Over the past two decades, technology has taken over policing. Officers wear body cameras to record their encounters and carry newfangled weapons like tasers that seem to come straight out of “Star Trek.” The police patrol criminal “hot spots” identified by big data. Suspects are tracked with GPS, cell-site simulators and video surveillance enhanced with facial recognition software. Has all this costly technology made us safer?
Not likely, according to “Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing,” Matt Stroud's incisive, muckraking exposé of the “police industrial complex” — the web of law enforcement agencies, for-profit corporations and politicians who increasingly exalt technology as the way to reform American policing. Although innovative tools can help solve crimes, police departments often embrace new technologies without adequate testing or input from affected communities. The result is that “fixes” can aggravate the very problems they were designed to remedy.
Stroud, an investigative journalist with an eye for detail, begins the book with a bang — or rather a zap. Volunteering to be tasered, he describes an extraordinary pain that lasted only five seconds, he writes, “but felt like an eternity.” Felled by the weapon, Stroud's own experience is a metaphor for the troubling tale of how tasers became standard equipment for cops. Developed originally as a nonlethal alternative to the gun, tasers were relentlessly marketed to police departments by Taser International, a hungry start-up that stirred demand through celebrity cop endorsements and dramatic demonstrations of burly volunteers being dropped. Company trainers touted the tasers as safe, encouraging officers to use them early and often to prevent bad situations from escalating. Major police departments bought in and Taser International became a Wall Street darling.
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