Rick Smith’s Tasers and the Social-Control Economy

Human primates seem extremely keen to shock each other these days. Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, Inc. (formerly Taser International) produces electroshock weapons. And its market cap amounts to tens of billions in USD.

Axon’s corporate slogan is Protect Life. CEO Rick Smith has gone so far as to suggest that using a Taser 10 is safer than playing volleyball. Hello?

We’ve read the stories for years, featuring people like Kenneth Espinoza, a handcuffed senior, sitting in a squad car, relentlessly tased. Or Daryl Williams, who had a heart condition and informed Raleigh police officers, yet was repeatedly shocked, lost consciousness, and died an hour later.

In short—as Reuters put the point in a hair-raising 2023 article examining Axon’s corporate culture—tasing “can be fatal.”

How did this weapon become so dangerous?

First, They Aimed for the Pig

Company founder and CEO Patrick (Rick) Smith recalls a “catastrophe in Prague” In the 1990s:

“… I went to demo to their national police force and we had seven volunteers in a row. Nobody even fell down. They all fought through it.”

That wouldn’t do.

To create a shock that would sell, Smith ran experiments on a living pig.

“And then we could ramp up or down the intensity using some pretty gross, you know, system adjustments. And just doing that experiment and then observing the muscle contractions of that pig, we were able to very quickly identify what we needed to change.”

The pig was only an animal, you say? At the end of the day, we’re all animals. What’s done to one will afflict us all. And it will disproportionately afflict those human groups most likely to be treated as subhuman. By 1999, Rick Smith’s TASER M26s were shocking their targets’ central nervous systems to control muscle movements, along with inflicting pain.

Axon Buys Out Competitor, Consolidates Control

In 2018, Axon bought out NYPD bodycam supplier Vie Vu LLC (“VieVu”). Axon went on to fight Federal Trade Commission monopoly complaints all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supremes backed Axon on a jurisdictional point, and the FTC dropped its case. This left Axon with heavy control that remains in place to this day. By 2022, Axon could claim some 17,000 out of about 18,000 U.S. police agencies as clientele.

Cities pay far more for Axon’s policing products now, without the competition from VieVu. In 2023, a group of cities (Howell, New Jersey; Baltimore, Maryland; and Augusta, Maine) went to court to challenge Axon’s monopoly (with mixed results so far).

Axon continues to accumulate control. It’s able to charge hefty subscription rates by bundling report-writing tech with its physical tools. In 2024, Axon introduced Draft One, which turns footage from its bodycams into police reports, using a variant of ChatGPT.

Now, with Border Patrol and Immigration & Customs Enforcement urged to buy bodycams (Chuck Schumer’s concept of a new, improved ICE?), Axon stands to gain massively.

Are We Feeling Safe Yet?

Axon’s got lots of irons in the fire. With its 2024 launch of Body Workforce, Axon insinuated its surveillance gear into hospitals and medical offices, giving the company access to protected health information. Even retail managers are getting Axon’s bodycam pitches.

Got a doorbell camera? Know that police can and do get access to doorbell data unbeknownst to the customers who paid to create it. Axon’s involved with Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras. (Heads up: During a six-month period last year, Ring shared video or other content in response to 977 police requests, and shared non-content data 1,448 times, reported The New York Times. Most doorbell owners weren’t told.)

Then there’s the profit potential in military and police drones. Axon’s on it. Last year TheStreet® published a how-to piece on investing in the new asset class, and specifically in Axon, so you can personally profit. Maybe not as much as the Axon CEO profits.

The Seattle Police Department has engaged Axon in a first step to deploy drone surveillance in the city. In drone surveillance projects, Axon’s partner of choice is Skydio, purveyor of reconnaissance drones to the IDF.

In the wake of the Uvalde school killings, Smith announced that Axon would roll out drone-based electroshock weapons. Smith’s concept? Drones in the hallways, drones entering classrooms through special vents. Smith’s announcement set off concerns in the Axon ethics board—concerns that the drones could potentially intrude on privacy, exacerbate racial injustice, and create additional hazards to life and safety. The majority of Axon’s AI ethics board decided to resign. Which raises questions about why an ethics board would be formed—yet not consulted in advance of such a startling announcement from the CEO.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Next, watch as Axon takes over emergency call services and shapes responses with artificial intelligence. By promising quicker and stronger responses to calls, Axon is poised to amass a sprawling network of data that overlaps policing and social control.

The ACLU warns that AI can digest biases from data fed into it. Biases in social control are already well out of hand, with Trump’s ICE now openly profiling, arresting, and caging people based on appearance or accent.

Who’s checking up on what’s fed to corporate-owned machines? Who ensures that whatever mistakes or bias creep into AI-generated incident reports don’t impact charging, detention, and punishment?

“Axon is tracking police use of the technology at a level that isn’t available to the police department itself,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation has found. Axon’s system is designed to be opaque. And as the EFF observes, the consequences for lying “may be more lenient for a cop who blames it on the AI.” Another issue brought up by the ACLU is the increased likelihood that police will simply forget details when they haven’t done the writing work themselves.

In March 2025, the Utah government enacted a law forcing police to disclose any use of generative AI. Soon, Seattle urged police to create similar policy. In January 2026, California enacted a law barring police from using their Draft One tools without retaining the original AI-generated report and creating a record-keeping protocol. Maybe this stuff isn’t so convenient for cities as Axon likes to make out.

For those who want a more complete overview of fusing AI into surveillance and social control, I’ll point to this session, hosted by Joshua Frank of CounterPunch for Haymarket Books.

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