99% Invisible - 243- Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

On January 3, 1979, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department went to the home of Eulia May Love, a 39-year-old African-American mother. The police were there because of a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. The officers approached … Continue reading →

This is 99% indiscible. I'm Roman Mars. On January 3rd, 1979, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department went to the home of Yule May Love, a 39-year-old African-American mother. The officers were there because of a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. They had been called to her home by the gas company because she had hit the utilities bill collector with a shovel. Mrs. Love was overdue with her $69 payment. The officers approached her and the encounter quickly turned violent. Love allegedly threatened the officers with a knife. They fired 12 times and killed her.

Her neighbors in Watts couldn't believe it. They could have seduced this lady without using the weapons that they used. It could have took her alive, plain and simple, because it was two cops against one lady with the butcher knife. Neither of the two offices involved were prosecuted for the killing. That's George Lavender, a criminal justice reporter at KCRW in Los Angeles. The shooting spout protests and calls for the resignation of the chief of police. In the months since, blacks and liberals have become intensely critical of what they

charge is excessive use of force by the Los Angeles Police Department. The American Civil Liberties Union says that in the last four years, officers here have shot over 300 people, killing nearly half of them. Even though police shootings had been happening for years, and of course still happening today, the killing of Yulaluv received a lot of media attention. That put pressure on the department to respond. The Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners recommended changes to training

and the way shootings by officers were investigated. And the killing also led the department to research non-lethal weapons to see if there was some alternative that might reduce the LAPD's reliance on guns. We needed to find a way to control people. Was there something that we could do before we had to shoot them, before they had an opportunity to attack and get shot? That's Greg Meyer. He's a retired captain with the LAPD, and in 1979, he was given the job of researching

non-lethal weapons for the department. And what we were looking for was something that was effective at subduing a person so that they could be handcuffed expeditiously without a big fight. Maya and the LAPD set out to find a new tool that they hoped would help avoid needless deaths and injuries. The police chief at the time, Darrell Gates, told the Los Angeles Times, quote, what we need is that thing you used to see in Buck Rogers, that thing you used to zap him. Freeze him. Stop him. Ever since the beginning of policing, officers have been looking for tools to subdue people

that they consider threatening. When police first started to patrol the streets of America's cities, many carried sticks. In 19th century New York, cops actually had two sticks to choose from, a shorter stick for the day, and a longer one for the night time, because it was thought that more dangerous criminals would come out after dark. That bigger stick became known as the Night Stick. It's called by other names too, the Billy Club, Truncheon, Baton. By the early 1900s, lots of police departments across the country were equipping their officers with guns, but Night Stick remained the alternative weapon of choice.

In the 1960s, that began to change. There was a lot of interest in using new weapons to control alternative weapon of choice. In the 1960s that began to change. There was a lot of interest in using new weapons to control large crowds of people. Many of those weapons, like tear gas, came straight from the military. But some police departments started using a new electrical weapon, the cattle prod. They're designed to move cattle by providing a very focused pain on the body. That's Darius Rijali. He teaches political science at Reed College and has written about the history of electrical weapons

and torture. They're usually two electrodes separated by about two inches and they provide a sudden sharp blast of voltage, which moves a person to comply with commands. Police began to use cattle prods against protesters during the Civil Rights Movement in addition to attack dogs and firehoses. Cattle prods emerged in the hands of the Alabama

Mississippi police as early as 1961. And by 1964, they had become quite common and also quite contentious. Because people objected to being treated like cattle. In 1963, a New York Times article described Alabama highway patrolman using cattle prods on a group of African-American freedom walkers. The Times reported, quote, as one of the Negroes flinched and twisted in the grip of the four troopers, an elderly

toothless white man shouted from a roadside pasture, stick him again, stick him again. In quote, people were offended by these stories and images. But there were also proponents of electrical weapons who thought they were better than bludgeoning people with sticks. Better a few joints of electricity than a knockout blow on the head. That's Richard Dordy, a former deputy police commissioner of New York City advocating for electrical prods on ABC in 1968. What is a nightstick after all? It's a club, it's no stick, it makes the cops look like ugly primitives when they use the thing, and it makes the people who

get hit, as well as the thousands who watch such scenes on television, hate the police more than before. Now, why does this have to be? Why in this age of science and alleged enlightenment do our police have to use a weapon that is right out of the stone age? As it turned out, an inventor named Jack Cover was thinking about these questions, too. Instead of a weapon from the Stone Age, he wanted to create one right out of the space age.

But whether it would be any more enlightened is debatable. Cover worked as an aerospace scientist and had been involved with NASA's Apollo program. In the late 60s, as images of protests and police violence saturated the nightly news, Kovar came up with an idea, a weapon that would temporarily immobilize a person at a distance using electricity. For several years Kovar worked to develop this device, and finally he created something that worked. He named his new invention after a science fiction novel from his childhood called Tom Swift and his electric rifle.

In the book, Tom Swift's electric rifle is a lethal device that fires balls of electricity that can pass through walls and penetrate armor. Cova's electric rifle, on the other hand, was intended to be non-lethal, something that could be used to incapacitate a person without injuring them. To name the weapon, Cova took the initials from Tom Swift's electric rifle, T-S-E-R. And then he added an A to make the word easier to say, Taser. You enter a new space age weapon that stands but does not kill the victim. Science-Innerger Jules Bergman has details in this report.

It's called the Taser and they claim it's the first gold tentative of a gun. It looks like a large flashlight. You shine the beam to light up the target, press the switch, and it fires two guards at the intruder. The taser used a small gunpowder charge to fire the two metal darts. The gunpowder meant that some of the early tasers were categorized as firearms. A tiny part of the drive proposed a bomb drive which would have to find wires. The wires carried 50,000 volts in time from a rechargeable battery in short-first. When both the darts hit a target electricity would flow along the metal wires causing the muscles

to tense up involuntarily. The high of old-est guards hit, clean the clothing, and send its guards of temporal and parallelized muscles incapacitating the attacker. The guards conduct right through the clothing. They don't have to penetrate flesh. The cattle prods police departments had been using delivered painful assaults of electricity to make someone move.

The taser, on the other hand, used electricity to immobilize them. Cover patented his weapon for immobilization and capture in 1974, instead of approaching police departments across the country to see if they were interested in buying his invention, but he didn't get much traction at first. It's important to recognize it. In its early days, police were absolutely not interested in this weapon. They could imagine what would happen if a, I think I believe the line was a crazy hippie

grabbed the end of a taser and wrapped it around the neck of a policeman with all this electrical wire. Nobody wanted to go near it with a 10-foot pole. So, Cove tried to find other buyers like the Army, but that didn't work out. He then tried the airline industry. He wanted to create a light device, one that could be handled by a female stewardess, to incapacitate a would-be terrorist or hijacker, I guess, in those days. But airlines ended up addressing their hijacking problem

with the introduction of metal detectors and X-ray machines that screened passengers and their belongings before they got on the plane. Throughout the 70s, Kovac kept tweaking the design of his taser and shopping it around to potential customers, but except for a handful of small police departments, he really didn't have much success. Then finally, in 1979, he found a good match, one of the biggest police departments in the country, the LAPD. As it turned out, the taser seemed to be exactly what the department had been looking for. A device the police could use to, quote, zap him, freeze him, and stop him. So the things would be handcuffed expeditiously without a big fight.

Since the killing of Yula Love, Greg Meyer at the LAPD had been searching for an effective non-lethal weapon. The department looked at things like chemical sprays, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets. We also looked at all kinds of contraptions, including a net and something called the action control chain that was very complicated. Meyer says the LAPD even spent a day at the Los Angeles Zoo

to see if it might be possible to use tranquilizer darts. They're not ready. Then, and they're still not ready now for human use, too dangerous, too many animals die when tranquilizer guns are used. And that's when they already know the animals diet and weight and habits. So when Cobra came along with his taser, the department wasn't intrigued. But first, Meyer needed to see how it might work. My job was to figure out, okay, is it really a good idea?

Does it really work in real life on the street? Not just in a testing environment, but in real police situations out there. So the LAPD took the taser out onto the streets of South Los Angeles and began to test it, actually using it on people they were trying to subdue and apprehend. At first, the device didn't do what the police wanted, and so they asked Cobra to increase the power, which he did, and then they took it out for more testing. And within just six or ten days, you days, we knew we had a winner. The LAPD put in an order for several hundred tasers,

and other police departments would soon follow. Today, tasers are a huge business. Almost all tasers used by police in the US are made by one company, Taser International. Founded by two brothers, Rick and Tom Smith in the early 90s, the company worked with Cove to expand on his original invention. Over 80% of all law enforcement departments in the US now use tasers. When Jack Cove died in 2009, his wife told the New York Times that he believed his invention

had saved 100,000 lives. But of course, the story of tasers is way more complicated than that. For one thing, it's tough to say if tasers have or have not saved lives. Data on both police shootings and taser use are notoriously unreliable here in the US, and even if they're not designed to be lethal, tasers still produce an incredible amount of pain. I know that first hand, because back in the summer of 2015, I volunteered to be tasered. I met up with two taser instructors who worked for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, Deputy Chris, Saldana, and Deputy Ed Clark.

Both of them have been tasered before, and they tell me the only thing I have to worry about is ruining my shirt. It's going to be a blend, it's going to be a whole thing. You might do anything, you know? I don't care. OK. The tazers used by the LA Sheriff's Department have changed a lot from the models

first developed by Jack Cove. For a star, they look much more like guns. The one Clark is holding in his hands looks a bit like a plastic toy gun Black with a yellow stripe on the side Modern tasers also use compressed gas instead of gunpowder to fire which means they're no longer considered firearms But the basic function has remained the same when it's fired both darts have to connect with the target to form a circuit Each taser cycle typically lasts five seconds

to form a circuit. Each taser cycle typically lasts five seconds. So I don't fall and hurt myself, they ask me to lie down. As I get onto the floor, Clark asks if I want to be able to tap out early, meaning stop the electric shock before the five seconds are up. I think if I tap out then I'm happy to go shorter. Then Clark raises the weapon and points it at my back. OK, I'm ready. Taser, taser, taser. I lasted for about two or three seconds before I had to tap out. More than enough time to know that I wanted to do whatever I could to make it stop.

I think what I remember most was just not being able to focus on anything except the feeling in my back or across my body. For those two seconds, it felt like my entire body was out of my control. It was the most intense pain I've ever experienced. After George had recovered, the instructors had to pull the taser barbs out of his skin. Twist and pull? Really, the only medical care to be rendered is a bandit. So it's not like a big hook that's going to tear a hunk of flesh.

My back was sore for a few days, and it took about a week for the puncture weren't to heal, but the memory of the experience stayed with me for longer. I kept replaying it over and over in my head for several weeks afterwards. In the fact is, George had it easy. Most people who get taser don't do so voluntarily. They don't have the option of tapping out when they've had enough. And in the real world, the effects of tasers can be much worse. Tasers are now referred to as less lethal weapons rather than non-lethal. In part, that's an acknowledgement that any weapon can be fatal. Even a blow from a nightstick can kill

someone. There is no use of force that is completely safe. According to a report by Amnesty International, medical examiners have listed tasers as a cause or a contributing factor in more than 60 deaths in the United States between 2001 and 2012. And a 2014 article in the Journal of the American Heart Association concluded that the taser could cause cardiac arrest. Taser International's training materials warn that its weapons can quote, cause death, but the company is really statement stressing that they are quote, generally safe. After Yula loves death in 1979, the LAPD set out to find a new weapon to reduce their alliance

on guns and improve their relationship with the community. But it's not clear that tasers are succeeding at this central purpose, even in the majority of cases when they don't contribute to a person's death. The use of these weapons really drives a wedge between the police and the communities that they serve. These weapons and seeing them deployed seems on its face to be somewhat barbaric. That's Tom Nolan. My name is Tom Nolan. I'm an associate professor of criminology at Merrimack College in

Massachusetts. For 27 years I was a city of Boston police officer. The taser didn't solve the problem of excessive use of forests or police shootings. In fact, some researchers have found that cops are reaching for their taser far too quickly and too often in situations that don't justify it. The more weapons we have, of course, the police are going to use them. I mean, it's become the default compliance tool. And while information on taser use across the country is patchy, in several jurisdictions, there's evidence that they're being used disproportionately on people of color, juveniles,

and people with mental health issues. In a 2016 Department of Justice report found that Baltimore, Maryland, police use of tasers was often, quote, unnecessary and unreasonable. Additionally, the Baltimore Sun found that people were sometimes being tasered for longer than the 15-second limit taser international recommends. In one case, a black man named Anthony Howard was tasered nine times for a total of 37 seconds. He stopped breathing and died shortly afterward.

Video of the incident shows that when Howard was first tasered, he was standing still, holding a child scooter. After he dropped the scooter and fell, officers continued to shock him. Tazers were originally sold as a way to respond to dangerous situations, like the kind where someone had a knife without having to resort to using a gun. But Nolan says that's not how they're being used. I think the concern that we should all have is that the police are using these weapons unnecessarily in situations where someone has just, as they say in the police world, someone

has flunked the attitude test. The real solution to the issue of police community relations isn't a tool or a technology. The alternative to this is to initiate institutional change and cultural, subcultural change in police agencies. That's something that is extraordinarily difficult to undertake let alone accomplish. It's a change we have to undertake, even if it is extraordinarily difficult, because there is no magic bullet. 99% Invisible was produced this week by George Lavender, Delany Hall, Katie Mingle, and Sharif Usif, with Kurt Coles' stead Avery, Truffleman, Sam Green's fan Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Part of the story originally aired on KCRW,

special thanks to Joe Dominic, Matt Stroud, and Brendan Baker, and special thanks to Melodium and Okia Kumi for their music. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and join discussions about this show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org, run Instagram and Tumblr too. If you want all the stories, the full experience of 99PI, there's only one place to go.

99PI.org Radio Topea From PRX you