Speaker 1: How are you doing today, Nick Good?
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 1: Absolutely fantastic? I gotta start off with this right here.
I'm a I'm a broadcast instructor, and I and I
faused people all the time about podcasting, and all I
ever hear over and over again is oh, don't know
what to podcast about? And then I get to talk
with you, Nick, and You've got a podcast about tasers.
My god, how did this even come into your life?
Speaker 2: Well? It was. It's, you know, a winding road. It
began when I was myself a broadcast student at the
University of Missouri and I was working a live TV
news shift, the morning show. I was working a shift
in the morning show and a young man from a
town nearby was killed during a traffic stop after police
tasered him. And so I went to go cover that story.
And I didn't really necessarily want to do broadcast news.
I figured that out. By that point, I considered myself
more interested in sort of long form storytelling. And that's
that That story of that man's death ended up inspiring
a film that I made, A documentary that I made
ten years ago that did quite well about this company
that makes tasers and why I came back to this
story for this podcast with the incredible producers of you Know,
Bone Valley and Wrongful Conviction. I mean, Lava is an
incredible you know podcast production company was that as the
film had come out, I really had a lot of
great conversations with police officers themselves, who I think, you know,
are living in a world where systemically we have a
lot of issues in policing, but these are just people
trying to do their best, often times in a job
that can be really difficult, and they were wrestling with
the question not just of you know, how do I
do my job, but what do we want as a system,
as a law enforcement system? How do how do we
want to improve? And one of the officers that I
had a conversation with was Matt Masters, whose own son
had been tasered and nearly killed in an incident in
Kansas City. And so finding Matt kind of led me
to a place where I felt the story was unfinished
because part of the not to give too much away,
not too many spoiler alerts, but part of the podcast
is not just about the way in which this taser
became the most popular weapon in policing, but the way
the company that invented it used that weapons success to
now become what I believe is the most powerful company
most people have really never heard of because of the
surveillance technology, the data storage, the evidence storage, the camera systems.
The things they are capable of doing now are Minority
Report esque, you know, for folks who are familiar with
you know that that that you can do these real
time crime centers where they're feeding all these cameras through
AI and trying to predict when crimes will happen. What
kind of surveillance state is created out of the success
of this single weapon. And so the story really asks
a very important question, which is this one man who
really founded this company and drove its success through the taser,
can he be trusted now with the future of policing.
That was a question that a lot of cops were
asking me after my film, which was ended with a
similar warning about this is where things are headed. Well,
now we're in that future I warned about, and we
should be asking can we trust this company with this
history of how they made the taser successful, which is
to put it coyly, a little suspicious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but nick I was there when this thing first
came out, and I remember the police department doing promotions
with radio station people that they wanted somebody that they could,
you know, so that we could experience what it was
like to be tasered, and that when I hear stories
like this and I see what I've seen these things
happen over the years, it's a dangerous sport. And they
had to get that word out there, didn't they by
using radio people and other volunteers.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the beauty of the marketing, you know, the company,
even in its Grasshroost days, was brilliant in the way
they marketed this device because they leaned into the sort
of you know, tough guy machismo of policing a lot
of times. Right, give us your toughest guy, bring us
the guy who can fight through anything. We'll hit him
with this taser. Watch your buddy fall to the ground,
crying and screaming, and he pops right back up after
a second or two, he'll pop back up and he'll
be fine. And what that sort of did was it
kind of like convinced officers that this weapon was sort
of a miracle, that it was strong enough to take
anybody down and nobody could fight through it, and that
there would be no consequences. That's really key, I think
for people to understand the use of force element of this,
right when someone that the idea of the taser initially
was it would reduce gun violence because officers could tase
people instead of sh them, and that's never really been true.
Tasers don't replace deadly force, but what they do is
they make it more like compliance tools. So if you
don't want to sign the back of a speeding ticket,
we used to see this all the time twenty years ago.
Cop wouldn't just put their hands on somebody and try
to argue with them. They just taser them, put them
in the back of Odd's cards. They figure it out.
And that marketing, that promotion of this as sort of
like a magic bullet that could take all the complexity
out of use of force in policing and just say,
you got a problem, taser, somebody figure it out later.
That's ultimately what I think led to sort of the
dehumanization of policing in the way that you could distance yourselves,
you know, from striking them with a baton or having
to put your hands on them and get in that
kind of tussle, and that made it so that these
weapons became ubiquitous, and with them becoming ubiquitous, it kind of,
I hate to say, cheapened policing in that way, but
it made it so that officer really didn't have to
wrestle as much with the thought of using force.
Speaker 1: Doesn't that wrestling begin with personal training only because right away,
of course, I can't be the only one who's thinking
of that female police officer that grabbed the wrong gun
in that situation that was on the streets. I mean,
she was trying to taser the guy and she ended
up shooting the dude.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, well, that's certainly. One of the things that
I have a beef with is the way that the
training works that, especially in the early days, it was
really all controlled. You know, the great failure of protecting
people from the collateral damage of this is that the
company really controlled everything from the top down. They controlled
the training of how the weapon was implemented, and then
that meant there was nobody to really fact check a
lot of the claims that were being made right, and
so when officers were trained, they got, you know, a
PowerPoint presentation about how great this thing was. Like I said,
they would often the trainer would shoot everybody and they
would all volunteer and you know, laugh in a big
circle as they all got tasered. But there wasn't a
lot of practical understanding about how to effectively deploy these weapons, right.
It was kind of like a taste first and ask later.
And because they became you know, so relied upon, you
would see situations like that where people were officers were
thinking I'm reaching for my taser and they end up
they end up pulling a gun and shooting someone. But
to me, you know that really it speaks to the
nature in which the weapon itself was sort of treated
without the conce without the seriousness and the consequence of
what it really was, which is a weapon. And I
think that can be true of a lot of law
enforcement training that we actually don't spend enough time with officers,
you know, in the classroom for a lot of different
you know things, and we really just kind of toss
them out there and say, you know, go go deal
with that person who's having a mental health care isis
after you've really had very very little mental health training. Right.
That's a burden that we put on a lot of
officers that I don't think we adequately prepare them for
One of.
Speaker 1: The things that I love about this podcast, which is
called Absolute Taser Incorporated, is the fact that you give
us the history. History to me is so valuable because
it leads us to where we are now and to
learn more about the Smith brothers and then find out
that they betrayed the police and the public. My god,
who knew that story?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I think it's one of the things that's
most insiduous about this story is that the entire success
of the company was built on the backs of this
relationship with police, and when it became a liability issue, right,
you know, fifteen years ago, when it really became the
it's if you don't warn correctly these lawyers who are
who are taking you to task, you're going to go
bankrupt from these lawsuits. And so when they basically made
a decision to start adding warnings for the first time
in the training material, they did it kind of speaking
out of both sides of their mouth, where the warnings
weren't really treated as warnings. They were treated sort of
as this fine print, right, And what had happened, what
that allow What happened was officers didn't really get the
message that there really was some risk to these weapons.
But when something would go wrong in the street, and
there was there was there was a bad incident, they
would be the ones left, you know, trying to explain
what happened. And in this story in particular, one of
the things that we really illustrate is that happening exactly
in Matt Masters, the main officer we speak to in
this story, when his son is tasered, all the blame
eventually falls on the officer who tasted him, despite the
obvious you know, holes were able to poke in all
of the training in which we do believe this officer
when he says he didn't really understand what the weapon
was capable of when he shot it at Matt's son.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Nick Bardini coming
up next. The name of the podcast is Absolute Taser Incorporated.
Let's get back into that talk with Nick Baradini. If
tasers are supposed to be like the ultimate weapon, and
why is it the average person doesn't have one. They're
choosing instead guns, but they won't do a taser. I don't.
I don't know anybody who owns a taser.
Speaker 2: I think that's a bit There's there's certainly a cultural
element to that. There's you know, a line that I
really like to say, which is that Rick Smith, you know,
assumed a lot of people would want to buy tasers.
Their initial target was civilians, and he tells this really
funny story about, you know, the launch of the initial
civilian taser, and he had rented this big call center
expecting a flood of orders and the only person who
called that night after they launched the product was his
own mom, asking how it was going. Right. Well, the
problem a is that people buy guns a lot of
times because they like guns right self defense and gun
ownership is ingrained in you know, the American culture. But two,
it's it's it's because they this was a weapon that
nobody really understood, and in order to get the civilian trust,
the company thought that if cops used it first, that
would help grow the civilian market because people would become
familiar with them. But the reality was that they're not
great self defense weapons. The civilian model tasers kind of
a weaker version of the police taser. It's kind of
a one shot deal. A lot of people are not
that familiar you know, when someone's if someone's bursting into
your home in the middle of the night, you know,
talk to somebody about would they rather have their you know,
their their their handgun that they've trained on by them,
or would they rather have a taser that they don't
know anything about. They they'd rather have their handgun, right,
And so I hate to put it so cynically, but
a lot of it was just good marketing, just kind
of like, the idea sounds good. We're going to convince
people that the point of this weapon is to reduce
gun violence, and the mission to make the bullet obsolete,
as Rick said, sounds like a grand mission we can
all get behind. But that was never really the practical goal.
The practical goal was to succeed in business, and they've
done that phenomenally.
Speaker 1: I would love to do the research on the psychology
of the taser in the way that do police officers
do they feel terrified when using the taser, therefore they
choose not to go that route.
Speaker 2: I think that most police officers the whole idea. What
scared me about the way this weapon was implemented and
how it became so popular was that most police officers
used them long before the situation escalated to the general
You know, fear for my life, right, language that we've
all grown accustomed to, you know, with the way that
law enforcement has become so contra These weapons were used
at low levels of force, most often at low levels
of force. That was because they were trained by the
company who had a vested interest in selling tasers to
use them early and often so that it wouldn't escalate.
But that means you can take any hypothetical police contact,
any traffic stop, and you can spiral it in your
own mind to say, well, if XYZ happens, then I'm
going to be in a fight, or then maybe I
will be pointing my guns. So this guy who's mad
at me for pulling him over, right, and who's giving
me some attitude about the ticket I want to give him, right,
I'll just tasee this guy rather than risk the hypothetical
of the situation escalating further. They were trained on this
excited delirium stuff, which I think was very, very dangerous
that people who were in mental health crisis or people
who were on drugs could spiral out of control and
collapse and die without intervention. Well, the way they were
trained was the best thing to do for someone in
a mental health crisis or on you know, amulant drugs.
Was taser them as long as you might need to
to get them under control and put them, you know,
in an ambulance. Of course, the effects, so the taser
can exacerbate, you know, somebody who's in crisis, right, and
so that the psychology that is I would say that
it doesn't matter that much because they were never really
used in situations that would rise to you know, the
true fight or flight, you know, psychology.
Speaker 1: Do you see Greg Meyer from the LAPD as being
an activator or just somebody who needed to ask the
right questions?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I really like
Greg and I think that Greg, you know, came from
an era right where these were foundational questions because we
should theoretically have technology that helps make policing safer. But
it goes back to the attitude of what when we
use force. If you're a cop and you use force,
what do you think and feel about the person you're
using force on? Do you believe that person right is
worthy of dignity and respect? And I hate to say
that a lot of times officers use force in this
US versus them mentality and they think okay, Well, my
choices were I was going to beat them with the
baton or I was going to taser them. And the
choice the third choice, which is could I buy some time,
get back up here and help the person calm down
using my verbal skills right, doesn't enter the equation. And
for Greg, I think that he saw the potential of
the weapon, But also I think potentially was cops in
those early days were easily dismissive of someone who might
be on PCP. Like there was a lot back in
LA in the eighties, and there wasn't a lot of
thought process about how do we help these people? The
thought process was how do I keep them from you know,
threatening me or the public? And so they they didn't
ask the right questions. I'm afraid a lot of times
cops didn't ask the right questions. And where I find
them complicit is because they didn't really want to know
the answer, right, And if you don't really want to
know the answer, you're not going to find the answer,
you know.
Speaker 1: So modern day technology, are we going to get a
stun gun eventually without something that's connected to wires?
Speaker 2: I don't think so. I think they've played with rounds
where they tried to they try to develop a shotgun
model that fired rounds basically like pellets, that would do
somebody like a Captain Kirk Phaser would have done in
the TV show. But it's just a pretty impractical technology
and there's not a lot of Again, this all comes
back to where's the money. What's the money right now?
The money is in camera technology and evidence storage, data storage.
And what people need to be aware of is why
did we go back in time to tell the story
of the taser, Because hopefully as we go, you know,
think about a season two, we're telling the story of
this success of the taser has birthed this technology and
you are not opting into this technology. Right. A lot
of people try to argue with me about the taser
when I would do screenings in my film, or I
would give talks or things about well, if you just
listen to the cop, you know, if you if you
just respect the officers and listen to their commands, you
won't be in any trouble. And Okay, I don't buy
that argument, but now what we're even if you accept it, Now,
what we're facing is every time you leave your apartment,
you know, to go down to the corner store to
buy a coke. You're opting into a system without even
knowing it, where your face is being recorded and stored
on somebody's and then being fed through an AI machine
that's proprietary to a company that is going to help
figure out whether or not you're likely to commit an assault. Right,
this is the kind of minority report stuff that's happening
that is only possible because that's where the money is.
That's not what you know. We can talk about public
safety all we want, but these are this company in
particular and the others that are in these spaces now,
these surveillance tech spaces. This is about, you know, driving
growth and revenue. And the money is not really in
tasers anymore. They've got a new ten shop model that
seems to be pretty high tech that I you know,
don't think will solve a lot of policing issues in
terms of use of force, but it's got some improvements
to it. That's not even really where the money is. Though.
The money is and the cameras and the storage and
the artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: Man, there are a lot of businesses that could use
those cameras because I mean, even at a grocery store
if they can predict that someone is stealing something or
they and then all of a sudden we're alerted on it.
I mean, it blows me away that AI technology has
that kind of power to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the the central question then is how much
power should you trust in the hands of ceo. It's
sort of like when we began talking about this and
developing the show and where it would ultimately go, this
was sort of like the Axon is the Skynet of policing.
You know, it starts with this niche you know, Taser
product in the late nineties, you know, with five employees,
and it has now grown into a fifty billion dollar
company that has its fingers all over these different technologies.
And theoretically things like predictive policing sound ideal. Why shouldn't
we want to live in a world where we can
prevent crime? But it is the actual end of privacy
in any way we know it. And the people designing
the algorithms and figuring out whether you're guilty or not
of a pre crime are the kind of people are
our CEOs, right, our businesses are these kind of people.
And if Rick Smith, for example, was willing to choose
his own self interest over even the police. When he
said that the taser could not kill and told officers
that in promise them that, and then when it did,
sort of left them holding the bag for those deaths, Right,
what is he willing to do when the technology begins
to falsely accuse people of things they they didn't do,
and and and and and that's to me the scariest
part is because now we're all living in a society
where we no longer even own our own face. We
don't own our own images, right, we don't own our
own identity. It's going to belong to this this, this
this big mass surveillance state. Wow.
Speaker 1: Now, what is the reason why the US military does
not carry a taser? Is it because of the cost.
Speaker 2: It's not so much the cost as much as the mission.
You know again that the taser some some MPs, you know,
some some military police might carry them, but they're truly
you know, the military is truly in a situation. A
lot of times where you're training soldiers to fight in
a war, you're training them, you know, to put it
bluntly to kill. And tasers are mostly limited and most
effective in situations frankly, that aren't very threatening, that aren't
very violent, that's when they are most effective. And because
of that, it doesn't make a lot of sense to
have a marine carrying, you know, a taser. At the
end of they're M fourteen, right, They're they're often being
deployed into situations where it's it's you know, shoot or
don't shoot, right, whereas officers do find, you know, reason
to have a lot of different contact with civilians. And
sometimes it's true that a taser can be an effective
weapon depending on the contact. It's just it's most effective
when there isn't really much of a threat to the
person carrying one.
Speaker 1: Are criminals afraid of the taser? Or is it like, yeah,
what are you gona do you get a taser?
Speaker 2: Me?
Speaker 1: Okay, get it over with them.
Speaker 2: I don't think criminals. Yeah, I don't think. Again, I
hate to put it so bluntly, but I don't think
that there are that many criminals who found themselves on
the wrong side of a taser. I think that people
who find themselves on the wrong side of the taser
are people dealing with mental health problem, people who might
be on drugs. That certainly happens, but Again, the vast
majority of uses of the taser are on people for
compliance issues, right, if you don't listen to an officer's
commands like Matt Masters our officer in the story his
son Bryce, who had an issue with this officer going
back the whole summer. He was a seventeen year old
kid going into a senior year of high school. This
officer and him had had you know, he'd been messed
with a little bit that summer, and he didn't want
to at this traffic stop get out of his car
until he was told what he was being put under
arrest for. And the officer that tasered him tried to
pull him out of the car first. When he was unsuccessful,
he said, all right, fine, fit right, and tasers this
seventeen year old boy in the chest. And So I
don't necessarily buy the premise of the question if criminals
are afraid of it, because I don't think the taser
became a weapon that actually was used in a lot
of situations where there was a true risk to the
officer of somebody who truly was violent. Now that certainly
has happened. I'm not saying that never happens. It certainly
has happened. Just the vast majority of the time it's used,
it's used for, you know, to gain compliance of somebody
who might be uncooperative.
Speaker 1: Man, I wish you would have been in my class
in broadcasting because I would have used you as a
as a powerful tool because you totally get getting the story,
sharing the story, and growing the story.
Speaker 2: Well. I appreciate that, you know, It's I've had plenty
of practice with this issue. I've been, you know, kind
of joke and deride myself for saying, I'm, you know,
the world's foremost expert on this company, and it's a
pretty niche honor to give myself.
Speaker 1: Wow, where can people go to find out more about you, Nick,
because I want them to get into what you're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, you know, certainly you can check out the
podcast Absolute Season one is the story of the Taser,
the rise of the Taser, and you know Matt Masters
as the Kansas City police officer whose son is Taser.
It's a fascinating, you know dynamic there. My film Killing
Them Safely came out in twenty sixteen. You could find that.
I'm not sure exactly where it's streaming now, but it's
been around forever. You can easily find that, and then
you can follow me on Twitter at Nick Beredini, follow
me on Instagram at Nick Beredini. I am always talking
about law enforcement and tech.
Speaker 1: You gotta come back to this show anytime in the future. Nick.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Thanks, Sarah, will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, thanks you too,