How the stun-gun maker plans to monopolize the body cam market.
Axon Body 2 camera by Taser.
On Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. Several witnesses described the shooting—which wasn’t captured on video—as unprovoked. In the national furor over police violence that followed, one remedy found common support across much of the political spectrum: outfitting more cops with body-mounted cameras to deter misconduct and create a record of tragic encounters. When a grand jury decided that November not to charge the officer in Ferguson, the victim’s family pushed “to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.” The White House proposed $75 million in matching funds for state and local police to buy the devices.
A few months later, in January 2015, employees of Taser International, the maker of stun guns, gathered for a sales meeting at the company’s futuristic headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz. They filled the ground floor and lined the catwalks that crisscross the three-story atrium, a space where a lightsaber duel wouldn’t seem out of place. Shades blocked out the desert sun, and in the darkness, low, long trumpet sounds blared—the famous Richard Strauss theme used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
As the sound of the timpani—boom boom boom boom boom boom—kicked in, Rick Smith, Taser’s chief executive officer, appeared high up among the rafters, dangling in a harness on a thin wire. He descended slowly, brandishing a giant yellow triangle: the logo for Axon, a recently expanded line of Taser body cameras and related tools. “Woooooo!” he shouted as he landed, pumping his fist in the air. The staff erupted in cheers and whistles as he lifted the logo triumphantly over his head. “Axon! Axon!” the group chanted.
Smith, 46, has intense round eyes that never seem to blink and floppy dark hair that channels Joey from early episodes of Friends. He’s often seen around the office in jeans, a Taser-branded shirt, and Taser-branded sneakers, with a Taser-branded Bluetooth headset wrapped around his neck—a get-up that echoes how ubiquitous the company’s black-and-yellow sidearms have become in law enforcement. When I ask for statistics on market share, Chief Financial Officer Dan Behrendt says he’s “comfortable saying that almost 100 percent of the CEWs”—conducted electrical weapons—“in use in North America have been supplied by us.”
When he co-founded Taser in 1993, Smith says his goal was “making the bullet obsolete.” The war on drugs and the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles had led Americans to reconsider how lethal they wanted their police departments to be. Taser’s breakthrough product, a pistol-shaped device that uses electricity to incapacitate a target, made the company worth more than $1 billion by 2004. But with market saturation came personal-injury and wrongful-death lawsuits; for almost a decade, Taser’s stock languished. The “Ferguson incident,” as the company refers to it, gave it a chance to grow again. By the next summer, with its shares at a record high, Taser executives were telling investors that thanks to body cameras, “2015 is our Super Bowl.”
Cop cams are inextricably tied to Taser, by far the dominant supplier, and the company will likely shape whatever the devices evolve into. For Taser, the cameras are more than just a new product category. Founded at one national moment of police angst, the company is using another such moment to transform from a manufacturer into a technology company. From a business perspective, body cameras are low-margin hunks of plastic designed to get police departments using the real moneymaker: Evidence.com, which provides the software and cloud services for managing all the footage the devices generate. Taser markets these tools under the Axon brand. About 4.6 petabytes of video have been uploaded to the platform, an amount comparable to Netflix’s entire streaming catalog. All of it must be preserved to an evidentiary standard. The company can sell a weapon or camera once, but cloud services are billed year after year.
“Taser wants to be the Tesla or Apple of law enforcement,” says Hadi Partovi, a venture capitalist who sits on the board. There are early signs the effort is working. In the first quarter of 2016, for the first time, Taser’s bookings for future revenue from the cameras and cloud services, $52 million, surpassed revenue from weapons sales. Every time a controversial police killing occurs—most recently with the July 6 death of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn.—there’s more pressure to outfit cops with cameras. And those cameras generate footage that will wind through the court system for years.
The officer who shot Castile wasn’t wearing a camera; Castile’s girlfriend used her phone to post live footage of the immediate aftermath to Facebook. The scene “looks terrible, and it’s hard not to conclude it is terrible,” Smith says. “We look at that and say if that [officer] had a camera on, we would at least have some idea if there was any justification for what happened.” Situations where witnesses have cameras but police don’t are “maybe the worst of both worlds,” he says. “You get all of the bad and none of the potential good, at least from the law enforcement perspective. You are missing the most critical elements to determine if it’s abusive or reasonable.” After the Castile footage went viral, demonstrators gathered for a march in Dallas, where a U.S. Army Reserve veteran ambushed and killed five law enforcement officers. “One incident somewhere can affect police officers around the world,” Smith says.
Dallas is an Axon customer: Last year the police there signed a $3.7 million contract to buy 1,000 Evidence.com subscriptions and cameras, some of which are already in use. “This will enhance our opportunity to document critical incidents; it will enhance officer safety; it will enhance courtroom testimony, which we think will turn into more convictions,” the city’s deputy police chief, Andrew Acord, told a local public radio station at the time.
Body cameras are too new for anyone to say how they’ll change policing. Early studies show that officers who wear them use force less frequently and face fewer citizen complaints—and that the footage may increase conviction rates and guilty pleas in prosecuting crimes. The results from one of the largest controlled studies in the U.S., at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, are due this fall.
Before setting out on patrol one day in March, Las Vegas police officer Sal Mascoli makes an inventory of his weapons. “Write down my badge number,” he says, in case something goes wrong. “P number five-one-one-five.” In a bracing New York accent, Mascoli points out where he hides a knife on his khaki uniform, where the rifles are stored in his SUV, and how to release his pistol. There’s a Taser stun gun strapped toward the back of his belt. Peeking above the collar of his crisp shirt is an Axon camera the size of a lipstick tube.
Mascoli is a cop’s cop, with short, close-cropped hair and a never-ending squint. He’s worked for Metro for two decades, after first serving in the U.S. Marines, and he’s trained hundreds of his colleagues in hand-to-hand combat. Out on patrol, he’s stern but affable. At a gas station, a lanky young man in hipster glasses flags Mascoli down. A driver just tried to run him over in a crosswalk, he says. Mascoli can’t do much about that, but he chats up the citizen—giving a young black man a good vibe about cops never hurts, he says later. The guy says he’s a comedian from Harlem looking for work. “I’m from Queens!” Mascoli says, as if his accent didn’t give him away. “I’m all Italian, all the time.” Mascoli hands out his phone number, recommends a comedy club with an open mic night, and rolls on.
The Axon Flex camera, which can attach to sunglasses or a collar, connects via wire to a battery pack that's usually worn on a belt or in a shirt pocket
Soon, a scraggly, middle-aged white man pushing a shopping cart catches his eye. Did he throw something over that fence? Mascoli pulls a U-turn and, almost imperceptibly, taps his chest. Two quiet beeps signal that he’s activated the Axon. He gets out of his SUV, pats down the suspect, and finds a long kitchen knife tucked in the man’s jeans. “You’re losing your knife today, you know that, right?” Mascoli says. He runs the man’s priors. “Eighty-four times you’ve been arrested, brother, and you ain’t learning,” he says. He sends the man on his way—no arrest.
Mascoli tosses the knife into his SUV, speaks into the camera to say the recording is ending, and taps the body cam. When his shift is over, he’ll dock his camera at the station to transmit the footage to Evidence.com. As he drives toward a burglary alarm, Mascoli says he doesn’t care for Taser weapons, but he’s made a bet on the business of cop cams. When the department issued him his Axon, he bought 25 shares of Taser stock. Mascoli likes wearing the camera, because it provides a balance to the citizen footage, from Facebook Live streaming to smartphone video, that increasingly monitors policing around the country. “I wanted my perception to be portrayed instead of someone else pulling out a camera phone and putting out a 10-second snippet,” he says. As his stubby fingers hunt and peck on the new dispatch computer installed in his police car, he groans, “I’m so bad at technology.” But with the camera, “I want to be on the early edge,” he says. “I know it’s coming.”
Taser initially turned to cameras as a way to ward off lawsuits, both for the company and the police. “It was about defending our business,” Smith says. As police departments across the U.S. discovered Taser in the early 2000s and bought into the idea that cops armed with a stun gun might reach for their Glock less often, the company saw explosive growth: Sales increased sixfold from 2002 to 2004. That brought scrutiny and charges that the company’s products were more dangerous than advertised. In 2004, Amnesty International published a report tallying more than 70 people who’d died after being shocked, either during the event or shortly afterward. (The group’s 2012 report says that number has risen to more than 500.) Dozens of plaintiffs have sued over injuries and deaths. Taser has prevailed in most of the cases, but in 2009 it revised its product warnings to say exposure in the chest area could cause cardiac arrest. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated Taser’s safety claims in 2005 and eventually closed the case without an enforcement action
In 2006 the company started selling the Taser Cam, a $400 clip-on device that automatically begins recording when an officer engages the stun gun. Street cops were skeptical. Smith likens it to the early hesitancy about dashboard cameras in squad cars—many officers dislike feeling as if they’re under constant surveillance. Few departments adopted Taser Cams. For those that did, it didn’t help Taser’s image that the device captured only the final moments of a conflict. Smith says, “You ended up with a highlight reel of people getting Tased.”
The few agencies that used Taser Cams gave the company a glimpse of an unexpected problem. Even large departments with ample resources struggled to download and preserve the video clips. As Taser began to develop a standalone body camera, one that could record long encounters or an entire patrol shift, it realized it needed to create a system to manage a new scale of footage.
Body camera footage is already starting to enter the court system. Tim Fattig, the chief deputy district attorney in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, estimates that about 20 percent to 25 percent of his cases have video evidence from the devices. Much of the footage is banal, but some can be helpful, he says. One recent trial involved a traffic stop that turned into a high-speed chase after a suspect fired a gun into the air and ambushed an officer. “It brought to life the officer’s perspective to the jury,” Fattig says. “They saw this all happened within a couple of minutes. It went from a minor traffic thing to life and death.” The defense challenged the footage, saying the suspect wasn’t identifiable in the recording and the gunshots weren’t audible, but the suspect was convicted and sentenced to as much as 157 years in prison.
Other Las Vegas cases show that body cameras aren’t the panacea that transparency advocates may be hoping for. The police department regularly releases body camera footage within three days of an officer-involved shooting, a practice praised by the American Civil Liberties Union. So far, none has caused a major uproar. But there’s one video, whose contents are almost certainly inflammatory, that the department hasn’t released. At 5 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2015, Officer Richard Scavone saw a woman named Amanda Ortiz drinking a cup of coffee in the parking lot of an area police say is popular for prostitution. According to a federal indictment, Scavone handcuffed Ortiz, then beat her, throwing her to the ground, striking her, and slamming her face into his patrol car several times.
The Justice Department charged Scavone with violating Ortiz’s civil rights and falsifying his report. He contests the charges. Although his camera captured the whole incident, Metro won’t release the footage, saying it’s part of an ongoing investigation. “We are not going to release evidence in this case,” Lieutenant Zehnder says. “Some people say, ‘We want to see it.’ You don’t get to. … It will come out in court.”
In Las Vegas alone, police have uploaded more than 16 terabytes of video to Evidence.com; that will likely pass 30 terabytes by yearend, Zehnder says. Combined with footage from other cities, it’s an unprecedented trove of interactions between police officers and the citizens they serve. What Taser does with all that data may shape the company’s—and policing’s—future.
“We’ve kind of leveraged a weapon to introduce a camera, and we’ve leveraged the camera to introduce Evidence.com,” Larson says. “This is really, really awesome, because no one else in the world is going to capture the data that we capture.” The company may explore license plate recognition, automated transcription of dialogue, and other feats of machine learning. “I mean, the possibilities are endless,” Larson says.
From where Zehnder sits, it’s obvious that big data is the next frontier for Taser and policing. “Some of it is very Orwellian and very scary and will rattle the cages of civil libertarians around the country, but it’s coming,” he says. Zehnder riffs on how facial-recognition technology might be deployed: An officer could patrol the Las Vegas Strip with a camera streaming to the cloud, “and there is real-time analysis, and then in my earpiece there is, ‘Hey, that guy you just passed 20 feet ago has an outstanding warrant.’ Wow.”
Smith says Taser plans to roll out live-streaming capabilities in 2017, and he expects facial recognition to become a reality someday so agencies can query police records or social networks in real time. “If we think about that situation in Minnesota, maybe that officer did have some preconceptions [about Castile], and maybe they were unhelpful preconceptions,” Smith says. If the officer had known that Castile didn’t have a violent police record, as has been reported, his death might have been averted. “The more we can help reduce that uncertainty, the better,” Smith says.
In Las Vegas, Professor Sousa is still crunching the data from the study on whether cop cams lead to better policing. Early results indicate some improvement, but Sousa warns against expecting too much from mere electronics. “The technology is being sold very strongly as a means to improve trust and enhance legitimacy, and I worry about tossing around those terms too loosely,” he says. While body cameras provide transparency and have come to represent the hopes of restoring faith in policing, Sousa says, “it is asking a lot of the technology to do that, especially in a really short period of time.”
