The Business of Repression

When I was posting about police brutality the other day something nagged at my memory. Then someone mentioned Bernie Kerik on the radio yesterday and a I remembered: of course! The prelapsarian Bernie Kerik was on the board and made millions in stock options from pushing tasers to his law-enforcement brethren.

I knew there was something shady about tasers, aside from their potential lethality and use as a torture weapon and summary punishment tool. For those who don't know much about the Taser here's a brief description of what it is and what it does from Amnesty International:

Tasers, powerful electrical weapons used by law enforcement agencies in, among other countries, the USA are designed to incapacitate by conducting 50,000 volts of electricity into a suspect. The pistol shaped weapons use compressed nitrogen gas to fire sharp darts up to 21 feet [7 m]. The darts can penetrate up to two inches [5 cm] of clothing. Electricity is then conducted down wires connecting the darts and the taser gun. The electrical pulses induce skeletal muscle spasms immobilising and incapacitating a suspect and causing them to fall to the ground. They may also be used, in "drive stun" mode, as a close up stun weapon. The "drive stun" is specifically designed for pain compliance.(4)

Since June 2001, more than 150 people have died in the USA after being shocked by a taser. Of those deaths, 85 have occurred in the USA since Amnesty International released its report (in November 2004) calling for a suspension on the use and transfer of these weapons. Amnesty International raised its concerns in its previous report that the number of taser-related deaths had been rising each year. There were three deaths reported in 2001, 13 in 2002, 17 in 2003 and 48 in 2004. In 2005 there were 61 taser-related deaths, and by the mid February 2006 there have already been 10 deaths.

In These Times has an excellent article up about those taser deaths, about the history of the company's formation and about its links with conservatives in government and law enforcement:

In 2002, Taser brought on former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik as the company’s director. Kerik had attained popularity in the wake of 9/11 as a law-and-order-minded hero; the company had seemingly picked one of the best spokespersons imaginable.

With Kerik’s help, company’s profits grew to $68 million in 2004, up from just under $7 million in 2001, and stockholders were able to cash in, including the Smith family, who raked in $91.5 million in just one fiscal quarter in 2004.

Unbeknownst to most stockholders, however, sales have been helped along by police officers who have received payments and/or stock options from Taser to serve as instructors and trainers. (The exact number of officers on the payroll is unknown because the company declines to identify active-duty officers who have received stock options.)

The recruitment of law enforcement has been crucial to fostering market penetration. For instance, Sgt. Jim Halsted of the Chandler, Ariz., Police Department, joined Taser President Rick Smith in making a presentation to the Chandler city council in March 2003. He made the case for arming the entire police patrol squad with M-26 Tasers. According to the Associated Press, Halsted said, “No deaths are attributed to the M-26 at all.”

The council approved a $193,000 deal later that day.

Everyone was doing very nicely indeed, thank you. A USAF Lt Col even co-authored a report (later discredited) that bolstered the company's claims for non-lethality and boosted sales. All was sweet for Kerik and the other shareholders. But then came the Amnesty report and a series of product liability cases:

The prospect that its “stun gun” would provide an effective non-lethal weapon for law enforcement drove the share price of Taser International Corp. up sevenfold in 2004 to a high of $33 in late December. Reports of deaths from use of the product led to the announcement of an informal SEC investigation in disclosures about its safety in January 2005, leading to a plunge in stock price to $15. In September 2005, Taser announced the SEC had made the safety investigation formal, and the stock fell further, to $6. The company announced its legal fees and public relations expenses for the first half of 2005 were more than $12 million, double those expenses in the first half of the prior year.

Amnesty International's reports on taser use really hurt the company, so much so that Taser actually considered sueing. Taser are prepared to take a very agressive legal posture towards their critics, but as more and more instances of deaths come to light and the more adverse publicity tasers get, the more the share price drops and the less money it makes. The share price is is somewhere where bloggers really can hit a corporation hard just by publicising the truth .

The problem is that even if the left does generate enough negative publicity to make Taser's stock price drop precipitately - even if they could be pushed out of business - there are plenty of other torture equipment vendors drooling over the potentially massive profits to be made in the repression racket.

Another challenge to Taser’s dominance in the stun gun market occurred earlier this week when Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, announced that his deputies will begin testing 30 new stun guns as an alternative to Tasers. This could only have been regarded with concern by Taser International, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. According to Arpaio: "Stinger tells me their weapons have better target attainment, they cost less and are cheaper to operate. If those claims are true, I may very well move away from Taser weapons."

More and more US police departments are buying Stingers, so I suggest anyone who's thinking of protesting anything anytime soon makes themselves familiar with Stinger Systems Inc.'s products.

Stinger has recently done a deal with a Spanish defence-tech supplier that gives it accessibility to supply products to any of the allied NATO Armies worldwide, not to mention to various EU members' riot police and anti-terrorism squads. Your country is pushing this technology worldwide.

If you are American your hard-earned tax dollars are actually promoting the use if both Tasers and Stingers abroad: the US government is itself marketing the companies' products overseas. Take a a look at BuyUSA.gov: it's not shoes or food products or cars that the US government is promoting internationally as the best of US manufacturing, it's the tools of repression and dictatorship. Hand in hand with the US in this grisly trade is Britain.

For years the focus of anti-capitalist and antiglobalisation protestors in Britain, Europe and elsewhere has been the campaign against the arms trade. The words 'arms trade' may conjure up pictures of steely-faced, flint-eyed men flogging aircraft, tanks and missiles, but the market is much bigger than that and includes all sorts of riot and crowd control gear that I bet you never thought your local police department would even have, let alone use on you or yours. Even the smallest police departments, both in the US and Europe, are increasingly looking like paramilitary units. They seem to be arming themselves for mass insurrection.

Take universities for example; UCLA isn't the only US university campus prepared for a riot:

The Ball State University Police Department has purchased equipment designed to provide individual officers with an additional less-than-lethal force option, as well as new equipment appropriate for crowd control.

The university has purchased 35 Tasers, four chemical propellant guns and three projectile launchers at a cost of nearly $38,400.

"This is a significant investment in our efforts to enhance the safety and security of the campus community," said Gene Burton, director of public safety. "This kind of equipment helps minimize the risk to our officers and those they are sworn to protect. This is a very positive step in the evolution of our department."

35 tasers? Why on earth do institutes of learning need this kind of firepower? Just what is being planned for?

The answer is they don't need it - it's been sold to them, just like double-glazing or timeshares, by clever marketing men who know exactly which buttons to push.

After all if their own government buys it and approves and promotes the stuff, it must be a good thing. Mustn't it? Law and order types tend to be conservative, they listen to conservative media and tend to take conservative viewpoints. Already these officers are ripe for the sales pitch.

Since your customers're already so receptive, all you have to do is to get your friends in the media - who owns both tv stations and defence tech companies? Step forward General Electric - to keep bumping up the conservatives' scaredy-cat level by promoting an 'us and them' mentality and the fear that their way of life is constantly under threat from within and without . Add a few freebies, a conference in Vegas and few techy presentations with shiny graphics, sexy product names and some obfuscated stats and specs, and voila, one multimillion dollar sale.

The Defence tech industry is is massive. It provides jobs: it contributes hugely to the balance of payments and international trade - and it makes huge contributions to politicians who enable it to continue doing so. It's one big self-sustaining ecology.

The Boston Globe this week:

The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions -- many already engaged in conflict -- grew to the highest level in eight years, new US government figures show.

According to the annual assessment, the United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of weapons to developing countries in 2005 -- 45.8 percent of the total and far more than second-ranked Russia with 15 percent and Britain with a little more than 13 percent.

Arms control specialists said the figures underscore how the largely unchecked arms trade to the developing world has become a major staple of the American weapons industry, even though introducing many of the weapons risks fueling conflicts rather than aiding long-term US interests.

The report was compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Yippee for free markets, and fuck the rest of the world!

That we're now seeing this kind of defence tech used against our own Western civilian populations when we question these corrupt relationships between the free market and repression should come as no surprise. That it should be extended to even the least threatening critics of of the free market of any kind does not surprise, not at all - it's all done pour encourager les autres.

Those of us who were against the Iraq invasion and occupation from the start, who pointed out the corruption and futility of that particular exercise in imperial adventure by the military-oil-industrial combine; we were denounced as a bunch of shrill anarchists. But we were right. Those of us who've been warning for years about the potential for state repression by that same combine are right too, as is now becoming clear.

But it gives no pleasure at all to be able to say 'we told you so'.

Read more: Tasers, Stingers, Crowd control, Torture equipment, Police, State repression.

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Posted 1:43 PM by Republic of Palau

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