Freedom vs. Safety: Axon CEO Rick Smith on the Future of Policing

Rick Smith says Axon began as Taser in 1993, after European graduate students asked whether he knew anyone killed by gun violence; he remembered two high-school football teammates killed in road rage and wondered why bullets were still the default technology. Inspired by Captain Kirk’s phaser, he found a 1970s Taser patent by NASA scientist Jack Cover, a 73-year-old Tucson inventor, and persuaded him to come out of retirement. They built prototypes in Cover’s garage from Ace Hardware parts. Smith says the first prototype took 30 days, while friends—including Emil Michael—thought the idea of electrical weapons was absurd.

Smith initially designed the new compressed-air Taser for consumers, including his mother, because the original gunpowder-based device was legally difficult to buy. Consumers repeatedly asked why police were not using it, and after two failed product launches and seven years of struggle, the company pivoted to police in late 1999. In 1998 Smith considered shutting down, but his father revealed that the company owed Silicon Valley Bank about $2 million and that Smith was personally exposed for $500,000. His father and investor Bruce Culver supplied the final $1 million, forcing the company to survive on its own cash flow.

The company solved the original Taser’s credibility problem by tuning nerve stimulation through animal testing so the device could actually incapacitate a focused, aggressive person; Smith notes that an earlier Taser had failed against Rodney King. With no advertising budget, a former Marine traveled in a Winnebago offering police officers $100 to take the device. Officers who tried it typically fell, recovered, and immediately understood its value. Purchase orders followed, and the company reached cash-flow break-even within a year. In late 2000, during the dot-com crash, an investment bank took the physical-product company public at roughly a $12 million valuation.

After tripling annually and becoming the world’s best-performing stock in 2004, Taser was hit by an SEC investigation alleging that it had misrepresented product safety to inflate its stock. Smith describes a short-selling attack in which his personal assistant allegedly acted as a mole, sending internal documents to short sellers and the New York Times. The stock fell from $33 to $7 in 2005, market capitalization dropped from about $2 billion to $100 million, police customers stopped buying, and hundreds of lawsuits followed. Smith personally brought boxes of documents to the SEC, and the investigation eventually ended with no findings.

Smith says Taser survived because it refused to let insurers settle cases that could trigger a flood of additional claims. In two cases, the company effectively paid the plaintiffs itself through insurance arrangements, even making money after winning, because it believed defending the business was essential. Around 2007–2010, Smith asked college friend Hadi Partovi for help building the body-camera software business. Partovi became a de facto part-time CTO, helped replace the original team, and pushed Axon away from running its own vulnerable data center toward AWS and Azure. He also advocated changing the Taser name to Axon.

Smith says a custody-death trial convinced him that police needed recordings of what officers actually saw. The family presented the suspect’s high-school photographs, while officers could only describe his behavior in restrained professional language; Smith believed the jury never understood the alleged methamphetamine-fueled violence. Axon therefore built body cameras so evidence would not depend on competing narratives. Police initially rejected the devices as “Big Brother,” but a union leader told Smith that officers who wore one for 90 days would refuse to patrol without it. A Phoenix officer also described a false rape threat that the camera immediately disproved.

The Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson became the turning point. Brown’s family said he had surrendered with his hands up, while Officer Darren Wilson said they fought over his gun; later review largely supported the officer, but there was no recording to settle the dispute. Brown’s family and police unions subsequently demanded body cameras. Axon had also bet on cloud storage, reasoning that 18,000 departments could not each securely operate video servers. Smith says virtually every major police department now uses body cameras and that more than a million officers upload roughly two hours of video daily, making Axon’s video business the main reason it grew from a company worth hundreds of millions to roughly $30–40 billion.

Asked about Flock cameras, license-plate readers, and fears of a surveillance state, Smith agrees that nobody wants China-style tracking but says cameras are already everywhere—on phones, in homes, and at businesses—so the practical issue is data governance. He distinguishes legitimate uses, such as finding a stolen vehicle or checking plates near a violent crime, from abuses such as searching for an ex-girlfriend or tracking every American. Axon’s proposed safeguards include case codes, collaboration between officers before searches, criminal and civil penalties for misuse, and homeowner-controlled sharing of Ring footage. Smith supports Senator Hawley’s proposed oversight framework.

Axon’s mission is to “protect life,” extending from Tasers and cameras to Skydio drones that can reach an incident before officers. Smith says an ethics council quit in 2022 after opposing a Taser-equipped drone intended for extreme cases such as school shootings, but Axon continued the project, rebuilt the council with more Black and brown voices, and kept critics involved earlier in product design. He argues that a remotely operated drone or robot with a nonlethal weapon is preferable to sending officers with guns into a gunfight. Future systems, including humanoids and drones, will retain human decisions, recorded operations, and potentially multi-person authorization.

Smith accepts the concern that technology could concentrate power in the state, but argues that police already possess a legal monopoly on force and that robots could reduce rather than increase danger: a suspect might face a recorded, remotely supervised Taser instead of officers with guns. He says the right balance requires civilian oversight, judicial checks, and safeguards against tracking ordinary people. He rejects both abolishing and indiscriminately expanding policing, arguing that the best deterrent is a high probability of being caught rather than long sentences. Citing Montreal’s 1968 police strike and San Francisco’s post-decriminalization disorder, he calls public safety the glue supporting other social contracts.