First-Time Director Works To Uncover the Truth About Tasers

“Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle," a documentary currently showing at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a hard-hitting look at the company behind Tasers. They were originally hailed as the perfect non-lethal weapon for police, but they've since come under increased scrutiny after several people were killed.

First-time director Nick Berardini said he became interested in the topic when he covered the case of Stanley Harlan in 2008 as a student reporter at the University of Missouri. Harlan, 23, was shot in the chest with a Taser for 31 seconds after a traffic stop in Moberly, Mo. He was killed.

Berardini said he’d originally set out to make “an intimate portrait about the relationship between a small town and the police” after Harlan’s death. He ended up with a film about the billion-dollar Taser Corporation, which has sold the weapons to 17,000 police departments across North America.

“How do we deal with potentially violent people that we can't shoot, but you don't want to use batons on? How do you take those people and control them safely? That's a complicated question and this was a very, very simple solution,” Berardini said. “The film speaks to our societal inclination to love magic bullets and to love easy answers.”

The film features interviews with representatives from Taser, the family of Stanley Harlan, the lawyers targeting the company and a police department in Warren, Mich., that re-thinks its relationship with Taser when a young man dies after one of its officers shoots him with the weapon. Taser has denied its weapons can cause death or serious injury.

But Berardini said he doesn’t think police departments should stop using Tasers. He said that would just be another “magic bullet.”

“The police were only being told one version. We told the complete story so that now officers have all the information when they go out in the streets and use these weapons,” Berardini said.

"Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle” will have one last showing at the SVA Theater Sunday night.

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