Axon Pauses Plans for Taser Drone as Ethics Board Members Resign

As nine members of its ethics board resigned, the company that developed the taser said it was pausing plans to develop a stun-gun-equipped drone that it said could be used to prevent mass shootings.

After the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, last month, Rick Smith, the founder and chief executive of Axon, announced a proposal for a non lethal stun gun. The same role that sprinklers and other fire suppression tools play for firefighters can be played by the drones.

The announcement came weeks after the ethics board voted to recommend that the company not go ahead with the pilot study.

On Thursday, the ethics board issued a public statement saying that it had not had time to review the proposal and that it was deeply regrettable.

Nine members of the ethics board resigned on Sunday. Mr. Smith said in a statement that the drones project would be put on hold. The board members told Mr. Smith that they were going to resign, so it was not clear if the decision to stop the project was made before or after that.

Mr. Smith said that some members of the ethics advisory panel withdrew from engaging directly with the issues before they had a chance to address them. We will continue to seek different viewpoints to challenge our thinking and help guide other technology options that we should be considering.

Nine board members resigned on Monday, saying in a statement that they didn't expect the announcement.

They said that they all felt the need to address the epidemic of mass shooting. There are far less harmful alternatives to elevating a tech-and-policing response. We begged the company to back off before the announcement. The company charged ahead in a way that struck many of us as trading on the tragedies of Uvalde and Buffalo.

Mr. Smith said in the announcement that it sounds ludicrous to some. He said that humans, not the drones, should control what the drones do, and that the drones would needrigorous oversight.

Mr. Smith said that if a drone is used to put down a shooter in a church, we can't just cheer it up. The video needs to be examined closely and thoroughly.

The board members who resigned said that the ethics board had warned the company against using products that could be used to surveil people.

They said that this type of monitoring will harm communities of color and other people who are over policed. The mass shooting problem has no realistic chance of being solved by the taser-equipped drones now being prescribed by the company.

Barry Friedman, the director of the policing project at the New York University School of Law, was one of the board members who resigned.

It is important that we find a way to restrict the adoption of technologies, which is happening often with very little concern for harm to privacy, harms to racial justice or concerns about how much data the government holds on all of us.

Giles Herdale, one of the board members who decided not to resign, wanted to try and mitigate any harms caused by developments such as this.

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He said that the deployment of those sorts of technologies would have to be carefully considered.