The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [110]
“I might mention that my first pursuit was in 1957,” McGill said. “Kid running for nothing, and he ended up hitting a train off Alameda. Knocked the train off the track and didn’t do him any good, either.” He went on for a while, then said, “Let’s change gears and talk about Carpoon.”
“How do you envision this?” Heal asked. “It shoots a probe?”
“Powerful mini-barrel air gun mounted on the front bumper of a police car,” McGill said. He leaned toward Heal. “The air gun is slaved to a dash-mounted computerized video camera that will project the image of the road in front of the police car. As soon as the officer goes into pursuit mode, the other car’s rear tires appear on his computer screen. The officer touches a tire on the screen, crosshairs immediately appear. Another touch on the screen moves the crosshair to any quadrant of the tire he wants, and when he’s satisfied he gets an aural tone, like a sidewinder missile. As long as he hears that tone, that crosshair is on the tire, no matter where the guy goes.”
McGill waved a hand. “From here on out, everything is automatic,” he said. “All the time the officer’s driving, he hears the tone. At a predetermined distance, the gun is going to fire. He’s just driving.”
Heal’s BlackBerry began buzzing, and he took it out and read a message. Then he said, “Sorry.”
“Air gun shoots a tethered dart into the tire,” McGill went on. “Now the bad guy’s got a quarter-inch hole in his tire. In addition, the computer will give him some cable that will wrap around his wheel and cause real havoc. I’m hoping we can engineer something that will break an axle, break a tire shaft.”
McGill turned to me. “These guys, Sid and I know, will lose a tire and keep going, but we’ve taken the hundred-mile-an-hour thing out of it.”
“You have no idea on price, though, because you don’t have a developer, right?” Heal asked.
“I don’t have anything,” McGill said. “I need a money partner.”
Heal leaned back slightly. “All this stuff is feasible,” he said. “Military uses it all the time.” He asked if McGill had consulted the National Institute of Justice Office of Science and Technology.
“I haven’t looked at anything,” McGill said. “I just got the patent.”
“You’re going to need a working prototype before you have much of a chance,” Heal said. “They got to see it, touch it, smell it, watch it work.”
He looked hard at McGill and said, “I have to tell you something: Do not mortgage your house. Do not give up your retirement.”
McGill looked at his wife. “We’re not going to do that,” he said. His wife shook her head.
“Perfect is the enemy of good,” Heal said. “If you can get to the field-trial stage, you’re the only one there. When I first read your letter, it came across as a tether device, and they’re almost universally rejected.”
Heal said a few more things about how McGill might proceed, then he and McGill shook hands, and we went to Heal’s car. As we drove away, McGill waved to us from the lawn.
I asked Heal what chance he thought the Carpoon had. “What we’re hoping really is somebody invents a directed-energy device that uses a signal from our car to interrupt the other car’s ability to supply fuel or ignition,” he said. “It may make the fuel mixture too rich or too thin, and if you can change it even briefly the car will die. That’s the Holy Grail. Whoever invents that will be rich from the day he does.”
MORE THAN NEW INVENTIONS, Heal sees weapons made for the military and adapted for the police. Traditionally, many adaptations have involved shooting less harmful things at people than metal bullets. In 1958, British colonial police in Hong Kong used bullets made from teak called baton rounds. They would aim the guns at the ground, and the bullets would ricochet—it was called skip-firing—and hit people in the shins, which was very painful. A refinement, rubber bullets—which were lethal often