Max Isaacs was an adviser to the former independent ethics board at Axon that quit in 2022. Photo: Supplied
A US lawyer is cautioning New Zealand police to think twice about becoming more reliant on American taser and drone supplier Axon.
Police are poised to replace their old Axon tasers with new ones that shoot further.
They also use an Axon system called evidence.com to store footage from taser cameras and interview videos.
Axon supplies bodyworn cameras to many police forces in the US and elsewhere, but police here recently ruled out using such cameras.
Max Isaacs of New York University's Policing Project, was also an adviser to the former independent ethics board at Axon that quit in 2022 over its proposal to put tasers on drones and send them into schools to combat mass shootings.
Axon recently confirmed it was still working on this.
"The fact that they're charging forward is deeply troubling and suggests to me that they're not sufficiently committed to developing their products in an ethically responsible way," Isaacs said.
New Zealand might never get drones with tasers, but there was a red flag, he said.
"This is a company that really needs to invest more in considering the potential civil rights' and civil liberties' harms of its products."
The data platform evidence.com, for instance, was useful but "when used in connection with other surveillance technologies, it's enabling police to gather much more information about us. And that's something that gives us real concern", Isaacs said.
Axon has been approached for comment.
Other red flags the New Zealand public should watch out for, that were being embraced by police in the US, were facial recognition systems and aerial drones and robots, Isaacs added.
"Do we really want to live in a society in which we have police drones and robots patrolling our streets?"
Police documents from 2022 said it would expand its use of evidence.com, but this month police told RNZ it would not.
