The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 Page 25
He looked hard at McGill and said, “I have to tell you something: Do not mortgage your house. Do not give up your retirement.”
McGill looked at his wife. “We’re not going to do that,” he said. His wife shook her head.
“Perfect is the enemy of good,” Heal said. “If you can get to the field-trial stage, you’re the only one there. When I first read your letter, it came across as a tether device, and they’re almost universally rejected.”
Heal said a few more things about how McGill might proceed, then he and McGill shook hands, and we went to Heal’s car. As we drove away, McGill waved to us from the lawn.
I asked Heal what chance he thought the Carpoon had. “What we’re hoping really is somebody invents a directed-energy device that uses a signal from our car to interrupt the other car’s ability to supply fuel or ignition,” he said. “It may make the fuel mixture too rich or too thin, and if you can change it even briefly the car will die. That’s the Holy Grail. Whoever invents that will be rich from the day he does.”
MORE THAN NEW INVENTIONS, Heal sees weapons made for the military and adapted for the police. Traditionally, many adaptations have involved shooting less harmful things at people than metal bullets. In 1958, British colonial police in Hong Kong used bullets made from teak called baton rounds. They would aim the guns at the ground, and the bullets would ricochet—it was called skip-firing—and hit people in the shins, which was very painful. A refinement, rubber bullets—which were lethal often enough to be controversial—was invented by the British in 1970, to be used against the Irish in Northern Ireland. The government wanted some means of striking protesters who were throwing rocks at them from afar.
The Taser, which the police tend to adore and civil-liberties organizations loathe, was patented, in 1974, by a NASA researcher named John Cover. The name Taser is derived from “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle,” a book in a series for adolescents first published in the early twentieth century. Tom Swift was an inventor, and the plots usually involved things he dreamed up to resolve a crisis. (Cover was fond of the books.) The Taser can reach a person thirty-five feet away. The pain it causes is temporarily debilitating. Nevertheless, people have died after being shot with it. Amnesty International believes that the Taser hasn’t been tested properly and that it should be withdrawn until more is known about how it affects certain classes of people. Short of that, the organization would like to see it used solely when killing someone is the only alternative. Heal regards the Taser as a valuable tool that should never be used recklessly—merely to subdue a troublesome person, for example.
“In law enforcement, our core value is to have a reverence for human life,” Heal told me. “It doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t take it; it means we would avoid taking it if we could. Life-and-death decisions are made in the military and in law enforcement by the least experienced people, just the opposite of business. But they are the ones in harm’s way. And therein lies a great irony: even the failure of a non-lethal weapon makes a case for restraint. Let’s say a guy’s coming with a machete. We hit him with bean bags. He doesn’t stop. And we kill him. We went to great efforts. A primitive option is a warning shot.”
For policemen, Heal said, “twenty-one feet and a hundred and eighty feet are the two figures your non-lethal weapon has to satisfy. Twenty-one feet is the distance at which you can be killed by a person with an edged weapon or club if the force you use to deter him is not immediately effective, which means right-now lethal. A hundred and eighty feet—less than three per cent of the population can throw an object large enough to cause serious injury beyond that. Golfballs, spark plugs—they’ll give you stitches. But a brick—you get hit in the head, helmet or not, it’ll put you on your knees. If you have a weapon that has a range shorter than a hundred and eighty feet, while you’re approaching them to get into your range you’re being pummelled with bricks and bottles. In the middle of the city, where everything’s paved, they bring stuff to throw at us—wheel weights, things that are cheap. We had one guy who could throw a golf ball ninety-seven yards. You can buy a bag of golf balls for five bucks and equip everybody in the mob.”
One day, I went with Heal to a sheriff’s station to meet a salesman from a company in Washington State who had a laser that he wanted Heal to see. The salesman’s name was Clint Meyers. From a briefcase he produced a black metal tube that looked like a gun-sight, and a larger one that was about the size of a Maglite. He handed the small one to Heal. “This is the military version they’re using over in the sandbox right now,” he said.
“What’s eye safe on this?” Heal asked.
“Eye safe is about eighteen metres,” Meyers said.
Heal twisted the device in his hands. “The official term the military gives it is ‘to visually dissuade,’” Meyers said for my benefit. “Someone approaching a checkpoint sees this, he knows he’s supposed to stop.”
“What do you see as your law-enforcement market?” Heal asked.
“Entries,” Meyers said. He turned to me. “The reason I wanted the Commander to see this is it’s a way to come into a building—you know, the bright lights they have on shields; it does the same kind of job.”
“I don’t want anyone using shields on entries,” Heal said. “You’re in a defensive posture, you’re sacrificing mobility.” He turned the laser in his hands. “Some of it’s going to carry through to law enforcement, and some’s not,” he added. “By shining that light, you’re going to make an individual take one of two actions—turn away or fight through.”
“The military doesn’t care which,” Meyers said.
Heal asked how much the device cost.
“I don’t really have an answer,” Meyers said. “Five thousand for the military one.”
Heal told Meyers that he’d like to see the SWAT team test the laser; he thought three to six months would be a sensible period for a trial. “If they like it, they’ll fight for it,” Heal said.
Then Meyers measured off seventy feet, and we took turns shining the laser at each other. “I’ve been shot with these many times, so I don’t mind,” Heal said. When it was shined at me, I couldn’t see for several minutes to take notes, and Heal said that this was called the afterburn.
IN JANUARY, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Department on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers, including one to teach crowd-and riot-control tactics in China—three days in Canton and three days in Beijing. He has no idea how he came to the attention of the Chinese government. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System—the pain ray. There were also offers to work with a lab that is building a light-emitting diode incapacitator, and another that is working on a means of stopping a car by interfering with its onboard computer.
Heal’s first plan was to ride his bicycle across the Mojave and then through the Great Plains, and eventually to Michigan, stopping at every historical site and library he passed. (He left at the end of April.) “I want to continue with my ‘calling’ and build better non-lethal options and work with developers and law-enforcement agencies,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “But for right now I just want to put my life back in order.” So far, he has agreed only to take part in a study in Washington that focusses on what parallels might exist between law enforcement’s treatment of gangs and the military’s handling of tribes and clans.
Early in April, at a retirement luncheon attended by more than two hundred people, including colleagues from the Sheriff’s Department and the Marines, Heal was given the Distinguished Service Award, one of the department’s highest honors. He also received proclamations from the California Senate and the Assembly, and the five badges he had worn throughout his career. Heal’s place will be taken by the man he worked with the most, Sergeant Brian Muller, who kept a notebook in which he wrote down remarks Heal made.
I ASKED HEAL if he had ever read a letter describing an invention and dropped it
in the wastebasket. He shook his head. “I’ll listen to everything.” Then he said that one of the products he likes best was initially among the least plausible. It is a speaker that broadcasts sound by means of magnets, and he took me to Costa Mesa to see it. “This guy called me and made these fantastic, wild, incredible claims,” he said as we drove. “I talked to him, but the things he was claiming were impossible. There is a law in physics called the inverse square law, which says that as the distance is doubled the sound is quartered, and yet this guy was saying that with his invention we can hear sound with clarity at ranges that we’ve never seen before, at factors more powerful.”
The product, he said, was called MAD, for magnetic audio device. “A guy named Vahan Simidian’s the owner, and his chief technical officer’s a guy named Dragoslav Colich. Everybody else was making bigger speakers, adding more power, adding longer wave guides, which is the bullhorn part of the speaker; it’s like a barrel. Anyway, instead of using a speaker this guy’s using magnets, and instead of using an acoustical wave he’s using something called a planar wave. I’ll let them tell you what it is.”
Craning his neck to read a number on a wall, Heal said, “This is it,” and pulled into a parking lot outside a low cement building. “When he demonstrated the system, I went a hundred yards down the road, and he’s playing a Queen record,” he said. “As the drummer is hitting his drum, I can feel it on my chest so tangibly that I look down to see if my shirt is moving. As I’m leaving, he says, ‘If you think that’s something, I can make the sound go a mile.’ So we picked a date, and I brought a sixty-thousand-watt generator. We took a G.P.S. and measured a mile, and I listened to a Frank Sinatra record and everything was there—the lyrics, the orchestra, the cymbal sound, everything. We couldn’t even see where the sound was coming from anymore. At three-quarters of a mile, we had trusties from the jail raking leaves, and they were putting in music requests.”
Heal started collecting papers beside him on the seat. “We don’t even know everything it will do; it’s just started the trials,” he said. “First thing, though, it replaces conventional hailing devices. Second thing is, it has non-lethal capabilities. I have to give you a little class. All non-lethal agents are debilitating, not incapacitating. They don’t force you to leave an area; they just make it difficult for you to remain. Tear gas is weather-dependent, though. If the wind blows the wrong way, it affects everyone in the area; it’s dangerous to use around schools and hospitals. The human brain is susceptible to certain frequencies that have nothing to do with volume. Most people cringe when you scrape a fingernail on a blackboard. What if we create a repellent sound? Will it make people avoid an area? We don’t have a weather-dependency system, then, we don’t have collateral damage, and because we can do it with clarity and be specific in our target we have an advantage.
“The third thing with this is that, after we started working with them, they had a major technical breakthrough. They made it so you can throw a switch and turn it into a microphone. On rescues, we can point it at somebody and have them hear us, and then we can have him talk to us, even though there’s a helicopter, say. He can participate in his own rescue.”
Heal got out of the car, and I followed him to the company’s door. “First time I came here, I thought, My job is to encourage this guy, not crush him,” he said.
Vahan Simidian turned out to be tall, with dark curly hair. He took us into a warehouse that had a big garage door at one end which had been raised. On a tripod in the parking lot was a square block of speakers about four feet by four feet. Beside it stood Colich, who was a few inches smaller than Simidian and a little heavier. Simidian said that the membrane, which he called a diaphragm, vibrated like vocal cords. “The difference between our technology and the rest of the world’s is that our sound goes out in parallel beams,” he said. “It’s called a plane sound source.”
I asked what that was, and Simidian said, “Drag, how do you explain a plane source?”
“Big surface that vibrates and creates tones that project forward,” Colich said. “What you normally have is a single-point source, where everything radiates outward.”
“Conically,” Simidian said.
“Spherically,” Colich said.
It is as if a line of sound had left the magnet speakers and remained intact, Colich explained, instead of a wave in the shape of a V that became wider and weaker as it travelled.
Simidian walked us about a hundred yards across the parking lot and had Colich play a sound that he called a wobble tone, which was a little like a siren. I didn’t so much hear it as feel that I was in its way.
“Play the machine gun,” Simidian yelled. “The .50 calibre.”
The report sounded as if it had come from a weapon the size of a backhoe. All around us, birds took to the air.
Heal was grinning. “Did you hear the brass shells hitting the ground?” he asked.
“If there’s crowds around, and they hear that, they’re going to disperse,” Simidian said.
We walked across the parking lot and into the warehouse. At the far end of the room was a microphone. Simidian gave me a pair of headphones, then he walked outside, so that the microphone was about eighty feet away from him. I stood with my back to him while he crushed a dry leaf, and I heard it as if it were in my own hands and I was holding them against my ear.
“Keeping the good guy away from the bad guy until the good guy knows what he’s up to is the point,” Simidian said. He told me that two governments—the American and the British—were using the speakers in Iraq to clear neighborhoods and to tell people at checkpoints to stop.
Heal asked Simidian if he could play the dog tape for me, but Simidian said he didn’t know where it was. “Everyone’s frightened of that,” Heal said. A deputy had played the tape outside a junk yard where he thought a gang member was hiding. Then, Heal said, the deputy announced that he was sending in the dogs, and a stream of gang members came out.
ALEC WILKINSON has been a writer at The New Yorker since 1980. Before that he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that a rock and roll musician. He has published nine books—two memoirs, three biographical portraits, two collections of essays, and two works of reporting, most recently The Protest Singer, about Pete Seeger.
Coda
Sid Heal retired in 2008 and rode his bicycle from Los Angeles to his childhood home in Michigan. “4,163 total miles over sixty-three days, fifty-eight of them pedaling,” he wrote me, “78,000-plus feet of ascent. Had more storms than I would have thought possible. Everyone said that this was the worst spring in their memory. Started with windstorms in Arizona and then wind and dust and the Trigo fires in New Mexico. Hit the southern end of the Great Plains at Trinidad, Colorado, and then headed north. Got caught in the hail and thunderstorms all the way through Colorado and Nebraska and then stiff and cold headwinds in the Dakotas and then freezing temps through northern Minnesota and then warm rains through Wisconsin and Michigan. In fact, it rained on me every single day for more than two weeks from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to Davison, Michigan.” He continues to teach at the war colleges and to consult and is working on a handbook for people who use non-lethal weapons.
Hanna Rosin
AMERICAN MURDER MYSTERY
FROM The Atlantic
TO GET TO THE OLD ALLEN police station in North Memphis, you have to drive all the way to the end of a quiet suburban road until it turns country. Hidden by six acres of woods, the station seems to be the kind of place that might concern itself mainly with lost dogs, or maybe the misuse of hunting licenses. But it isn’t. Not anymore. As Lieutenant Doug Barnes waited for me to arrive one night for a tour of his beat, he had a smoke and listened for shots. He counted eight, none meant for buck. “Nothing unusual for a Tuesday,” he told me.
Barnes is white, middle-aged, and, like many veteran cops, looks powerful without being fit. He grew up four miles from the station during the 1960s, he said, back when middle-class whites lived p
eacefully alongside both city elites and working-class African Americans. After the 1968 riots, Barnes’s father taught him the word curfew and reminded him to lock the doors. Still, the place remained, until about 10 years ago, a pretty safe neighborhood where you could play outside with a ball or a dog. But as he considered more-recent times, his nostalgia gave way to something darker. “I have never been so disheartened,” he said.
He remembers when the ground began to shift beneath him. He was working as an investigator throughout the city, looking into homicides and major crimes. Most of his work was downtown. One day in 1997, he got a call to check out a dead car that someone had rolled up onto the side of the interstate, on the way to the northern suburbs. The car “looked like Swiss cheese,” he said, with 40 or 50 bullet holes in it and blood all over the seats. Barnes started investigating. He located one corpse in the woods nearby and another, which had been shoved out a car door, in the parking lot of a hospital a few miles away. He found a neighborhood witness, who gave up everything but the killers’ names. Two weeks later, he got another call about an abandoned car. This time the body was inside. “It was my witness,” he recalled, “deader than a mackerel.”
At this point, he still thought of the stretch of Memphis where he’d grown up as “quiet as all get-out” the only place you’d see cruisers congregated was in the Safeway parking lot, where churchgoing cops held choir practice before going out for drinks. But by 2000, all of that had changed. Once-quiet apartment complexes full of young families “suddenly started turning hot on us.” Instead of the occasional break-in, Barnes was getting calls about armed robberies, gunshots in the hallways, drug dealers roughing up their neighbors. A gang war ripped through the neighborhood. “We thought, What the hell is going on here? A gang war! In North Memphis! All of a sudden it was a damn war zone,” he said.