Coming to theatres and VOD this Friday, November 27: KILLING THEM SAFELY
Nick Berardini’s exposé on the ethics of Taser use in law enforcement made its debut at Tribeca under its earlier title, TOM SWIFT AND HIS ELECTRIC RIFLE. Screenings have followed at Hot Docs, Tallgrass, and St Louis, among others events.
In the early 1990s, brothers Rick and Tom Smith, inspired by the needless deaths of high school friends in a road rage incident, sought out safer alternatives to conventional firearms. They found the Taser, an electroshock device invented in the late 1960s-early 1970s by Jack Cover, a NASA researcher which had proven too weak to properly incapacitate assailants. Through further development, the Smiths managed to make the device effective by upping the voltage, and their enterprise, Taser International, began marketing it to law enforcement around the country as a non-lethal alternative firearm, and providing training and assurances that the Taser was perfectly safe. Berardini’s surprisingly even-handed film, however, exposes cracks in these claims, focusing on a series of cases in which individuals who were tased ended up dying. As disturbing as surveillance footage capturing several of these deadly incidents is, even more troubling is the evasiveness of the brothers Smith, as revealed in deposition recordings. Latching on to any flimsy excuse or half-baked theory, they are dogged in their refusal to admit the danger their tinkering with the device has yielded in the name of profits. While the film also notes that the trigger-happy, poorly-trained police departments that too quickly added the Taser to the arsenal certainly share in the blame, it finds its true culprits in the corporate malfeasance of Taser International’s denial of reality.
what (not) to doc 