The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [111]
The Taser, which the police tend to adore and civil-liberties organizations loathe, was patented, in 1974, by a NASA researcher named John Cover. The name Taser is derived from “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle,” a book in a series for adolescents first published in the early twentieth century. Tom Swift was an inventor, and the plots usually involved things he dreamed up to resolve a crisis. (Cover was fond of the books.) The Taser can reach a person thirty-five feet away. The pain it causes is temporarily debilitating. Nevertheless, people have died after being shot with it. Amnesty International believes that the Taser hasn’t been tested properly and that it should be withdrawn until more is known about how it affects certain classes of people. Short of that, the organization would like to see it used solely when killing someone is the only alternative. Heal regards the Taser as a valuable tool that should never be used recklessly—merely to subdue a troublesome person, for example.
“In law enforcement, our core value is to have a reverence for human life,” Heal told me. “It doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t take it; it means we would avoid taking it if we could. Life-and-death decisions are made in the military and in law enforcement by the least experienced people, just the opposite of business. But they are the ones in harm’s way. And therein lies a great irony: even the failure of a non-lethal weapon makes a case for restraint. Let’s say a guy’s coming with a machete. We hit him with bean bags. He doesn’t stop. And we kill him. We went to great efforts. A primitive option is a warning shot.”
For policemen, Heal said, “twenty-one feet and a hundred and eighty feet are the two figures your non-lethal weapon has to satisfy. Twenty-one feet is the distance at which you can be killed by a person with an edged weapon or club if the force you use to deter him is not immediately effective, which means right-now lethal. A hundred and eighty feet—less than three per cent of the population can throw an object large enough to cause serious injury beyond that. Golfballs, spark plugs—they’ll give you stitches. But a brick—you get hit in the head, helmet or not, it’ll put you on your knees. If you have a weapon that has a range shorter than a hundred and eighty feet, while you’re approaching them to get into your range you’re being pummelled with bricks and bottles. In the middle of the city, where everything’s paved, they bring stuff to throw at us—wheel weights, things that are cheap. We had one guy who could throw a golf ball ninety-seven yards. You can buy a bag of golf balls for five bucks and equip everybody in the mob.”
One day, I went with Heal to a sheriff’s station to meet a salesman from a company in Washington State who had a laser that he wanted Heal to see. The salesman’s name was Clint Meyers. From a briefcase he produced a black metal tube that looked like a gun-sight, and a larger one that was about the size of a Maglite. He handed the small one to Heal. “This is the military version they’re using over in the sandbox right now,” he said.
“What’s eye safe on this?” Heal asked.
“Eye safe is about eighteen metres,” Meyers said.
Heal twisted the device in his hands. “The official term the military gives it is ‘to visually dissuade,’” Meyers said for my benefit. “Someone approaching a checkpoint sees this, he knows he’s supposed to stop.”
“What do you see as your law-enforcement market?” Heal asked.
“Entries,” Meyers said. He turned to me. “The reason I wanted the Commander to see this is it’s a way to come into a building—you know, the bright lights they have on shields; it does the same kind of job.”
“I don’t want anyone using shields on entries,” Heal said. “You’re in a defensive posture, you’re sacrificing mobility.” He turned the laser in his hands. “Some of it’s going to carry through to law enforcement,