Turns Out Taser’s ‘Tragic’ Backstory Is Mostly Just Alternate Facts Cooked Up By Its Founder

Jeffrey Dastin, writing for Reuters, has dug up some very interesting information about TASER, which has since re-branded to Axon (and has since set its sights on arming cops with body cams, in addition to its infamous electrical devices).

The story behind the founding of TASER is something its founder, Rick Smith, loves to expound upon. The same narrative has been delivered to purchasers, shareholders, and company employees. Smith was motivated to create a so-called “less lethal” device because of tragedies he personally experienced.

It makes for a good story:

For years, Smith, a charismatic and fit 53-year old, has told variations of the same inspirational story – that he co-founded his now highly successful company because of the gun violence that killed his friends, whom he sometimes describes as football teammates. Their deaths feature in various promotions the company has run, including one this year in honor of its 30th anniversary. Smith even cites them in a 2020 Axon filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The problem is this: it’s just a story. It sounds good. It makes Rick Smith appear to be very personally motivated to create something that gives cops (and cops only) a less-lethal way to drop perps in their tracks.

It would have been a better story if these two students had been killed by cops who only had lethal force options available to them. It also would have been a better story if it was, you know, actually true.

But it isn’t, as multiple people spoken to by Jeffery Dastin have indicated:

Smith was not friends with the deceased, Todd Bogers and Cory Holmes, according to three immediate family members and a close friend of the young men. They were gunned down after a road rage incident in 1991, not 1990, as indicated on Smith’s slide in Las Vegas. Smith played on the same football team as the boys at Chaparral in Scottsdale, Arizona – but not at the same time, according to school yearbooks seen by Reuters. The boys who were killed graduated in 1986. Smith does not appear in the yearbooks until the school year that ended in 1987.

Axon “ran a whole advertising campaign based on the murder of my son,” Todd’s father John Bogers said in an interview, recalling feelings of bereavement that the ads triggered. “They profited off that, and they didn’t ask for permission.”

That’s pretty ugly. What’s even uglier is the fact that the high school Rick Smith believes is so instrumental to his inspiration was rejected when it asked Taser/Axon to contribute to improvements of the football field where Smith claims he bonded with the dead people he now uses as bullet points in sales presentations.

Everyone personally related to the deceased students denies Smith being a close friend with either of these students. That leaves Smith alone with his preferred narrative, which only contains a tenuous link to actual facts.

The thing is Rick Smith never needed to do this. He could have pitched his devices by saying nothing more than he wanted to prevent tragedies like those of the two teens that attended the same school he did. But he chose to embellish the facts and make it all about him and how much he personally was affected by the deaths of supposedly close friends.

Presenting alternate facts and alternate realities is just the way Taser/Axon does business. It’s not just the CEO ginning up sympathy by exaggerating his relationship to two teens who died senseless deaths. This is the company that is almost solely responsible for the myth of “excited delirium,” a deadly medical condition that almost always presents itself only when cops are choking, tasing, shooting, or beating someone to death.

Because Taser devices were sold to cops as less-than-lethal devices, cops felt they could apply them anywhere they wanted for as long as they wanted, whether it meant deploying an electric shock to someone covered in gasoline or drive-stunning handcuffed teens for the crime of failing to recover immediately from a mental health crisis. The company prefers its own facts because the actual facts are way more horrific.

There’s much more in Dastin’s full report on Axon and Rick Smith, although — despite my dislike for the company and its tactics — I don’t think a lot of what’s reported depicts anything more than a CEO acting like a CEO and a corporation acting like a corporation.

Dastin points out that Rick Smith promised employees he would not go over the top with his personal compensation, stating that he would keep it in the 50th percentile for people in his position. But he soon found a way around that promised limitation by “allowing” the company to purchase him a $240,000 sports car in lieu of a cash bonus or exercising stock options worth $246 million, which made Smith one of the highest earning (but not highest paid) CEOs in 2018.

There’s other shady stuff in there as well, including nepotism, cash payouts delivered directly (and I mean directly, as in on a literal silver platter at a high-end restaurant) to executive staff, and quid pro quo sponsorship deals with a golf tournament that swiftly escalated Axon president Josh Isner into an executive position on the golf tournament’s board.

While all of us would like to see CEOs stick to their promises and companies refuse to bend/break internal policies, this isn’t really an Axon-centric issue. It’s a vast majority of corporate America. That Axon is doing it too doesn’t make Axon any better. But it also doesn’t make Axon any worse.

That being said, it’s a very well-written examination of everything questionable the company has done. The fact that it’s so comfortable lying to its employees and engaging in seemingly unethical behavior can be directly linked to its founder’s refusal to state the facts as they actually are, rather than what he would prefer them to be.

The fact is two students who attended the same high school as Axon founder Rick Smith were tragically killed. That should have been enough for him. But Smith decided to make the tragedy personal (without any basis in facts) so he could move as much merchandise as he could. That’s what’s really sickening here. Everything around it is just capitalism in action.