October 14, 2025 • 25 mins
Pod Crashing episode 398 with Nick Berardini host of the podcast Absolute Taser Incorporated… America loves the story of a hungry entrepreneur with a dream. But how far is too far, and what forces shape and warp their best intentions? Journalists and documentarian Nick Berardini reports the story of Axon Enterprises and its founders Rick and Tom Smith, hyper-aggressive entrepreneur siblings who tap into the financial opportunity of creating an American paramilitary police state. Rick Smith's willingness to disregard grave safety and public policy issues nearly destroys his relationship with his brother and alienates countless colleagues. Yet, he has become a multi-millionaire many times over - even as more than 1,000 U.S. citizens have been killed by police officers using the company's Tasers.Drawn from key interviews, whistleblowers, and substantial archival materials,Absolute: Taser Incorporated investigates the fraught relationship between the Smith brothers and reveals how their choices ultimately betray the police, the public, and even each other.EPISODES AVAILABLE HERE:Https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-absolute-275471765/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, guys, please don't forget about erro dot net A
r r o e dot net. I believe in the
power of choice, and your listening habits are a choice.
There are seventeen podcasts to listen to. Please enjoy them
a r r o e dot net. Hey, thanks for
checking in. Let's do some podcrashing get to know other podcasters.
(00:20):
Podcrashing Episode number three ninety eight is with Nick Berardini.
He's the host of the podcast Absolute Taser Incorporated. How
are you doing today, Nick?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Good? How are you er?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Absolutely fantastic. I gotta start off with this right here.
I'm a I'm a broadcast instructor and I and I
faced 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 (00:52):
Well? It was. It's, you know, a winding road. It
began when I was with 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
(01:14):
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 that story of that man's death ended up
inspiring a film that I made, A documentary that I
made ten years ago that that did quite well about
(01:37):
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 with police officers themselves,
(01:58):
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,
oftentimes 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
(02:20):
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
(02:40):
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
weapon's success to now become what I believe is the
most powerful company most people have really never heard of
(03:04):
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 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. Well,
(03:28):
that 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
(03:50):
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 (04:09):
Yeah it, 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 seen 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 (04:32):
Yeah. Well, the beauty of the marketing, you know, the company,
even at 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,
(04:54):
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
(05:16):
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 shoot 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
(05:37):
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 odds 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 and policing and just say,
(05:58):
you got a problem or 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,
(06:24):
I hate to say cheapened policing in that way, but
it made it so that officers really didn't have to
wrestle as much with the thought of using force.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
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 taseer the guy and she ended
up shooting the dude.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
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
(07:09):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:53):
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 then
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
(08:17):
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 deal with that person who's
having a mental health crisis after you've really had very
very little mental health training.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
That's a burden that we put on a lot of
officers that I don't think we adequately prepare them for.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
One of 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 (08:56):
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 uh,
(09:16):
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
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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 tastes him. Despite the
obvious holes we're able to poke in all of the
(10:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Son, Please do not move. There's more with Nick Baradini
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.
(10:51):
I don't know anybody who owns a taser.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
I think that's a bit there's certainly a cultural elements
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
(11:17):
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. But 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
(11:40):
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
(12:04):
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,
(12:27):
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,
(12:48):
you know goal. The practical goal was to succeed in
business and they've done that phenomenally.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
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 (13:05):
I think that most police officers. The whole idea of
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
(13:26):
that law enforcement has become so controversial. 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,
(13:46):
any traffic stop, and you can spiral it in your
own mind to say, well, if X y Z 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 tase this guy rather
than risk the hypothetical of the situation escalating further. They
(14:10):
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, stimulant drugs was taser them as long as
(14:31):
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
(14:51):
to you know, the true fight or flight, you know psychology.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Do you see Greg Meyer from the LAPD as being
an activator or is somebody who needed to ask the
right questions?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
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
(15:24):
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
(15:44):
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
(16:07):
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
(16:27):
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 (16:40):
So modern day technology, are we going to get a
stun gun eventually without something that's connected to wires?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
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 somebody
like like a Captain Kirk Faser 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
(17:08):
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
the success of the taser has birthed this technology and
(17:33):
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 of my film, or I
would give talks or things about well, if you just
listen to the cop you know, if you just if
you just respect the officers and listen to their commands,
you won't be in any trouble. And Okay, I don't
(17:53):
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 over and then being fed
through an AI machine that's proprietary to a company that
(18:16):
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
(18:37):
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
(18:57):
really where the money is though. The money is in
the camp and the storage and the artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
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 (19:18):
Yeah, But the essentral 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 sky net of policing.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
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
(19:57):
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,
(20:17):
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 and promised them that,
and then when it did sort of left them holding
the bag or those deaths, right, what is he willing
to do when the technology begins to falsely accuse people
(20:40):
of things they didn't do. 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, we don't own our
own identity. It's going to belong to this big mass
surveillance state.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Now, what is the reason why the US military does
not carry a taser? Is it because of the cost.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
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,
(21:28):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:11):
the contact. It's just its most effective when there isn't
really much of a threat to the person carrying one.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Are criminals afraid of the taser or is it like, yeah,
what are you gonna do? You get a taser?
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Me?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Okay? Get it over with them.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
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
(22:43):
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
(23:04):
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
(23:27):
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.
(23:49):
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 (23:57):
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 (24:08):
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 (24:24):
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 (24:29):
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.
(24:51):
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 Nick Beredini. I'm always talking about law
enforcement and tech.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
You gotta come back to this show anytime in the future. Nick.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Thanks Sarah, will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Okay, thanks you too,
Hey, guys, please don't forget about erro dot net A
r r o e dot net. I believe in the
power of choice, and your listening habits are a choice.
There are seventeen podcasts to listen to. Please enjoy them
a r r o e dot net. Hey, thanks for
checking in. Let's do some podcrashing get to know other podcasters.
(00:20):
Podcrashing Episode number three ninety eight is with Nick Berardini.
He's the host of the podcast Absolute Taser Incorporated. How
are you doing today, Nick?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Good? How are you er?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Absolutely fantastic. I gotta start off with this right here.
I'm a I'm a broadcast instructor and I and I
faced 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 (00:52):
Well? It was. It's, you know, a winding road. It
began when I was with 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
(01:14):
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 that story of that man's death ended up
inspiring a film that I made, A documentary that I
made ten years ago that that did quite well about
(01:37):
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 with police officers themselves,
(01:58):
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,
oftentimes 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
(02:20):
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
(02:40):
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
weapon's success to now become what I believe is the
most powerful company most people have really never heard of
(03:04):
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 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. Well,
(03:28):
that 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
(03:50):
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 (04:09):
Yeah it, 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 seen 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 (04:32):
Yeah. Well, the beauty of the marketing, you know, the company,
even at 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,
(04:54):
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
(05:16):
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 shoot 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
(05:37):
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 odds 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 and policing and just say,
(05:58):
you got a problem or 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,
(06:24):
I hate to say cheapened policing in that way, but
it made it so that officers really didn't have to
wrestle as much with the thought of using force.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
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 taseer the guy and she ended
up shooting the dude.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
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
(07:09):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:53):
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 then
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
(08:17):
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 deal with that person who's
having a mental health crisis after you've really had very
very little mental health training.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
That's a burden that we put on a lot of
officers that I don't think we adequately prepare them for.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
One of 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 (08:56):
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 uh,
(09:16):
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
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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 tastes him. Despite the
obvious holes we're able to poke in all of the
(10:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Son, Please do not move. There's more with Nick Baradini
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.
(10:51):
I don't know anybody who owns a taser.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
I think that's a bit there's certainly a cultural elements
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
(11:17):
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. But 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
(11:40):
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
(12:04):
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,
(12:27):
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,
(12:48):
you know goal. The practical goal was to succeed in
business and they've done that phenomenally.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
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 (13:05):
I think that most police officers. The whole idea of
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
(13:26):
that law enforcement has become so controversial. 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,
(13:46):
any traffic stop, and you can spiral it in your
own mind to say, well, if X y Z 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 tase this guy rather
than risk the hypothetical of the situation escalating further. They
(14:10):
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, stimulant drugs was taser them as long as
(14:31):
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
(14:51):
to you know, the true fight or flight, you know psychology.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Do you see Greg Meyer from the LAPD as being
an activator or is somebody who needed to ask the
right questions?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
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
(15:24):
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
(15:44):
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
(16:07):
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
(16:27):
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 (16:40):
So modern day technology, are we going to get a
stun gun eventually without something that's connected to wires?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
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 somebody
like like a Captain Kirk Faser 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
(17:08):
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
the success of the taser has birthed this technology and
(17:33):
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 of my film, or I
would give talks or things about well, if you just
listen to the cop you know, if you just if
you just respect the officers and listen to their commands,
you won't be in any trouble. And Okay, I don't
(17:53):
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 over and then being fed
through an AI machine that's proprietary to a company that
(18:16):
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
(18:37):
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
(18:57):
really where the money is though. The money is in
the camp and the storage and the artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
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 (19:18):
Yeah, But the essentral 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 sky net of policing.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
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
(19:57):
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,
(20:17):
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 and promised them that,
and then when it did sort of left them holding
the bag or those deaths, right, what is he willing
to do when the technology begins to falsely accuse people
(20:40):
of things they didn't do. 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, we don't own our
own identity. It's going to belong to this big mass
surveillance state.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Now, what is the reason why the US military does
not carry a taser? Is it because of the cost.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
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,
(21:28):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:11):
the contact. It's just its most effective when there isn't
really much of a threat to the person carrying one.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Are criminals afraid of the taser or is it like, yeah,
what are you gonna do? You get a taser?
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Me?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Okay? Get it over with them.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
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
(22:43):
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
(23:04):
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
(23:27):
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.
(23:49):
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 (23:57):
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 (24:08):
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 (24:24):
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 (24:29):
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.
(24:51):
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 Nick Beredini. I'm always talking about law
enforcement and tech.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
You gotta come back to this show anytime in the future. Nick.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Thanks Sarah, will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Okay, thanks you too,
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