We've all seen the videos. They're as widely disseminated as they are difficult to watch. In them, a suspect – or perhaps not even a suspect, but instead merely a bystander – is hit with a police officer's taser gun, literally shocked into submission by thousands of vaults of electricity. As the manufacturer TASER explains, the device functions to confuse a subject's communicative channels between brain and muscles. But though it's certainly far less harmful than a gun, it is an incredibly risky device. According to a February 2012 article in RT, the past decade has seen at least 500 deaths stemming from tasers.
For officers, the taser is a weapon to be used sparingly, and they're trained extensively as far as when and when not to use it. TASER's own site specifies that the device is to be used for "stopping a violent subject." Yet all too often police officers seem to veer from this ostensible purpose and dispatch taser probes on those who are not violent and who pose no threat, such as this deaf man and this suspect who was already in restraints and being booked. Clearly, tasers can only be effectively deployed if there's a commensurate check on power of the authorities who've been authorized to use them. To that end, a wearable camera is hitting the market that would monitor the taser's activity. The company behind the product? TASER itself.
Camera could serve to deter police violence
Across the country, cameras already play a more pivotal role in daily police proceedings than they ever have before. Police, bystanders and even those being arrested are all apt to whip about some video recording device in order to document police action in progress. Such recordings have led officers to be held culpable for crimes where they otherwise likely wouldn't be, such as the NYPD officer whose gun and badge were taken after a video of him choking Eric Garner to death appeared to show excessive force.
According to Popular Science, the new device by TASER – called the Axon Body – is being advertised as a wearable device that police can count on to deliver comprehensive recordings of an altercation. The way the Axon differs from a normal camera – say, one that a bystander would take out of his or her pocket to record an arrest – is that it runs all the time, thereby providing officers with a full video document of an exchange with a suspect, instead of one filmed on the street that could have not provided enough visual context for the officers' actions. The way the device works is that it needs to be activated in order to actually record, but once an officer starts recording, that recording will include the previous 30 seconds of footage shot before the officer hit the button. Through saving the last 30 seconds' worth of footage, the Axon ensures that an officer who's up to 30 seconds late to press the record button will still have a full picture of what happened.
If widely enacted, this technology has the potential to reduce instances of police violence, since officers will basically be holding themselves to task the second they put on the wearable device. But opponents of the Axon will understandably argue that the new device isn't really all that much of a check on power, since what if an officer just conveniently "forgets" to record before administering extreme brutality? One thing is for sure: However effective the Axon is, it certainly won't stop people from exercising their right to record police interactions.
