This article was on the front page of today's Chicago Tribune.
chicagotribune.com
Taser aims at home market as safety concerns mount
Stun gun's maker, critics disagree on weapon's danger
By Michael Martinez
Tribune national correspondent
February 13, 2005
LAS VEGAS -- The maker of Tasers is launching a major high-stakes campaign to market its new model to consumers despite scores of fatalities and injuries linked to the police Taser, including the death of a man in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood last week.
Taser International, which has made its name in law enforcement and the military, envisions a future in which millions of average citizens protect their homes and communities with the stun guns instead of firearms.
Tasers fire two wires tipped with electric barbs, delivering a shock that painfully and briefly paralyzes a person. The new consumer model has a range of 15 feet and is designed to stun for 30 seconds. The more powerful police counterpart fires 25 feet, with a stronger initial jolt of up to five seconds, extendable for as long as the officer wants, the duration of which the weapon internally records.
Even as government inquiries and shareholder lawsuits have reached their sharpest pitch for the 11-year-old firm, Taser President and co-founder Thomas Smith insists the products are safe and is upbeat about sales of the recently introduced $1,000 consumer model.
"It's a huge potential market," Smith, 37, said in an interview at a recent firearm dealers convention in Las Vegas, where private "Taser Shows" drew hundreds of gun dealers. "I just can't get my arms around how big this can get."
Taser, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., has offered consumer models in the past, but never with so much controversy facing the company as it tries to tap into a potentially lucrative civilian market.
To help kick off the campaign, a Minnesota firearms dealer, Milan Hart, plans to be zapped with the 50,000-volt consumer model for a second or two. A police officer from Albert Lea, Minn., where Hart Brothers Weaponry is located, will administer the jolt later this month.
"I'm not hesitant or reluctant at all," said Hart, 51.
Amnesty International, a leading critic of Taser, warns that while police can receive days of training on the stun gun, civilians are offered one hour of in-person instruction and a 38-minute training DVD, and both are voluntary. The organization sees a serious potential for abuse.
"We have documented a case of a parent using a Taser against a child. That, of course, raises the question if a Taser is going to replace the bootstrap or belt as the preferred form of discipline by parents for children. And if that's so, we're facing a very, very dangerous situation," said William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "It's a ghastly idea."
Tasers and generic stun guns are legal in Illinois for civilians to own, as long as they keep them in their home or business.
Taser isn't a handgun
Tasers use compressed nitrogen gas to propel the wires that are capped with electrodes. But because the weapon doesn't use gunpowder, it isn't a handgun and therefore is unregulated by the federal government, Taser officials said. A handful of states and cities restrict or ban civilian stun guns and New Jersey outlaws them even for police, the firm said. But elsewhere in the U.S., Tasers have become an increasingly popular tool in 7,000 police agencies.
Chicago police have been using Tasers on a trial basis since April. Before last week, they had used them more than 150 times without causing serious injury. But in two incidents last week, one person died and another was seriously hurt.
Last Monday, a stun gun was used on an unruly state ward at a group home on the North Side. Police said the 14-year-old lunged at a sergeant; officials of the Cook County public guardian's office said the boy was no longer violent when police arrived. After being shocked by the Taser, the youth went into cardiac arrest and was hospitalized at Children's Memorial Hospital, where he remained Friday.
Fatal incident in Illinois
On Thursday, a 54-year-old man who allegedly tried to bite an officer in a Lakeview apartment building was shot by a Taser. When he appeared to be in distress, police took him to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The Cook County medical examiner's office had not determined Friday whether the jolt from the Taser was responsible for the man's death.
More than 80 deaths have occurred in the U.S. and Canada among people shot with police Tasers since 1999, and in 12 of the U.S. fatalities, medical examiners have cited the stun gun as one of the causes of death, a contributing factor in the death, or as a possible factor that couldn't be ruled out, according to reports in the Arizona Republic.
Smith said the police Taser hasn't been proved to be the singular cause of any of the deaths.
"In terms of the deaths, we haven't been listed as `A-ha! It's the Taser!'" Smith said. "Listing as a contributing factor doesn't tell me it's the cause."
Smith added that "in-custody deaths are going to happen whether there is a Taser or not."
He and supportive law-enforcement officials around the country say hundreds of lives have been saved by officers using a Taser instead of a firearm. Some police agencies have reported a decrease in use of firearms when Tasers are available.
But Amnesty International says the total incidents in which police have used force--including firearms and stun guns--have increased in some agencies that had Tasers. The group also has raised concerns that Tasers could be used in police torture, without leaving visible marks, and has called for a suspension of the police weapon until an independent safety analysis is conducted.
"Let's say that Amnesty International was successful in banning Tasers in the world," Smith said. "How many torturous events would have been avoided? Zero. Why? It's the intent of the individual, not the weapon."
Taser officials say their weapons have been used in 55,000 police confrontations and on more than 100,000 volunteers, including the majority of Taser employees and, more recently, on 60 people at a consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.
But some police officers have been injured after being "tasered" during mandatory exercises to experience the shock firsthand. After at least two officers were hurt when they fell after being shot in Taser training, the Phoenix Police Department abandoned the exercises, a spokesman said.
While the company cites testimonials from police chiefs--including one who called the Taser the best invention since the police radio--recent incidents have cast a harsh spotlight on police use of the weapons.
In Miami, a 6-year-old boy was shocked in a school office, and in Rock Hill, S.C., a 75-year-old woman was shot with a stun gun in a nursing home. In both cases, police were called because of a disturbance. But in both cases, police were later criticized, and took disciplinary action or refined their procedures.
The red-hot nature of the issue has made some police agencies reluctant to buy the weapon. Though the Boston Police Department won a change to state law last year to allow officers to use stun guns, it has since delayed buying Tasers. That police department endured a public outcry in October over the death of a woman hit with another purportedly non-lethal device fired to disperse crowds during street celebrations after the Red Sox won the World Series.
Chicago bought 200 X26s
When the Chicago Police Department began using Tasers, it assigned one to each shift sergeant in all districts under a pilot program that cost $150,000. The department bought 200 of the company's X26 model.
Chicago police recently expanded the trial use to patrol officers in two districts, said spokesman Dave Bayless.
"We bought it with safety utmost in our minds, and that includes the safety of citizens as well as officers," Bayless said.
After the two incidents last week, Police Supt. Philip Cline called a halt in plans to buy 200 more Tasers but said the department would continue to use the 200 it has.
A spot check of some Chicago suburbs shows that the Naperville police have limited the Taser to their 16-member special response team, and Elgin and Aurora police don't use the weapon.
Taser International is noted for recruiting law-enforcement officers to endorse its product or provide training.
Board member Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who stepped down as President Bush's Homeland Security nominee amid controversy, raised eyebrows when he cashed out Taser stock options at a $6 million profit last year. New York City police bought Tasers during Kerik's tenure.
The Kerik connection is among a number of controversies involving the company.
The New York Times reported last year that the stun gun-maker allegedly conducted safety studies in which company-paid researchers used merely a single pig in 1996 and five dogs in 1999 to test an early police model, the M26.
Smith dismissed the criticism. "They made it sound like we went in the back yard and shot a pig and a dog and said, `It's good to go,'" he said.
Smith said medical and drug companies often pay for studies of their own products. He said he is open to independent studies and cited the peer-reviewed Pacing and Clinical Electrophysiology journal, which says the Taser's risk of causing ventricular fibrillation is "extremely low." But two of the article's four authors are Taser employees.
"You're never going to get anyone to say the risk is zero because nothing is," Smith said.
The company also is facing a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its safety claims and its end-of-the-year sales transaction with its exclusive civilian distributor, Davidson's Inc., including the sale of 1,000 of the new consumer models. An independent research firm raised questions about whether the last-minute deal was a scheme to inflate sales and impress Wall Street, where the Taser firm was one of 2004's hottest stocks.
Two dozen law firms in the past month have filed class-action shareholder lawsuits against the company, alleging misrepresentation of safety, fraud in the Davidson's deal, and insider trading amounting up to $96 million.
The controversy, which has sent publicly traded Taser stock reeling, doesn't deter founders Tom and Patrick Smith, brothers in their 30s who considered becoming doctors but instead developed the electro-shock weapon in the early 1990s with the help of its original patent owner, physicist Jack Cover, who's now in his 80s and had worked on the Apollo space program.
Thomas Smith said he was a biology major at the University of Arizona and then obtained his master's in business administration from Northern Arizona University; his brother majored in neurobiology at Harvard University and then received an MBA from the University of Chicago.
The Smiths entered the stun gun business in their early 20s after two of Patrick Smith's high school football teammates were murdered in a traffic dispute by a motorist with a handgun. Their early model Air Taser was designed for civilians and was sold by the Sharper Image retail outlet for 18 months in the early 1990s. There were 100,000 of these models sold to consumers, the company said. But the device fizzled, partly because it didn't stop assailants emboldened by drugs or alcohol, Thomas Smith said.
So the brothers refined their stun gun and began successfully marketing to law enforcement.
Many Americans first heard "Taser" when Rodney King was shocked with such a device during his beating by Los Angeles police in 1991. That early version was actually made by a different company, Tasertron, later acquired by Taser International.
Police 95% of business
Taser International now equips about 135,000 of the nation's 1 million law and corrections officers, and law enforcement makes up about 95 percent of its business, Thomas Smith said.
Smith notes that the Taser has become part of the mainstream, evidenced in recent movies such as "Meet the Fockers," in which leading characters are zapped by a trigger-happy officer.
Tasers aren't inexpensive. The new civilian model, X26c, costs about $1,000, and the X26 police version $800--both of which are 60 percent smaller and lighter than a prior model, the police M26. A modest, reputable handgun can cost $400 or so. Cheaper stun guns, largely manufactured in Asia, don't have projectiles and require gun-to-skin contact; they can cost $100 or less.
Powered by batteries and weighing 7 ounces each, the X26 and X26c are slightly bigger than a cell phone.
The Taser citizen model allows the user to stun a target for up to 30 seconds. The first cycle of electric jolting lasts 10 seconds, and a user can squeeze the trigger two more times, creating a 30-second period in which the shooter can drop the Taser and flee from an assailant. If the shooter loses his Taser in such an incident and later files a police report, the maker will replace the weapon.
The stun gun uses cartridges that eject the wired barbs as well as 20 to 40 bits of confetti containing a serial number, designed to scatter at a scene and allow law officers to track down the original purchaser. (To hold officers accountable, the police model is designed to count how many times and for how long a trigger is pulled.)
Felony checks required
Under its own background check system, Taser International requires retailers to conduct a felony check on purchasers through ChoicePoint Inc., a Taser contractor. After the computer check, buyers can take home the weapon the same day.
Despite such safeguards, the Bellingham, Wash., police chief successfully persuaded the City Council to ban civilian ownership of all stun guns in January, partly because he feared criminals would use them against his patrol officers.
In Georgia, state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, an Atlanta Democrat, has called for a ban of stun guns for police and civilians, as well as federal regulation of them.
"It's a form of electrocution before prosecution," Brooks said.
But Thomas Smith sees the Taser as a helpful police tool and a safe alternative to firearms for civilians.
"You don't take a Taser to a gunfight. That's not our niche," he said. "But this is a device you can use to defend yourself without making a life-or-death decision."
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune |
