Stroud - Thin blue lie: the failure of high-tech policing

You hear a click, like the sound of a light switch or a pencil being snapped.

Youre facing away from it, looking straight ahead, just as instructed. The click and the searing pain you feel are nearly instantaneous, but your mind tricks you into thinking that theres a distinct period between the click and your first realization that somethings gone very wrong. Maybe thats because your shooterfriendly and supportive, congratulatory, even, somehow impressed that you were dumb enough to have volunteered for thishas prepared you for it, warned you that a pain like no other is about to strike you.

So you just stand there, waiting for it, on the wrong side of target practice.

When it hits you, no matter how much you expect it, it comes as a surprisea literal shock, like a baseball bat swung hard and squarely into the small of your back. That sensation, which is actually two sharp steel barbs piercing your skin and shooting electricity into your central nervous system, is followed by the harshest, most violent spasm you can imagine coursing through your entire body. Needles everywhere, overwhelming you. With the pain comes the terrifying awareness that you are completely helpless. You cannot move. You lose control of almost everything and the only place you can go is down, face first to the floor.

THE WHOLE THING lasted five secondsbut it felt like an eternity.

I had just spent several hours interviewing employees in the Scottsdale, Arizona, headquarters of the wildly successful, publicly traded company that makes Tasers, the black-and-yellow electroshock devices. At the time, the company was called Taser International. Just a few years earlier, Tasers had become Internet famous when a college student was filmed shouting Dont taze me, bro! at a university police officer in 2007. Like many who saw that viral video, I hadnt taken the weapons very seriously.

But on my way out of the building, the companys main press officer asked me, Do you want to take a ride?

He was asking if I would voluntarily subject myself to being shocked by the companys signature product. It was typical, he claimed, for anyone visiting Taser Internationals massive, futuristic desert compound to get a taste of what Tasers all about.

Maybe it was the hot desert air. Maybe it was the fact that Id never read or heard a good explanation of what it feels like to be shocked with a Taser. Whatever the reason, I agreed to play along.

AS SOON AS it was over, I began to ask myself for the first time: Is a weapon this powerful really necessary for police to do their work safely?

Many cops would say yes, of course: the purpose of Tasers is to disable and immobilize unruly suspects. Tasers give police another option that is less likely to kill someone than a gun. Tasers make police safer. But as I looked deeper into Taser International, this reasoning seemed flimsier and flimsier.

I soon came to see that this was just one example of many in which police put their total faith in technology, expecting it to solve the massive, seemingly intractable problems inherent to their work. Weve seen this same kind of blind optimism concerning body cameras, Compstat, predictive policing, cell phone trackers, and even surveillance cameras. Leaving aside the important privacy concerns that have been raised about some of these technologies, in many cases they simply dont do what theyre supposed to do. And more often than not, the technologies have turned out to be expensive stopgaps that give the police a sheen of forward-thinking pragmatism while in fact steering them away from the kinds of fundamental reforms that could make a real difference. How did police come to trust technology so fervently? And what role has technology played in pitting them against the communities theyre supposed to serve and protect?