YouSaid · the spoken record

Rick Smith

lines on the record: 102
first: 2019-11-27
most recent: 2019-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Unconscious bias that officers don't Self identify as racists, but these things are happening. And so the degree that you can use these training tools to come back and help officers identify and learn and know they're going to be held accountable, I think there's just so many opportunities to continue to improve the system.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's still not. It's not pretty. I mean, when police are using force on someone, it's disturbing, to say the least. And that's if it's fully justified. And if it's not justified, police for humans too, and sometimes they're making mistakes or they're escalating things up. I think overall it's very helpful because it's giving people context of the challenges police are dealing with. We are very much focused over the next five to ten years in taking the video feed and now using it for training and feeding it back to officers and helping them learn from how they're interacting and looking at issues like, you know, we talked about racial bias and other things. I think even the critics in this space would say a lot of it is.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we need and everything. So, those are in good positions. What about the impact of all these videos? You know, there's been whole TV shows of them of police, and it's usually the terrible things or the weird things like a deer jumps on the hood or something like that. When you have these, when there's so many disturbing videos where it's clear something that the police escalated it far too quickly, only because I feel like police should never escalate. Even if citizens are being awful to them, but not violent, there should be almost no reaction. I know that's difficult to say. I'm not a police officer. How do you think that impacts that?”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Lee, the other one that was super interesting was the rate of continued abuse dropped. It turns out when police would come to the call the first time Then they leave, or something, you know, this is before the laws where they have to arrest the abuser on site. Of course, the abuser is trying to intimidate the other person not to testify against them. So you may get secondary abuse calls where. Police, they actually learned they would do the interview that night, and then they would tell the abuser very clearly, hey, we're done, we have what we need. They're sending a message. There's no point in intimidating anyone.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you see this person and what they've been through and there's physically hurt and they're crying, it's much more impactful than taking a written statement and then people go back.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're in the early days there. So, I mean, you're going exactly where this is headed. It starts out as hey, this is a way to oversee officers and protect them from allegations. Then you move into more things like, well, what else can we do with this video? In a lot of cases, it really streamlines the criminal justice system. Like, for example, in domestic violence disputes in Australia, there's a great study that showed just recording victims of domestic violence the night of the event was far more impactful in gaining convictions on abusers.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then when you record, you're also recording their audio on how they interact with the public. I saw an astonishing thing. It was an art project where they took all the voices of police officers talking to people. And there was a lot of abuse stuff. It was really interesting. At the same time, they talked differently to different races. It was really interesting. There were word clouds. Then it was like fascinating the difference between them talking to white people and black people. It was sort of shocking. I'm not surprising, but sort of weird to see in one place. Do you think it's sort of a learning thing of how you're talking about doing empathy with police officers? Do you think they realize, because they're getting abuse from citizens, for one, but at the same time, does it help in any way?”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it protects them. I mean, police officers take more verbal abuse than about anyone except air traffic or airline razor basin people when there's a storm. Right.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost universally after a few months of wearing a camera, they will not go on patrol without it. So they quickly become.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea is to protect good officers and not protect bad officers. I want to get into later the idea that citizens also have their own cameras on all the time. What's been the experience of police officers so far? They think this is a good thing or a bad thing?”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends on the agency. In bigger agencies, they delegate it down. Body cameras are typically purchased more by IT people because they quickly realize managing the data is the hard part. Sure.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Motorola just acquired our biggest competitor, which is WatchGuard. They do cameras and patrol cars and wearable cameras. There's another company called Digital Ally that's a direct competitor. Panasonic is in the space. They have NCAR and body cameras. And then there's a couple others.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's also what about bathroom breaks, and then there are these are human beings as well. They have some privacy, right? So if they're not on a call and they take deployed in a police mission, they're in their patrol cruiser and they take a personal phone call. They probably have a right to privacy not to be physically recording in a public record system, personal conversations. It gets a little tricky.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we have sensors that do all that today. The challenge you start to get into is then officers are pulling their guns out actually for lots of reasons. They may be going into a restaurant. They want to, or they're checking the gun or one officer is turning on everyone else's cameras. So then sometimes they start to get annoyed that, okay, my camera's turning on all day. And so then they may start to disable some of those signals. So it's actually fairly tricky to get it to where it's only turning it on when it's really small.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or if they turn on the lights and siren in the vehicle candidly, where I see this going long term, we're already recording the whole day. It's just officer privacy issues that when body cameras were new, I think there was a lot of concern. Well, we don't want to be recorded all day. We'll only record the critical incidents. But then what happens is occasionally, and especially when there are adrenalines pumping, they forget to turn the camera on. Then you're relying on sensors to turn it on. I think where we'll be in another 10 years is the camera will just store the entire day's shift. It'll upload the critical segments. But if God forbid they forget to turn the camera on and something bad happens, they could go back. And recapture that before the upload event.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Behind it. So it's, you know, I've got an iPhone Max here. It's maybe two thirds this size, but quite a bit thicker because we have to have a 14 hour battery and it's recording video all day, which is a highly intensity processor, you know, a process. Now, we don't record the entire shift. It's buffering video. And then once the officer signals it to start, we then begin a recording. We grab the previous 30 seconds of video, preserve that until they turn it off. And then we've now added all sorts of triggers and mechanisms. So if they pull a gun out of the holster, there's a wireless signal that turns the camera on.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I'll tell you, nobody hates a bad cop more than a good cop because it gives the profession a bad name. And they want to get bad apples out of policing as much as anyone.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, as with anything, you have to make it personal to the individual. So we really focused in on, you know, look, you as a police officer get accused of all sorts of terrible things. And most of the time, it's not true, at least because I work with police, I'll admit I have a bias believing that they're good people. I've met so many good people. And so for us, it was like, look, this isn't about mistrusting you. This is about giving you the tools for you to show what actually happened. And if you're doing the right thing, the truth will set you free.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, it depends on obviously your personal point of view, but I think the case that best exemplified this was the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, people that believe police believe that that officer was probably fighting for his life, people who don't believe police thought it was a murder We all formed our opinions based on our biases, and there was very little”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, with body cameras, yeah. Not good. As you can imagine, when you so police do feel like they're under siege, you know a lot of negativity in the press, et cetera. And so the initial reaction was what you don't trust me. Now I got to wear a camera and you're going to record what I do all day. What we found though is once they use it for a while within about 90 days, police will refuse to go on patrol without it because they quickly realize, oh, if I'm doing the right thing, now I'm above reproach because I have video of what I was dealing with. Whereas otherwise everything is that he said she said.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's big conferences that we go to. And then also we would start to show them in our TASER training classes. So Taser weapons require police be trained typically annually. And for instructors at least every two years. So we're putting about 10,000 police instructors a year through training, and we would just showcase the cameras there as well. Hey, if you're using taser weapons, you've probably, you're aware of the public controversy about them. Here's a way to address public concern with cameras.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were a little too big. We built our own touchscreen computer. I'd say we perhaps got a little carried away with all the things we could engineer, and it grew in complexity, size, cost. And then it was our second generation where we really focused on simplifying the product experience. And that's when they started to take.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's hard to know how much inspiration we took from consumer products, et cetera. I think it was a combination of seeing what's happening. We're serving the police.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become part of the pop culture lexicon. But as they became more widely used, there were legitimate concerns about overuse and abuse. And so again, you take a solutions mind to it, sat to it, and you say, well, we can argue about whether police are doing good things or bad things, or what if we recorded it? And so that simple insight got us into the body cameras to say, okay, this is a way to control for bad officers, hold them accountable, and protect good officers who might be falsely accused of things.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this started around 2007 or 2008. And so we launched tasers around 2000, and they actually exploded in popularity because police officers found them super, super helpful.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we run the largest cloud software product in public safety with about 70 petabytes of police audio video data. So we run our body cameras and software, sort of like the iTunes ecosystem. Right, they're together. They're together.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is relatively new. And so you've been doing taser training for as long as you founded the company. This was the original thing. Explain that. What other products do you have besides body cameras and tasers?”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's sort of like feeling like you're in a horror movie, right? Where there's voices and you're having strange perceptions. And then when you see a police officer come and point a gun at you and a flashlight flashing lights and they're yelling at you. You sort of suddenly understand, oh, wow, yeah, this might trigger somebody who's on the edge of their seat.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for example, what we did with our schizophrenia training experience, so we put the officer through a scenario where we're Put him through as the police officer, and they deal with this schizophrenic. And then we rewon it where they're in the schizophrenic shoes. Now, of course, we can't give them schizophrenia, but we can play audio video stimulus with the help of mental health experts. Right.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But VR is powerful because it's immersive. Jeremy Balance and Stanford. There's all kinds of people working on this idea that you can be. My issues, there was a really interesting thing that Lorraine Bowjob backed around immigrants where you were in a VR setting. It's a really interesting area. The question is, how can you make someone actually scared? How can you make someone actually feel? Can you inject them with some feeling? The idea of seeing it is better than hearing it or hearing it from someone's story. But I wonder how you can actually make someone feel scared. On the other side of an arrest”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have varying levels of sophistication, and they may have access to varying levels of expertise. So we've just taken on a larger role because we know this technology really well. And so we're taking on more and more of the training just actually today, I believe, or yesterday, we announced we're using VR now to do empathy training. So turns out police officers are called to many different situations, including people who are suicidal or have schizophrenia. So we just did a suicide prevention experience, where it's one thing for you to tell a police officer something. But VR is powerful because it's immersive.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is an area where training is really important. And we have really extended ourselves into training. What a lot of people don't realize there's 18,000 police departments. Yes, there are. I do realize that. Yeah.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Security officers. Yeah, so overall, there's a similar number in the field. There's probably 500,000 consumer tasers and 500 or 600,000 that are being used by police officers.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, particularly if police are dealing with somebody who's high on cocaine or with amphetamines, they're right back into the fight. And so sometimes police do have to use it multiple times while they're trying to get or use the”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want people to understand. He's actually a great question because, yes, particularly, so the way to think about it, the Taser is a stimulation device that is running for a set period of time. During that five seconds, somebody is impaired or incapacitated, depending on, you want to spread the electrodes out so they fire at a spreading angle because the electricity you want to actually spread it through enough nerves that it incapastates. If you shoot somebody really close or you hit them in the forearm, it might impair the muscles in that area, but not the whole body. But even if you get a great spread and it's highly incapacitating, the moment it turns off, it's just like when I stop flexing my muscles, they're right back to normal.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we fire two wires effectively that make the connection, and then the power supply remains in the operator's hand, and we're transmitting energy down the wires. So when you click.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Pacemakers actually have to withstand by law the cardiac defibrill. I still wouldn't do it. I still wouldn't do it.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that can set off. Now, there's a lot of debate about whether or not Tasers affect the heart. Now, it's very hard to prove a negative. But in all the testing we've done, we actually see there's a very significant safety margin. In fact, the most prolific inventor of pacemakers and cardiac devices is on my board. He's taken shots directly to the chest and he and our medical advisors.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what are the terms of engagement, I guess, around a taser? Do people died from using tasers? Presumably heart attacks. Actually, that's what is so interesting. Yes, these are not risk-free. There have been deaths. There have been about 28 deaths directly caused by the taser. The biggest risk is head injuries from falls. People fall. So about 6 million people have been hit with tasers. About, I think, 18 falls and eight ignitions of flammable liquids, like in a meth lab or if somebody's doused themselves in gasoline, it can ignite because it's doing an electrical signal, correct? Yeah, it's an electric spark. Right, that's right, right.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the early things we had to do was actually go back to the lab and determine how we could tune these things so they would actually stop really focused aggressive people quickly and immediately, yep. Right. And we launched that technology in 1999, sort of the upgraded, revamped taser weapons. And since then, it really took off in law enforcement where they're pretty ubiquitously used now throughout most of the English-speaking world and now being adopted in Italy and France.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's really a command and control instrument. Think of it like radio jamming. We're jamming the communication so that we can impair somebody's ability in a temporary, yet reversible way. So I've been shot with it seven times. It's certainly not fun, but the intention is, again, to stop somebody without requiring inflicting death or permanent injury. And to replace among police officers or people this device to have a taser if you're in a, you know, I know several women who have them to stop someone from just disable someone essentially. Exactly. So you started a business. What's it changed from the technology of this? So the early taser generations Were underpowered, frankly. Rodney King was shot famously with an LAPD taser and it failed to stop him and officers went to their batons and the rest is catastrophic history.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you and I are sitting here talking today, there are numerous electrical signals in our body. All the firing of the neurons, it's all electronically controlled. And the idea of a taser Is that we plug into the human body and we, it's like a remote control. We flood the system with signals and it causes your muscles to spasm. It's a little bit like an induced seizure is probably the best analogy. But it does not require causing any physical damage.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some progress in this direction, that's where I want to get started. So, what were the difficulties of creating something? Obviously, that a non lethal thing could be lethal. I mean, if you do them wrong, they're quite lethal, and it also affects the neurobiology of something. Explain what a taser does. So as you and I are saying, when it started and then what it does now.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got his number, called him up, and next thing I know, here I am 23 years old standing on his doorstep. He's 73. And we just sort of fell in love over this idea that he'd been working on for a long time. And I convinced him to give it another shot. So in doing that, you wanted to create something that was debilitating but non-lethal, right? Correct? Yep. The idea that you would be able to stop someone in some way. And again, the idea wasn't from Star Trek, Set Pasers to Stun. Well, some of the inspiration, I'd say, came from science fiction. And then when I discovered somebody had already made...”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's what we do. So you had created Taser. Talk about going about creating the Taser business. So I just started doing research and I discovered the actual taser weapon had been around for over 20 years. It was invented by a NASA scientist back in the 60s. The early generations were pretty buggy, like many technologies. And it turned out he lived in Arizona near where my parents lived. And so I dowed 411 for those listeners who may not know this before Google. That's how you'd get a phone number. 911 was for the police. But go ahead.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if we could give something better to people, you start to tease the logic of it all apart, the reason that people use guns to defend themselves is to stop somebody who's threatening them. And if we go even a little bit deeper, like into policing, police actually, they don't intentionally kill anyone. Sometimes they do. But go ahead and go ahead. Well, from at least a legal and policy perspective, the reason they use lethal force is it's the only thing that reliably stops somebody today. So to me, that's a technology problem. If we could create Captain Kirk's phaser from Star Trek, then there'd be no reason to set it to stun. Exactly. Right.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After And you thought I'll invent something? Well, yeah, I had an entrepreneurial focus. I'd seen my dad been a serial entrepreneur. And as I was debating American gun violence with these Europeans, it just struck me that this isn't a problem our government has shown any particular aptitude at solving. And ultimately with 300 and some million firearms in the hands of the public, like the horse has kind of left the barn and getting the back would be really hard.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I was. Well, I did have a background in biology and neurobiology in particular. But I hadn't had a job yet. Right. So you”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the light bulb that went on for me is obviously guns are very divisive issue in this country, but for me it seems really strange. Like, why are we still using these medieval weapons that shoot literally balls of flying metal at people? And I came to conclude, I think the way out of this is the way we get out of most real problems that we invent our way out. And so I started doing some research and discovered.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in the early 1990s, I was living in Europe. I was in graduate school, and two of my high school friends had been recently shot and killed by a businessman with a gun in the glove box. And it was a situation that just... Started as an argument and spun out of control. And three lives were ruined that day. My two friends are dead. And the guy who killed them is spending his life in prison. I've never met him, but from everything I know, he didn't set out to kill anybody that day. He just had a gun to defend himself and got in a bad situation.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT