The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [109]
Heal’s field trials of new weapons last several weeks or months and involve sometimes just a few deputies and sometimes as many as five hundred. In 2000, he tested the TigerLight, a flashlight that also dispersed pepper spray. Deputies carried pepper spray and flashlights on their tool belts; the problem was that fights broke out too quickly for them to get to their pepper spray, whereas they usually had their flashlights in hand. “When a deputy gets in trouble, he’s going to hit with his flashlight, and you’re going to get stitches, which almost always result in lawsuits,” Heal says.
Initially, Heal distributed twenty TigerLights. The deputies didn’t like that when the lights were upside down the pepper spray leaked on them. The manufacturer fixed the problem, and in 2005 Heal gave out five hundred TigerLights. “We figured if the option to use the spray in the TigerLight could reduce head strikes by even two or three per cent we’re going to recover the money the TigerLights cost,” Heal says. The difference was closer to thirty per cent. “It was a real sleeper.” He says that at the end of a trial the endorsement he looks for is that deputies complain when he takes the weapon away.
MANUFACTURERS WHO HAVE A PRODUCT that they want Heal to consider tend to bring it to him, but he also travels a lot. He answers anyone who contacts him, and he has spent a good deal of time driving around Southern California visiting inventors. Recently, I went with him to see David McGill, a retired member of the L.A.P.D., who had written a letter describing a device he calls the Carpoon. McGill and his wife live in Temecula, about seventy miles southeast of L.A. The Carpoon is designed to stop cars that are fleeing the police.
“People have thought of all kinds of harpoon devices,” Heal told me on the way to McGill’s. “Some shoot out the tires, some lock onto the car, then you drag them to a stop by slamming on the brakes. What we’re going to see here is called a running gear-entanglement system. His idea is he fires a probe that hits a tire then rolls a cable around the axle and kills the ability to drive the wheel. It’s the release part that’s a good idea—being entangled is not attractive. Nobody likes entanglement. You’re entangled, he spins out, which makes us spin out; it’s like a boa. There’s so much civil liability with that. Even if a bad guy’s breaking the law, he was safely breaking the law until we spun him out.”
Recalling other inventions, Heal mentioned a man who had built a remote-control machine gun. “You looked at a little TV screen that has a crosshair on it, and you fired with a toggle switch,” he said. “I put eight rounds through a target, but it had no application in law enforcement that I could think of. Another lab had a sniper-detection system that would locate a sniper by a combination of acoustics and light. They were taking it to the Balkans—this was ’97 or ’98. I tried to get them to let us borrow one for South Central L.A., but it was classified.”
Heal took an exit off the freeway. “One device I really liked was a camera that fit on a dog’s head,” he continued. “It was just like a little hat, and when the dog searches for a crook you see what the dog sees. There was also a little speaker that fit in the dog’s ear. You could talk quietly and the dog would follow your commands. That one, I think, still has potential. The dog handlers were willing to try it; I just wasn’t able to get the canine to buy into it. The problem is, it takes about three weeks for the dogs to tolerate it, and until they do they’ll scratch their heads and pull at their ears. The guy only wanted to give it to me for a month.”
By now, we had arrived in a neighborhood of single-story houses. Heal had brought McGill’s letter with him and, reading the address on the back of the envelope,