The first Tasers

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1970s, an American engineer Jack Cover designed a new experimental stun gun. He called it a Taser. But the device only really became popular when it started to be used by US law enforcement agencies. The Los Angeles Police Department were among the first to use the device. Retired police Captain Greg Meyer was then the young officer given the task of evaluating non-lethal weapons for the LAPD. He tells Alex Last about the origins of the Taser and its dramatic impact on the streets.

Photo: Jack Cover with an early version of his Taser. The gun has a flashlight atop and below are two cartridges each containing two darts which can be fired a distance of 15 feet with a stunning 50,000-volt shock.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.
0:29.2	Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex
0:38.8	Last each day a first-hand account of an event that shaped our world.
0:44.0	And today we go back to the 1970s and 80s
0:51.0	and the development of a weapon that changed policing around the globe.
0:56.3	I was working the streets in South Los Angeles as a young officer and then I was selected
1:01.6	to go to our planning and research division.
1:05.0	The first thing they told me was, well, you're going to be our non-lethal weapons researcher.
1:10.0	Retired Captain Greg Meyer was a young police officer with the LAPD in the late 1970s at a time
1:16.6	when the police were under fire on several fronts.
1:20.0	In 1979, there had been a series of incidents with a lot of police officers getting
1:26.4	hurt, civilians getting hurt, even police shootings that became
1:31.2	questionable in the public mind.
1:33.0	In particular, there was a storm of protest over the police shooting of Yula Love,
1:38.0	a 39-year-old African-American mother of three.
	...

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