new hardware they represented a whole new direction for the company, a network of software and hardware. To signal the shift, Rick renamed Taser International Axon Enterprise. Just like the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, Axon Enterprise would explore
a new frontier. A couple months after the name change, Rick gets on stage at the company's huge annual user conference wearing a T shirt that says, write code, Save lives.
For those who are wondering where the name Axon came from, Axon is actually the technical name for the fibers that extend from your nerve cells to connect them to each other. So when we got into the camera business a few years ago, we selected this name because we saw the value of body cameras wasn't in the hardware of the camera itself. It was if we could make that device connected, did it become a sensor that we create a network of really interesting information.
Rick walks across the stage and explains his vision for Axon, a digital evidence storage platform, and they wouldn't stop there. They were going to develop world class artificial intelligence that would analyze all the footage the Axon cameras recorded.
Now, when we first announced that we're doing artificial intelligence. We had some pretty interesting reactions in the media. This was one of them.
The slide behind him shows the headline the new tech that could turn police bodycams into nightmare surveillance.
Tools, where they were talking about how we're going to use facial recognition to go out and create the Orwellian state, big brother observing us everywhere. There are some creepy things that you could do with some of these technologies. Before we touch anything like facial recognition or any other technology where AI could be abused, we're creating an AI privacy and Ethics Advisory Panel with experts from legal privacy experts, civil rights experts.
And Rick promises that he will convene an ethics boord to help him weigh the risks of the new technology he wants to explore.
Right, I think we all agree we want to be building technology for the society we all want to live in, and we don't want this stuff to get misused because number one, if he gets misused, this could blow up and the technology gets taken away. Wan to avoid that, so you're not going to see.
Us rushing on so on stage at that Axon conference in twenty seventeen, Rick assured everyone he would rely on his independent ethics boort to help him responsibly deploy any new technology. Since then, he's repeatedly clashed with the board over the company's plans. Axon came up with facial recognition on body cameras, then paused it when the board objected. The company wanted to sell police departments drones armed with tasers, and the board objected again. Then you've all did.
Texas America is real from the painful reality of another mass shooting.
This latest massacre at an elementary school in a small Texas town.
Here is the latest.
At ten Texas officials report nineteen children and at least two adults killed.
School children gunned down by one man, murdering kids in grades two, three, and four at school, this time in Uvalde, Texas, a small city. Days later, Axon announced it was pursuing a plan to sell drones armed with tasers to schools shooting.
Axon says that it's working on a non lethal taser drone that could be deployed in an emergency.
Figure it like a smoke detector, a piece of safety equipment with its on site that's hidden away.
Nobody needs to know.
It's there, and if there's a person who shows up to school with a gun, a teacher or any administrator could hit a panic button.
Smith says that would then allow for law enforcement to get a live look at the room with the devices built in camera and activate the drone with the goal of incapacit sitating the suspect using the taser attached to it.
Rick paused the project after intense public backlash, but the damage was done. Nine of the twelve Ethics board members resigned in protest. In a statement explaining their resignation, the resigning members wrote that after several years of work, the company has fundamentally failed to embrace the values that we have tried to instill, and that they'd lost faith in Axon's ability to be a responsible partner. Today, Axon is
a forty five billion dollar force. Tasers are still a part of that business, but Rick's concept of selling a dropbox for cops a network of body cameras and software to support them has morphed into an Amazon like everything store for law enforcement. Plus, they're expanding their customer base, selling their camera and software systems to civilian spaces like healthcare, retail stores, and schools. The company is the market leader and just about every piece of technology a cop might use.
They sell drones, drone counter surveillance. They've combined their cameras with AI. Rick is building crime tracking centers to try and stop crimes before they happen. His inspiration the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. In the movie, Tom Cruise is a policeman who relies on three clairvoyant women who are basically held captive in order to predict the crimes of citizens before they happen. But when Cruz gets falsely accused of a pre murder, he goes on the run until
he can successfully prove his innocence. In the end, everyone realizes the whole idea of crime prediction was fucking insane, so they shut the program down. But I guess for Rick, the moral of the story was, wouldn't that be neat?
Please welcome CEO and founder of Exxon Rick Smith.
At the company's twenty twenty five annual conference, Rick Smith came jogging out on stage to give the keynote address. He had on a dark gray pollover with a small gold triangle on his chest.
Thank you everybody, and certainly we've taken a ton of inspiration from science fiction. It's kind of fun to wear my Captain Kirk inspired a lot of today, Because life truly does imitate art. That's where we first imagine the technologies that we will ultimately create.
That triangle design on rick shirt is inspired by the insignia for the star Trek, Starfleet Command, the explorers and protectors of the galaxy.
Now, each technology on its own is neither good nor evil. It's an extraordinary tool, powerful and neutral. How we choose to wield it will define the future that we build.
So I'm watching this speech and thinking about Captain Kirk's origin story again. Kirk's legend was born when he reprogrammed that simulated test so that he could save both his own starfleet and the civilians stranded on the other ship. And Rick's legend was born when he reprogrammed the Taser and quadrupled its power. He likes to say that doing this saved his family, his company, and hundreds of thousands of lives.
So together, I mean, we can harness these tools to create safer, more cohesive communities and build a society that would make Captain kirkrowd.
Now to meet our goals, Kirk lives in a fictional intergalactic utopia, and Rick Smith lives on Earth. He may be trying to write his own story it is, but his choices have real world consequences.
Our task is clear to construct the right safeguards to ensure this tech is used ethically, maximizing its power for good while minimizing the risk of misuse. So we take this responsibility very seriously. It is a privilege and our greatest challenge to thoughtfully deploy technology in ways to protect life and uplift humanity, ensuring that we always choose the path of good.
It's a good story, do you believe them?
Shares of Axon Enterprise hitting an all time high today. It's the fifth best s and P five hundred performer this year.
Best Ridge company forming known as Taser International now is a big police bodycam evidence management software business.
Phenomenal growth rests term. This has been one of the best performing sacks over the past decade. Probably announces that RINGS will be integrating with Axon's community requests.
It is now I think, the largest video repository.
In the first time, a Colorado police department is using artificial intelligence to police reports.
Port CON's police say they are in a testing phase with their bodycam provider and had your owns.
As first responders Axon and nine for drones and public safety to that powering the revenue growth that we are.
Seeing and make law enforcement's job easier.
That would, like Crazy today up over fifty pm, provide a new revenue source for accents.
The AI services are selling five times faster than any product in our history, and that's ten dollars not in height.
Absolute. Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company Number one. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and threads at Lava for Good. Follow me at Nick Beadini on in in Twitter. Taser Incorporated is written and produced by me Nick Beredini. Our executive producers are Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Worris. Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Paul is our producer. Hannah Biel is our writer and producer. Joe Plored is
our sound designer. Music composed and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Mariann mckune is our editor. Fact Checking by Donya Suleman. Jeff Cliburn is our head of marketing and Operations. Our Social Media director is ist Marie guard Rama, our social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional reporting by Matt Straut.
So, like you, Gottaut a little bit of a tent to humor. Back around two thousand and five or six, I was on the front page of every newspaper in America saying that we were evil, we were killing people, we had lied about the safety of our products. And it was right that time I was building this house and for the man Cave. Decided, well, if everybody's going to say I'm running an evil empire, well then clearly
I need a volcano layer. So I took some inspiration from the Great Doctor Evil and if you remember, you know he had a volcano layer too.
It was pretty cool, actually,