| Hey, it's Josh. Rick Smith, the chief executive officer of Axon Enterprise Inc., one of the largest police technology companies, said the killing of George Floyd has changed the way he thinks about the purpose of his company. Smith, who is white, said he was surprised to learn something in recent conversations with black colleagues that they have known for most of their lives: Negative experiences with the police are painfully common. Now, he thinks Axon has a responsibility to confront institutional racism within police departments. "We can't change politics, but we can build tech," he says. "That's what we do, we apply technology to social problems." Smith's company started out making the Taser stun gun, a common policing tool and one that was allegedly misused as recently as last week against two black students in Atlanta. These days, Axon is increasingly focused on providing body cameras and software to law enforcement. The transformation accelerated during the last outbreak of civil unrest over policing, when body cameras became a major plank in an effort to reduce the number of violent incidents involving officers and young black men. After a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year old Michael Brown in 2014, the Obama administration set aside $75 million to help local police departments buy cameras, which had been shown in one study in Rialto, California to significantly reduce use of force. Today protests are again dominating national headlines, and Axon's stock has jumped. Shares are up more than 20% since late May, landing the company at a market cap of $5.6 billion. Images of aggressive police behavior, first against Floyd, and subsequently against protesters, have fueled the demonstrations. But some people who once thought that the transparency promised by widespread body camera use would lead to systemic change have lost their faith. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said this week that he'd given up on the optimism he'd once held that documenting police officers would hold them responsible for abuses. "The hope that pervasive cameras by themselves would counterbalance the systemic racism that leads to the over-policing of communities of color and the disproportionate use of force against black men was simply a techno-utopian fantasy," he wrote. Notably, the proliferation of body cameras and smartphone videos mean that police operations are more documented than they've ever been, but the killings of young black men have continued. Zuckerman cited a 2017 study involving over 2,200 police officers in Washington, D.C., comparing the behavior of a random sample of cops who wore body cameras to a control group who didn't. The researchers could find no statistically significant difference in how the two groups acted, in terms of use of force or number of complaints. More chillingly, Zuckerman noted that even as Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin allegedly killed Floyd, he seemed to make eye contact with the teenager pointing her phone's camera at him. "He knows she's filming, and knows that the video is likely being streamed to Facebook, to the horror of those watching it," Zuckerman said. While Zuckerman now thinks too much was made of the power of technology to change policing, Axon's Smith is more optimistic than ever. Axon is planning on building artificial intelligence software to make better use of the footage the cameras are collecting, he says. The company might, for instance, automatically review all body camera footage to flag incidents meriting review. Such data analytics have shown some promise as a way to prevent police shootings. But many experts are skeptical of technical solutions. As Zuckerman notes, transparency doesn't lead to accountability if there are no consequences. There is no real way to code one's way out of a system that protects even police officers whose violent acts are already well-documented by body cameras or smartphones. Technologies that have been pitched as boons to public safety can also just as easily become surveillance tools that entrench existing disparities. Axon, for its part, has been gradually confronting the ethical complexities inherent in police tech. It launched an independent ethics board in 2018, which has subsequently determined that Axon shouldn't use facial recognition on its body cameras. In response, the company said it wouldn't commercialize face-matching last year. Barry Friedman, the head of Axon's ethics board as well as the director of New York University's Policing Project, says body cameras and other technologies are only useful if there's sound public policies behind them. "We have spent a fortune on body cameras," he says, "and it's going to be wasted if they're not used for accountability." —Joshua Brustein | 
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