The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (24 page)

Recalling other inventions, Heal mentioned a man who had built a remote-control machine gun. “You looked at a little TV screen that has a crosshair on it, and you fired with a toggle switch,” he said. “I put eight rounds through a target, but it had no application in law enforcement that I could think of. Another lab had a sniper-detection system that would locate a sniper by a combination of acoustics and light. They were taking it to the Balkans—this was ’97 or ’98. I tried to get them to let us borrow one for South Central L.A., but it was classified.”

Heal took an exit off the freeway. “One device I really liked was a camera that fit on a dog’s head,” he continued. “It was just like a little hat, and when the dog searches for a crook you see what the dog sees. There was also a little speaker that fit in the dog’s ear. You could talk quietly and the dog would follow your commands. That one, I think, still has potential. The dog han
dlers were willing to try it; I just wasn’t able to get the canine to buy into it. The problem is, it takes about three weeks for the dogs to tolerate it, and until they do they’ll scratch their heads and pull at their ears. The guy only wanted to give it to me for a month.”

By now, we had arrived in a neighborhood of single-story houses. Heal had brought McGill’s letter with him and, reading the address on the back of the envelope, he parked in front of a house where a tall, thin man in a red sweatshirt and jeans waved to us from the lawn—McGill himself. We went into the house and met his wife, Cheryl, then we sat in the living room.

“I might mention that my first pursuit was in 1957,” McGill said. “Kid running for nothing, and he ended up hitting a train off Alameda. Knocked the train off the track and didn’t do him any good, either.” He went on for a while, then said, “Let’s change gears and talk about Carpoon.”

“How do you envision this?” Heal asked. “It shoots a probe?”

“Powerful mini-barrel air gun mounted on the front bumper of a police car,” McGill said. He leaned toward Heal. “The air gun is slaved to a dash-mounted computerized video camera that will project the image of the road in front of the police car. As soon as the officer goes into pursuit mode, the other car’s rear tires appear on his computer screen. The officer touches a tire on the screen, crosshairs immediately appear. Another touch on the screen moves the crosshair to any quadrant of the tire he wants, and when he’s satisfied he gets an aural tone, like a sidewinder missile. As long as he hears that tone, that crosshair is on the tire, no matter where the guy goes.”

McGill waved a hand. “From here on out, everything is automatic,” he said. “All the time the officer’s driving, he hears the tone. At a predetermined distance, the gun is going to fire. He’s just driving.”

Heal’s BlackBerry began buzzing, and he took it out and read a message. Then he said, “Sorry.”

“Air gun shoots a tethered dart into the tire,” McGill went on. “Now the bad guy’s got a quarter-inch hole in his tire. In addition, the computer will give him some cable that will wrap around his wheel and cause real havoc. I’m hoping we can engineer something that will break an axle, break a tire shaft.”

McGill turned to me. “These guys, Sid and I know, will lose a tire and keep going, but we’ve taken the hundred-mile-an-hour thing out of it.”

“You have no idea on price, though, because you don’t have a developer, right?” Heal asked.

“I don’t have anything,” McGill said. “I need a money partner.”

Heal leaned back slightly. “All this stuff is feasible,” he said. “Military uses it all the time.” He asked if McGill had consulted the National Institute of Justice Office of Science and Technology.

“I haven’t looked at anything,” McGill said. “I just got the patent.”

“You’re going to need a working prototype before you have much of a chance,” Heal said. “They got to see it, touch it, smell it, watch it work.”

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.”

M
ORE 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.

I
N
J
ANUARY,
Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Department on March 31st. At that point, he had re
ceived 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
H
EAL
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.