自由与安全：Axon CEO Rick Smith 谈警务的未来

What does it feel like to be hit with a Taser?

It’s terrifying in the moment because you lose control of your body. It feels like waves of energy. Five seconds while you’re being hit with a Taser seems like a very long time. I had enough time to understand the philosophical essence of what it must be like for people who cannot control their bodies. Then the power went out.

Yes. But that’s not fun at all.

As soon as it turns off, it’s all over. You instantly return to normal.

Am I the only person who thinks a great content business could be built on body cameras? These devices produce a ton of cool content. Does this sound crazy? Not only is it valuable from a social perspective, it’s also full of entertaining content.

Well, there was a company that—remember Live PD? I don’t know if you remember this. There was a show that only aired Live PD on Friday nights, like Cops. Remember Cops? A guy I went to high school with had a dad who produced Cops on TV. I always thought it was interesting.

Yes. Live PD was a new version of Cops.

Yes. Their thing was that it was live, so people would tune in on weekend evenings because they wanted to see what was going on, like during a sports broadcast. But then the show was canceled after the George Floyd incident. I think production companies were afraid to share content that looked pro-police.

We’ve been working with A&E Studios for a while, trying to do exactly what you’re talking about: a business based on live body camera content. But you need to know your company’s DNA. We’re too much on the side of the police, and we’re a big corporation that wasn’t going to do the risky things necessary to build a cool content business. But I think this niche is open for someone else.

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It’s great to be here. Thank you.

1. History of TASER/Axon: brink of bankruptcy to IPO

I’m glad we managed to arrange this. I know we talked about your visit to the summit, but then there were delays and we missed the moment. I’m very glad everything worked out. The story of your business is fascinating. I’d like, if you don’t mind, to go back a little to the very origins of the company. Your company was previously called Taser. I think we all remember the original name and product, Taser. Maybe you could take us back and briefly tell us how it all started in the early days.

We started in the early ’90s. This is the only job I’ve ever had. We started in 1993 in a garage in Tucson. The backstory is this: I was in graduate school in Europe, and many European students said they were afraid to go to America because of the gun violence they saw on TV. I told them, “Listen, not everything is as you see in the news.”

One of them asked if I knew anyone who had been shot, and that surprised me. I thought, “Wow, I actually do.” Two boys from my high school football team died in a road rage incident, and we knew a couple of other family friends. When I counted, there were about five or six people.

I was struck by the question: Why do bullets still exist in 1993, let alone 2026? Bullets have existed for many centuries. The simple epiphany was this: If we had Captain Kirk’s phaser, people wouldn’t be killing each other because they’d have a more civilized way to stop whoever was threatening them.

One thing led to another. I learned about a device called a Taser, invented in the 1970s by a NASA scientist who lived in Tucson, Arizona. I found it through patent applications. I just called him and said, “Hey, man, what happened to this technology? I think that’s what the world is missing.”

Shortly after that, he invited me to his home. Here I was, a 23-year-old, and he was a 73-year-old. It sounds like some comic book plot, but we started creating new stun guns in his garage. At first, everyone thought I was crazy. I even have a great video where Emil Michael, one of the executives at Uber—he’s now the Deputy Minister of Defense—came to me when he was 23, and they made a parody video making fun of me and how crazy my idea was to start making stun guns.

So you found the inventor of the stun gun through a patent application, went to him, bought or licensed it, and built a company around it?

Yes. I actually convinced him to do it with me, to retire and, to some extent, show me the way. We built the first stun guns in his garage from parts from a hardware store. First, we had to get permission from the federal government to make sure the new device wasn’t considered an illegal weapon, and that required regulatory approval.

Looking back, you don’t realize how fast you move as a startup compared to the rest of the world. We created our first prototype within 30 days of launching. I have 6,000 people now.

That was 1993?

1993.

And you immediately founded a company and built the first prototype with your own money?

It was friends and family. My father was a serial entrepreneur and had one successful company in Silicon Valley, so he knew a lot of venture capitalists. But none of them wanted to work with us. We weren’t an internet company in the late ’90s. This was the peak of the internet boom, and everyone thought we were some kind of strange, unusual thing.

I’m proud that we’ve achieved enough success now, and thanks to changes in the world, technology for defense and police has become much more popular than it was then.

It was a handheld electroshock device. What was the market like at first? Was this aimed at selling to police departments? How did you plan to enter the market, and what was your first sale?

No, our first market was consumers. The police could have purchased the original Taser, but essentially that Taser was a firearm, even though it looked like a flashlight. That put it in the second category, like a shotgun barrel, which effectively made it illegal and very difficult to purchase. But the police could still buy them.

Our theory was this: If we made this new Taser device using compressed air instead of gunpowder, it wouldn’t be considered a firearm. Then people like my mom could buy it for self-defense. She had just bought herself a gun not long before that.

We started with the consumer market, but we had a hard time and didn’t really succeed. Consumers asked us, “Hey, if this thing really works, why aren’t the police using it?” So we realized we had to prove the device’s effectiveness to the police. After seven years of struggle and defeat, at the end of 1999 we refocused on the police market, and that’s when business took off.

Like MacArthur to the Philippines, I will return to the consumer market once we prove to the police that the Taser is as effective as, or even more effective than, a gun. This will happen within the next five years.

So you spent seven years developing the market, trying to find a product that matched people’s needs, all with money from friends and family. What kept you going? Was there a moment when you said, “Hey, I give up. I need to do something else with my life”?

It’s a classic question for an entrepreneur: How many times are you willing to change course? We had two failed product launches. In 1998, I visited friends in Silicon Valley who had taken jobs at companies with ridiculous names like Yahoo. Of course, they all made huge amounts of money. It was the internet gold rush, and I had just failed with the second product.

I remember going to see my father. He and one of his friends had financed it. I said, “Listen, I think we should shut down. We failed twice.” My father looked at me and said, “You know, it would have been nice to have figured this out a couple of years ago, because we owe Silicon Valley Bank about $2 million. I have $500,000, and I’m responsible for it with my own money. So if we close, the bank will take everything.”

So we had no choice. I put in the last $500,000. The other investor was a guy named Bruce Culver. Congratulations, Bruce, if you’re watching. Bruce invested the same amount. That was the last $1 million we were ever to receive. We would have to survive on that.

2. Going public during the dot-com crash, selling to police, battling shorts and an SEC investigation, pivoting to software

Thanks to this, we managed to design, develop, manufacture, and release a police Taser, then gradually break even and ultimately conduct an IPO two years later.

So you went public at the end of the dot-com boom, right? The market was generally falling then, and the opportunity arose because you already had an income. You sold it to police departments. Was that the main market at the time?

Yes, that was it. Looking back, it was just a lucky coincidence. The internet bubble burst in 2000.

Yes.

At the end of 2000, an investment bank came to one of our trainings. They were delighted: “Oh my God, you’re not an internet company. You’re creating a real physical product. You have real income. We’ll take you to the stock exchange.”

So we went public, I think, because the banks needed deals and we weren’t “the internet.” We went public with a valuation of about $12 million.

Oh. But it was a great result, wasn’t it? You owned 100% of the company.

You didn’t have venture capitalists or funds in the company’s capital?

That’s right. We had a tiny market capitalization when we went public. But because of this, we became the highest-return investment for that bank in Oregon.

This is great.

It was such a relief for me. We had managed to raise enough money to pay off the debts to the shareholders, and I knew my father wouldn’t end up on the street. It was the biggest relief—not destroying my family. Everything else was a nice bonus.

How did you navigate this path in those early days? You come to the police station with a pocket-sized device that shoots electrodes. They dig into the skin, deliver an electric shock, and the person falls, losing the ability to move. How did you convince people who had never heard of it or seen anything like it to place their first orders? How do you start getting those orders? Was there a point when enough police forces got it, everyone realized they needed one, and the market just took off?

This is one of those things where you shouldn’t make life too complicated. We didn’t have money for anything fancy. The main thing was that we solved a real problem.

Early generations of Taser stun guns weren’t powerful enough. The Los Angeles police tried to stop Rodney King with a Taser, for example, but it didn’t work. They switched to batons, with disastrous consequences. That’s why the Taser had a terrible reputation in the late ’90s. And it was deserved: I sent out several demos of our first-generation product, which also couldn’t stop a focused, aggressive attacker. They could endure the pain and continue the fight.

We conducted animal testing to adjust the level of neural stimulation so the device could actually paralyze a person. Once we did that, launching became pretty easy. We didn’t have money for a big advertising campaign. We hired a former Marine, put him in a Winnebago van, gave him a hundred-dollar bill, and he drove around the country, going into police stations and talking about our product.

Until then, non-lethal weapons were considered something like a joke: pepper spray stings, but you can tolerate it. We had the first weapon that could actually stop a person. And police are interesting to the public. They have a lot of courage, let’s say that. They weren’t afraid. They’d say, “Okay, do you think this will work? Let’s try it.”

We offered them $100 if they could stand up after being shot. We hit them, they fell, they shook themselves off, and they said, “Oh my God, that was much more powerful than I expected.” Some tried it again. Then they immediately saw the value.

I can’t tell you how many times police officers have said to me, “God, this would have helped me not shoot someone or get into a violent fight with a dangerous person.” The value proposition was very simple. We just had to convince them that it worked, and we did that with simple demonstrations. From that moment on, the orders started coming in. We could track where our instructor, Hans, was going all over the country. We broke even in a year.

And then there was a decade or so when the stock stayed in the same range, right? Many people think, “Okay, you’re going public, everything will go up, we’re on a growth path.” But how many years was it? Seven years as a private company, eight years until the IPO, and then another decade with the valuation hovering within a few dollars per share, right?

Oh, yes. No, excuse me—in fact, everything is much more interesting. It was seven years of “Will we survive?” We couldn’t pay for electricity.

Then we went public in 2001, and the next four years were crazy. We grew wildly, tripling every year. In 2004, we were the number-one-performing stock in the world. I have an article from The Wall Street Journal on my wall. We were first in terms of profitability over one and three years. That was the year Google went public. We were just smoking.

Then, at the end of 2004, we were hit by an SEC investigation. There were accusations that we lied about the safety of our products to boost our stock price. We can talk about this for an hour. This was a bear attack by short sellers. There were large short positions in our stock. My personal assistant was a mole for the short sellers. It was just crazy. He sent internal documents to them, and they passed them on to The New York Times. The newspaper reported that it was receiving confidential, non-public information from short sellers who had somehow gotten it from our company.

It was a terrible time. In 2005, our shares fell from $33 to $7 a share. You constantly wonder if you’ll survive at all. Our customers were the police, so they stopped buying from us. They said, “Listen, dude, you’re under federal investigation. I can’t go to city council until this is over.”

Ignoring the advice of lawyers, I came to the SEC office in San Francisco with boxes of documents and said, “Guys, I want to help you finish the investigation because I could go bankrupt if this drags on.” Then a long period of stagnation began. The stock never fully recovered after that, and we took a massive blow.

Regarding that investigation, did you complete it?

Oh, yes. They don’t give you a gold star when it’s all over and tell you that you did well. They just say, “No violations found,” and move on. That’s the best option.

But it turns out that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. In that case, we went from zero lawsuits to hundreds. Of course, shareholders sued us. Plaintiffs—everyone who had been struck by a police Taser—were now suing the police and us because we were all over the news. We took several steps in response.

And what was your market capitalization at that time?

The peak was around $2 billion in late 2004, and then it dropped to around $100 million.

So you had hundreds of lawsuits to deal with as a company with a market cap of about $100 million.

Yes. We should have gone bankrupt. We weren’t supposed to survive. This was only possible through sheer determination and, frankly, a little bit of madness.

For example, our insurance company—because we had insurance, like everyone else—wanted to settle our first claim for about $2 million. We said, “No way. You can’t do this. If you settle this case, we’ll be inundated with lawsuits. You’re putting our business at risk. If you settle this case, we’ll sue you. But we’ll give you a way out. If you pay the plaintiff $2 million, we’ll get a little less. You can pay us, we’ll drop our claims, and we’ll see the case through.”

We did it twice. We actually made money on those cases because we won them. But the point is, it was considered crazy behavior. We were making deals with our own insurance company to prevent them from giving a cent to the plaintiffs because we believed we were right, and it worked.

Today, for the first time—knock on wood—for the first time in a decade, we have zero lawsuits. If you’re going to sue us, you’d better be prepared for a serious battle. If we really did something wrong, we’ll be rational and fix it. We’re smart people. But if you sue us in a situation where we believe we’re right, we’ll stand our ground like religious fanatics defending our beliefs. This is important. It’s what protected our business.

This went on for years, right? The lawsuits, the market capitalization standing still. This lasted until around 2012, right? And Rick, my friend, Hadi Partovi is on your board of directors, right?

Yes, that’s right.

And he’s been on your board for quite some time. First, how did you meet? And second, he mentioned a story about the role he played early on in saving the business. Can you tell me what happened?

Oh, yes. It’s impossible to overestimate his importance. Hadi and I were friends back in college. He was one of my friends making a ton of money during the internet boom in the late ’90s, while I was trying to get this stun gun business going.

Sometime between 2007 and 2009, we were working on our body camera business. We launched and started working around 2010, and frankly, I had a real disaster. I’d never built a software company. I hired a team, and let’s just say we had some serious problems.

So I called Hadi and said, “Hey, dude, I need some help. I’ve opened this software company. I created the first stun guns in the garage. I thought I had it under control, but this software thing… It turns out the person I hired probably wasn’t the right person. We were having technical issues, and honestly, I was trying to figure out how we were going to staff up and grow this business. It was completely new for me.”

I asked Hadi to join the board of directors, and he agreed. He was a board member, but for five years he was my part-time CTO, helping me figure things out and put together the right team.

At first, we were building our own data center, which we planned to manage for clients. We almost had a catastrophic failure where we nearly lost all our customer data. Hadi said, “Hey, man, there are a lot of complicated things in the world. Trying to run your own data center isn’t worth the effort.” So we moved to the cloud with AWS and then Azure.

I like to say that Hadi saved the business because he came in at the right time. He helped me figure out how to create a software business from scratch inside a weapons company. While we were doing this, our shareholders thought I was crazy. They said, “Rick, you’re trying to turn a weapons company into a software company.” Like many entrepreneurs, I probably didn’t realize how crazy an idea it was. Geddy was the one who helped me do that.

Did he remain on your board of directors?

Yes, he is still on my board of directors. Surprisingly.

I mean, the stock price—now your market capitalization is $35–40 billion. He must have made a good living.

I suppose so. Yes. Geddy was also the one who pushed us to change the name from Taser to Axon. It was difficult at the time. We were very committed to our brand and proud of Taser. We didn’t want to feel like we were retreating.

Hadi’s argument was, “Hey, man, Taser is kind of a sledgehammer brand. For people, it means stun guns, but you do much more.” He helped me think it through, and he was right. Taser is now just a small part of our business. It’s important, but we have a big business. We now seem to process more videos every day than YouTube. They have more viewers, but we have over a million police officers who upload 2 hours of video every day from one of these body cameras.

We have a huge amount of content, and of course it needs to be stored and transmitted securely, which is very difficult. I have a great team now because Geddy came in and helped me learn the business and rebuild the plane while it was in flight.

Keep going, Rick.

3. Creating the police body cam, surveillance state concerns around Flock

Yes. Another thing happened then. While we were defending ourselves in all the lawsuits, we also went on the offensive and created a body camera. The reason we created it was that the only way to protect ourselves was to record what happened, because our clients had been accused of terrible things involving Tasers.

I remember being involved in the defense in a case in Northern California where someone died in police custody. He was a young man, 40 years old, with a 20-year methamphetamine addiction, and he was in very bad shape. The police officers told me during the court hearing that the family kept showing pictures from his graduation. The officers would look at me and say, “This is not the same person I saw that night when I arrived at that house. I saw someone who was literally like something out of the movie The Exorcist.”

This cop told me he had been a police officer for 26 years and had never felt fear in his career until he encountered the animalistic rage of this man, who had overdosed on meth. But the jury never saw it. At that moment I said, “My God, we have to record what you see.” When police officers describe something, they have to be very professional. In this case, it was, “When Mr. Heston did this or that,” very professional.

The family suing the police used very emotional and graphic language. I said, “Guys, frankly, you’re not very good. You need to tell your story with more passion.” They said, “Rick, we can’t do that. We work for the government. If we get caught telling even one half-truth, it could be the end of our career.” That’s when you realize we need to record this, so you can show people what you saw and what you did instead of trying to explain it.

Didn’t companies already exist that made body cameras by then? Was this concept new?

The concept was new. There was GoPro with consumer cameras, so of course we didn’t invent cameras. But, as a little digression, we were creating the first police body camera, and then the employee developing it quit in the middle of the night and released the product a week later. It turned out he was financing it with his stock options to create a competitor to us. That’s another drama.

We eventually reconciled and later brought that company back into our ranks. But what led to the subsequent explosive growth—the reason we’re a company today worth, I don’t know, $30 billion, compared to a few hundred million—was the body camera. When we launched body cameras, the police didn’t want to wear them. We had 7 years of continuous failure, with cops telling us it was like “Big Brother.” They worried management would pick on every little thing.

Change is always hard. People find many reasons to be afraid of everything new. But we truly believed, “Guys, you should be able to show people what you do. You’re accused of all sorts of terrible things.” So we made a double bet. We focused not only on body cameras but also on the cloud, because we realized the only way to scale this was to upload video to cloud infrastructure. Otherwise, 18,000 departments would be trying to figure out on their own how to manage video servers safely.

But that creates a bunch of liability for the police force, doesn’t it? Now suddenly they’re being held accountable. I love watching body camera videos. The policeman did something wrong, the criminal did something wrong. There’s always drama in these stories. But I guess a lot of police officers get into trouble because they often forget that the camera is on. Isn’t there a liability issue here? How do you convince a client to take a risk, or do you present it as a double-edged sword: it’s for their safety and protection, and for winning in court?

You voiced exactly the fears people had at the beginning. That’s why they didn’t want to wear them: because of that perception. However, a police union leader once told me a famous phrase: “No cop wants to wear a camera until he has worn it for 90 days, and after that he will never go out on patrol without it.” Police are constantly arresting criminals, and criminals lie about what happened without any remorse. The number of false accusations is simply incredible.

I’ll give you one example. I was on a raid with a police officer in Phoenix, in the early days of body cameras, and I asked, “How’s it going?” He replied, “Well, I didn’t like it, but let me tell you what happened last week. I arrested a prostitute. She was, in fact, more than half undressed. She was high, and as I was putting her in the patrol car and taking her to the station, she started yelling at me, ‘I’ll say you raped me. I’ll say you raped me if you don’t let me out of the car right now.’”

He replied, “Ma’am, I just want you to know that this is a body camera. I was recording this whole interaction. You can say whatever you want, but it’s all being recorded.” He said her behavior changed instantly. She calmed down, and he added, “Now imagine what would have happened to me if I didn’t have a camera. If a woman accused me of rape and it turned into ‘his word against hers,’ it could ruin a career because there’s no way to prove otherwise.”

That was a miniature version of it, but the turning point came after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Remember Ferguson?

Yes.

A white officer, a Black detainee. Michael Brown was unarmed, but he was significantly larger than Officer Wilson, and according to Wilson, they struggled over the gun. A police officer takes a gun into any fight, and if they fight over it, he has the right to defend himself.

If you remember those events, the family said, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” claiming Michael Brown was trying to surrender. If that’s true, then it was a cold-blooded murder. But if you listen to the officer, he says, “Hey, I was attacked.” In fact, it appears he had a broken bone above his eye. Further investigation showed that the officer was mostly correct, but it was impossible to prove it.

After that case, Michael Brown’s family said they wanted body cameras. The police union responded, “You know what? We want them too, because at least we want the world to see what’s going on.” As I sit here, it’s interesting that some civil liberties groups that supported the cameras are now opposing them. They say they’re “broken” because they’re not exposing all these bad cops, as if there’s something wrong with the cameras themselves.

I have a different point of view: we need to accept the possibility that most police officers do their jobs well and are being falsely accused. I think that’s what body cameras have proven.

So you go out into the market, it starts moving, and I guess it becomes de facto across the country. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the scale of the business today.

Oh yes, of course. After the events in Ferguson, everyone urgently needed body cameras, and very quickly. This is where our focus on cloud technologies played a big role. Back in 2010, the cloud was a relatively new concept for the government, and they thought, “If it’s here on my computer, it’s safe because it’s in the room with me. I can oversee this.”

But that’s not true. In cybersecurity, Chinese hackers could be on a server in my building and it wouldn’t be a problem. It all comes down to the technology, the stack, and the people you have. Based on basic principles, we knew the cloud could be safer than a regular police station. And we could scale it.

Due to the urgency after the Michael Brown incident, things began to move rapidly. Today, virtually every major police department uses body cameras. Most of them work on our system, partly because we were the first, but also because we are, as they say, maniacally dedicated to our mission.

I know it sounds a bit trite, but we have the luxury of choosing which problems we want to solve. We work on things that will really make a difference and that inspire us. That leads to different results than companies driven solely by the pursuit of profit.

Perhaps you could talk a little bit about what’s been happening recently with public sentiment regarding monitoring. There’s a company called Flock that installs cameras in cities, and they’re starting to force city councils to abandon them.

There are concerns about the development of, in essence, a surveillance state. The fact that government agencies and police get all this monitoring technology creates a bigger, more powerful state that watches us all the time. No citizen wants this. Of course, there's the public safety argument, but maybe you could outline what's happening with public sentiment on these issues right now. I think this is part of a broader concern about AI in general, as well as the proliferation of cameras and sensors.

And look, that's quite right. I don't think any of us want to live in China, meaning a surveillance state where every citizen is watched everywhere they go. However, I think there must be a certain nuance here. We can't go back to the United States of the 1950s, when cameras weren't everywhere. The fact is that cameras are everywhere. There are more cameras than people.

You and I probably have 4 cameras on our cell phones alone, plus maybe a dozen at home, plus all the cameras in our businesses. So it really all comes down to how we approach data management. As a society, under what circumstances should we release these videos from government cameras? How should they use them?

I think, in general, we try to boil everything down to simple principles: What will we be proud of having created? What would be beneficial for society? And if we build it, will it be reliable? Using the example of cameras, we also make cameras for reading license plates. I think we've been pretty careful with the security measures we've put in place to avoid the problems you've seen.

People are actually outraged by things like a police officer being able to look up information about their ex-girlfriend. Such things are morally offensive to people. Or if it were possible to track every American everywhere they go—we don't want that. But people agree that tracking a stolen car or searching for license plates that were around the scene of a violent crime are reasonable use cases.

Even critics like Ben Jordan—I find him to be a very thoughtful critic. He seems to have kind of started it. If you listen to him, he'll say that he isn't advocating a complete rejection of this technology. We just need solid restrictions and safeguards. So I'm a big fan of that.

By the time this webcast is released, I think the election will be over and we'll start to see some changes in federal regulation. I strongly support Senator Hawley's actions to implement regulations and oversight so that we can reap the benefits of these technologies in fighting crime, while having safeguards in place to ensure they don't spy on ordinary Americans.

Do you think people perceive this rationally? I've noticed that there are things people can rationally explain and understand, and others that cause people to have a strong emotional reaction: “Ugh, nasty. I don't want to have anything to do with it.” It seems Ring did an ad during the Super Bowl, and the negativity around it arose because it's so creepy—with all these cameras constantly watching everyone in the area. That's what got people hooked.

I remember stories about Flock, where city workers used these cameras to spy on people even though they had no right to. So you could say, “Sure, let's put safeguards in place,” but the very idea that these technologies exist, that there is such power and such an invasion of privacy, makes people feel very uncomfortable. How, in your opinion, can we change this attitude to a more rational one, using safeguards, and move away from this strong emotional reaction that everyone has?

Yes. Well, I think part of it is just adapting to how society is evolving. A lot of people might still say, “Wow, that's kind of inconvenient,” but they buy Ring cameras precisely because Ring has some of the best technology for protecting your home or sharing video with the police if you're robbed. So I think there are some fluctuations, and that's normal. This is democracy. Moving forward, people won't agree on everything, but over time, I think we'll find common ground.

I don't think it's wise, and I don't think we're going to get to the point of banning door cameras, right? But I think Ring learned from that incident. They've implemented really reliable protections. In fact, we have a partnership with Ring where we're both focused on how to allow homeowners to share footage from Ring cameras with police in the event of a crime, while also making sure police can't casually view those recordings.

There's a lot of work being done on privacy issues to make sure people understand: these are my cameras. I control how they're used. And yet, I once had my car stolen from my house, and it took me days to find it. I had to call a technician to upload the video from this homemade camera system. I couldn't report it to the police for several days. Now I have a Ring because I want to be able to share the recording if something like this happens again.

Therefore, I believe the issue isn't only that not everyone will agree with the restrictions, but that politicians need to find a reasonable compromise. We must find an acceptable public policy. We've already observed this. Again, I really liked Senator Hawley's bill; it's quite rational. It provides for criminal liability if police officers abuse this system for personal gain. I believe there are both criminal and civil penalties.

Additionally, safeguards will be put in place for manufacturers like us and Flock that will require verification of the legitimacy of a request, so we know it's a real case registered with law enforcement. There are 2 key systems where interaction is required before a search can be conducted. So if you're looking for information about your ex, you'll have to find another officer willing to risk his career before you can do it, right?

4. Freedom vs safety, Skydio deal, Taser drone project controversy

I think such safeguards will convince 90% of people who are rational about it, but you'll never convince 100%. Of course, there will always be those who are simply afraid of it. But I've been in this field for quite some time and have seen fears subside when effective and rational security measures are implemented.

You started with the handheld TASER to reduce the use of firearms by police, then moved on to body cameras, and now you're creating what I think is an operating system for public safety. What else is included here? Does this sound like a Flock business? Help explain what other products are emerging now and will eventually help realize this mission.

Yes, our mission is to protect life. We chose these 2 words because we focus on violence as a problem worth solving. With TASER, our goal is to reduce the number of times police officers have to shoot and kill people. With body cameras, the question is how to reduce the risk of excessive use of force by police, and how to protect officers while they do their dangerous and risky work so they don't have to worry about false accusations.

We follow this approach in everything. We're collaborating with Skydio in the drone space. In fact, we recently became the largest investor in a leading American drone company. If you don't know Skydio, it's a company that creates robotic autonomous stations where a drone can take off from a fire station anywhere in the city, and you can get the drone on the scene in seconds.

This reduces the number of times the police have to waste resources going out to alarms. It allows them to focus on more important challenges. During major events, they can direct a drone to the scene, sometimes even before the 911 operator has finished handling the call. So it improves community service.

Again, drones are an area where people ask, “Okay, but how are they used? How do we provide safeguards to know that the police aren't using them in ways the public wouldn't approve of?” That's why we developed control systems together with Skydio. For example, agencies can share profiles of their missions with the public, so if people have concerns, they can see how these devices are being used.

Most agencies have rules that say drones aren't flown randomly while on patrol. They only fly to a specific location when a call comes in and someone asks for help. When a drone arrives quickly, it helps people understand exactly what's happening. In some cases, they even aimed the drone downward to distract attention, or there were cases where people surrendered to the drones.

The general idea is that we apply this to everything we do. We're looking for a way to connect these devices in a way that makes us all safer, but we also recognize that, yes, there are risks of abuse, and we need to build systems to minimize those risks. We won't convince everyone, and not everyone will agree with everything. But for now, we're managing to find the right balance to use these technologies to increase security in the world, protect privacy, and find balance at every step.

I think there's a big debate going on about how much security is needed and at what cost. That's what I think is causing resistance for a lot of people, because the personal benefit of greater security isn't felt as acutely as the risk or cost of restricting their privacy or personal space.

There's this Orwellian idea that the state has too much power, that the government, that the police force has so much authority that they actually, if they wanted to—although there are perhaps safeguards—now have such an advantage over citizens. And this Orwellian idea that the state can decide, “Hey, I don't like the language you're using,” or something like that. There are many reasons why people might feel that this is an abuse of power and authority over them.

It's almost like a question: How far can you go? For example, the movie A Separate Opinion, I think, explores this well, showing where the line is drawn: At what point do you start using AI to predict crimes and arrest people before they commit them? All these fantastic ideas make you wonder, “Is this really worth the risk? Do I really want to pay that price with my personal freedoms to get, as they say, that much more security?” And that seems to be the big discussion that people are having right now.

Is this a fair characterization, or do you think it’s a bit misleading?

No, no, no. I think it’s a fair and proper discussion, but it’s hard work, isn’t it? It’s a search for balance. Interestingly, these technologies are most supported by people from the poorest areas, where crime rates are highest. Paradoxically, they’re the ones who are said to be worried about excessive police presence.

But when you go out into the real world, frankly, the biggest concerns are expressed by residents of affluent neighborhoods, for whom this issue is more theoretical. When you talk to people who deal with gun violence in their cities every day, they’re happy when the police show up, and they’re the ones who want more of these technologies for deterrence.

Ultimately, I would say this: in America, we sometimes have simplistic ideas across the political spectrum. Some people say, “Imprison everyone,” and others say, “No, no, no, disband the police.” None of these decisions are right. I believe the right solution is to implement technology that discourages people from making bad decisions in the first place.

The best deterrent to criminal behavior isn’t long prison sentences. It’s a high probability that you’ll be caught and prosecuted. Then the question becomes: how do we balance that with not creating technologies that can be used to spy on ordinary people? These are interesting techno-ethical problems to work with, aren’t they? How do we build technology that meets ethical standards and helps us make the right choices?

You’re right. I don’t live or work in areas where I encounter a lot of violent crime. I’m driving through San Francisco and I get 3 speeding tickets, and I say, “Put away these damn cameras,” you understand? My reaction is, “Why are these cameras here?” These are what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs.”

There seems to have been a case—I have it in my notes—in June 2022, when some members of your advisory board resigned in protest after you announced plans to develop a surveillance drone with a stun gun designed to prevent school shootings. It seems the council voted against this project because of ethical considerations and privacy concerns. Can you tell us a little about this incident, what you learned from it, and whether this project is continuing?

Yes, this project is ongoing, and that’s why they left. Listen, life can be complicated. I was very disappointed. We created the AI Ethics Board to get feedback, frankly, from human rights groups concerned about police activity, not just from pro-police activists. It was a very useful feature. That’s one of the reasons I think we have great safeguards in the way we’ve developed automatic license plate recognition systems and other technologies.

In this particular case, we worked with them for about a year on the idea of a drone with a stun gun for use in extreme situations, such as a school shooting. Today, for example, if an armed person shows up in a building anywhere in America, do you know how we stop them? We wait for the police with guns. We send more people there with guns, and they start a shootout. This is the Wild West, guys. Is this really the best we can do as a society?

We’re saying that instead of waiting and sending a person with a gun into the line of fire, you can send a drone or a robot equipped with non-lethal weapons. This is a key difference. It’s unlikely that a police officer would go up against someone with a firearm using a non-lethal weapon. But if we send a small drone or robot, everything changes radically. They’ll say, “Oh, wait. Now I can use non-lethal force.”

You can argue about whether a criminal deserves to die, but in any case, the more bullets there are, the more often innocent people die accidentally. I continue to believe, and we’re conducting research, that the safe use of non-lethal force from a distance via a drone or robot is better for everyone than shootings in society.

Because of the way things happened, I think it was after the George Floyd case, some of our advisors were afraid they’d be “canceled” over this issue. Many of them worked at universities and had already faced accusations of being pro-police, so I think there were some personal factors. Many council members privately agreed with me: “You’re right, Rick. This is a better solution than what we have today, where they send cops in bulletproof vests and with assault rifles.” But it was too politically risky, and everything blew up.

I will say one thing I’m proud of: we didn’t give up. Many companies have now abolished their ethics committees. We’ve established ourselves, reorganized, and still exist. It’s now called our Equality and Ethics Council. Frankly, it now has more Black representation, whereas before it was more academically oriented.

When it comes to concerns about excessive police activity, this issue primarily comes from underrepresented communities. One criticism we received during that process was that we didn’t have the right people in the room. If you want to talk about the problems of excessive police activity, it should be done by representatives of the communities most affected.

5. Future of robotic systems and drones in policing

You learn from mistakes. We’ve recalibrated our approach, but we continue to engage people who are critical of police work because we believe it’s important to understand their concerns. By doing this early, we often learn to build safeguards into the product. It’s much better for us to hear critical comments in the early stages of design than after launch, when all we can do is argue. We lose the opportunity to make significant changes to the design.

Let’s talk about the future, 10 years from now. I think that in the next 12 to 18 months, there will be 5 companies in the U.S. that release humanoid robots for commercial use. Prices are rumored to be in the range of $10,000 to $30,000. Do you think the future of policing includes humanoid robots, other types of robots, and drones? Describe what local police work will look like in 10 to 15 years, taking into account all these technologies coming to market.

Yes. First of all, I’ll say that police work is a fundamentally human endeavor. Any decisions about using force against another person will be made by humans, and that’s a clear boundary for us. Even with the stun drone we talked about earlier, part of what we understood from the public’s concerns was the fear of abuse and how these things would be used.

Therefore, any robotic systems we participate in will require human control. We’re also creating processes with multiple levels of authorization. For example, the system can be configured so that before an officer can use even a non-lethal weapon from a drone or robot, real-time support from an administrator is required. We’re effectively creating the least user-friendly technology in the history of policing.

Today, you give a police officer a gun, he walks out the door, and you have no control over what he does with it. You can only hold him accountable after the fact. These robotic systems will give us the ability to make institutional decisions with several people participating in real time, which, in my opinion, will lead to significantly fewer errors and abuses.

I really believe in humanoids. I think drones will get bigger and faster. Humanoids aren’t far off, either. That’s why we invested in Skydio. We bought almost half of the company. We wanted to purchase as many as possible because we believe millions of drones will be deployed in the U.S. in the next few years.

At the same time, we felt it was better to leave Skydio as an independent company that could grow at the speed of a startup and continue to raise and spend capital without the restrictions a public company might have. And yet, we secured exclusive rights. We’ll be an exclusive channel in markets that are important to us because we believe a large part of the future will be drones and robots that arrive at the scene long before people can get there.

The whole idea is to understand what’s going on. Let’s make sure we make the best decisions possible, because the goal is to keep us all as safe as possible.

How can citizens preserve their personal freedoms without being stifled by a state armed with so much technology? I think this is where I personally react as someone with more libertarian views. I’m a big believer that the role of government is to ensure public safety. But the idea that you’re creating a significant concentration of such extraordinary power is troubling, because it makes it difficult for citizens to protect themselves from a government that might one day decide to suppress the voices and rights of individuals.

You just need to take a step back and look at the world as it is today. Let’s imagine, David, that the police received a tip that a dangerous criminal was hiding in your house. This has happened before, hasn’t it? We’ve all heard of cases where the police got the wrong address and staged a raid.

Today, it works like this: if they think you’re a dangerous criminal, they can break into your home, and you’ll have to deal with several officers in bulletproof vests and with guns in their hands. They have to make a life-or-death decision in an instant while their adrenaline is pumping. People are unable to make informed decisions in a fight-or-flight state.

The fact is that the government already has a monopoly on the lawful use of force, and almost every one of these officers has a lethal weapon. I’ll tell you, if they feel their life is threatened, they’ll have a gun in their hands. For comparison, if the police do have to enter your home, imagine a future where, in the event of such a mission—and we can argue about the conditions under which this should be done—they would send a drone or a robot.

The operator will be a whole team of people, not one person. This won’t be a person in a fight-or-flight state, fearing for their own safety, trembling with their finger on the trigger. If they make a mistake, you’ll get hit with a Taser, pepper spray, or some kind of non-lethal weapon. And all of this will be recorded, because camera systems must be installed on these devices in order to control them. Many police shootings today are not caught on camera.

I think it comes down to taking a step back and understanding how work is done today and how we can make it safer for everyone in the future. Then we can answer the right questions about what control mechanisms are in place, like multi-level authorization. We’ll work with our clients to insist that each of them have an oversight function, with independent civilian oversight and verification every time one of these robotic systems is used.

Again, I think it’s an unfounded concern. These things can be misused. That’s right. But I also don’t want to live in a world where everyone else has robotics and artificial intelligence, and the police arrive in a ’74 Chevrolet with an old walkie-talkie. They’re going to need enough technology to keep up with the rest of us. Then the laws, regulations, and oversight have to evolve so that we as a people have control over the government, have a proper judicial system, and maintain a good balance of power, so they can’t do anything arbitrary without being held accountable.

What are your thoughts on the changing political landscape and the rise of the DSA political class that calls for defunding the police? What do you think will happen to communities and cities over the next few years if these voices gain more power?

If you really cut police funding, we’ll do some social experiments. I can tell you it doesn’t take any experiments to figure out what happens: it will be catastrophic. But democracies are being restored, and I’ll give you an example. In 1968, the police in Montreal, Canada, went on strike over pay. There was no situation like the George Floyd case; it was just a labor strike. Looking back, it’s known as the “Night of Terror,” because the criminals heard the police were on strike, and the city went crazy.

Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist who’s a fairly well-known liberal but also very rational, wrote *The Lighter Angels of Our Nature*. He gives that as an example of why we need a functioning police force: it’s the glue that holds society together, so we have rules that we all trust and follow. I hope we don’t see significant examples of this.

To be honest, we started to see something similar when some states decriminalized shoplifting after the events surrounding George Floyd. That led to catastrophic consequences, with significant parts of downtown San Francisco being abandoned. I saw it with my own eyes.

Yes.

Along with this, jobs disappear and deserts form where there’s no economic activity, because it’s simply dangerous for people to be there. Business models collapse.

Regarding your example, I think San Francisco has already started to reverse course and take corrective measures.

That’s why I try not to get too involved in politics. Things will go one way or the other, but we have corrective mechanisms that will work over time. I think non-lethality is a wonderful mission. Public safety is critical to fulfilling all our other social contracts. Without proper public safety, no other social contract works, and systems break down.

I think this is obviously an important mission and important work that you’re doing. Congratulations on your business, your progress, and your investment in Skydio. There are obviously many social challenges ahead because of the big debates going on right now about the limits of technology.

I’ll also tell you that there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. It seems like 4 months ago The Economist wrote about the job apocalypse due to AI, and a couple of months later it was, “Wait, no, AI is creating millions of jobs.” People just don’t know what to think. We’re at a point where the acceleration of technology is leading to a huge amount of uncertainty.

What I tell our clients is, “Guys, we need you to stay strong.” After all, the police may be the glue that holds society together. I hope we don’t see what’s happening in France now and similar social upheavals. But God forbid, if that happens, we need law enforcement to be ready to stand up and help maintain order as we move toward what I, a great optimist, believe in.

I think that in 10 to 20 years, it will be an almost utopian society. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I believe technology will cure many diseases and ailments. I think we’ll see that Elon’s idea of unconditional high income will be fantastic, but we may face difficulties during the transition period. Our role at Axon is to equip the police to do this in a way that we can be proud to have helped them do right. Not that everything will be perfect, but let’s put robust controls in place and help people believe that we’ll get through this together.

Rick, I really appreciate you taking the time. I’m glad we finally did it. Thank you for joining us for the All-In interview. It was wonderful.

It was fun. Contact us anytime.

Well, friends, I think this was another epic discussion. People love these interviews. I could listen to him for hours.

Certainly. You did a great job with the questions. Admit it.

We give people real data so they can form their own opinions. What do you guys think? That was cool.