The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

Alec Wilkinson: NON-LETHAL FORCE

FROM The New Yorker

A JUDGMENT SOMETIMES APPLIED by professionals to a non-lethal weapon is that if the weapon is any good-if it reliably protects someone from being attacked or subdues a person without causing harm-criminals will use it. Absent a small number of robberies committed with pepper spray, though, they haven’t really taken to any. According to Charles Heal, an expert in non-lethal weapons, the problem is that the field is nascent, and “the options are primitive. The whole state of the art is only a shade over a decade old.”

“Non-lethal” is an imperfect term. “Lethal weapons are defined by their capability,” Heal says. “Non-lethal are defined by their intent.” In the hands of the police, non-lethal weapons are meant to resolve a crisis (say, a Hells Angel in a bar who has broken a chair over someone’s head and is overturning tables, and who, when asked to leave, draws a knife) without anyone getting badly hurt or being killed. They are also sometimes called less than lethal, less lethal, controlled force, soft kill, mission kill, and minimal force. There is no established lexicon for non-lethal weapons, but there are accepted categories and concepts, including impact or kinetic weapons-things that strike, such as batons, billy clubs, saps, and projectiles fired from shotguns (including bean bags and stun bags, which usually have sand in them instead of lead pellets), and “vivi,” meaning animals. “Dog is the only non-lethal weapon I can change my mind about after I deploy it,” Heal says. “The suspect sees me and puts his hands up, I can call it back. If I launch a bean bag, it’s downrange. Dog’s also the only one with target-acquisition radar: suspect moves, dog does, too.” In addition, there are irritants, such as tear gas, which was first used on a crowd in Paris, in 1912; malodorants (stink bombs); obscurants, which interfere with seeing, either by means of lasers or smoke or other substances; electrical, such as Tasers; physiological, which includes noises that are too loud and lights that are too bright, sometimes combined in devices called flashbangs; reactants, which include activities such as cloud seeding (conducted in Vietnam above the Ho Chi Minh Trail); and soporifics, which are also called calmatives, sedatives, and hypnotics. “What they used in the Moscow Theatre,” Heal says, referring to the occasion, in 2002, when Chechen terrorists took over a theatre, with nearly eight hundred people in it, and were subdued with a chemical delivered through the ventilation system. More than a hundred of the hostages died, some of them as a result of the chemical. Still, Heal says, they are the only weapons that “allow you to intervene in a lethal situation without having to resort immediately to lethal force.”

Heal was among the first Americans to use modern non-lethal weapons, as a marine in Somalia in 1995. One was a foam called sticky foam, which was shot from a hose and designed to fix a person’s feet to the ground. The problem was that people could move their feet faster than the sticky foam could be applied, although, Heal says, if you hit a person’s thighs his legs sometimes stuck together. Heal’s orders were to provide a twenty-minute window between the withdrawal of American soldiers and the arrival of “the people with crude weapons and guns on the backs of old trucks who’d rush in to take over.” He had his troops scatter caltrops, ancient devices made of spiked rods welded together in such a way that, however they land, a spike faces upward, like a child’s jack. The Somalis cast the caltrops aside. Heal had his soldiers lay down more caltrops and cover them with sticky foam; the Somalis picked these up, too, and threw them away, although it took longer. Heal’s soldiers then put down sheets of plywood, laid concertina wire over the plywood, laid caltrops on the plywood, and covered everything with sticky foam, which held up the Somalis for about five minutes, sufficient for the troops to retreat. Heal and others think that sticky foam might work in an embassy or at a missile base or a nuclear plant, where the floors could be flooded if someone broke in.

For more than thirty years, Heal, who is fifty-eight, and is known as Sid, divided his career between the Marine reserves and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. (The Sheriff’s Department acts as the police in parts of Los Angeles County that are not incorporated, and in cities such as Compton, where its services are retained by contract.) He is probably the most knowledgeable figure in America on the civil uses of non-lethal weapons. According to Nicholas C. Nicholas, the lead scientist at the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies, at Penn State, “There’s nobody close to him. I saw him interviewed on TV the other night, and I said to my wife, ‘That’s Mr. Non-Lethal Weapons as far as the police are concerned.’ Heal has served on the front in four wars-Vietnam, Somalia, Kuwait, and Iraq. When he returned from Somalia, he says, he “ended up on the lecture tour for the Marines in lessons learned.” The Los Angeles undersheriff called him into his office and said that if he could specialize in non-lethal weapons for the Marines he could do it for the Sheriff’s Department. Heal became the only municipal-law-enforcement figure in America then devoted to non-lethal weapons.

Manufacturers typically produce non-lethal weapons for soldiers, because the military market is larger and the military has more money. To sell weapons to the police, the manufacturers tend to modify, rather than redesign, the military versions. In addition, manufacturers often take advice from retired military officers, who, Heal says, have “no insight into law enforcement.” Heal began urging inventors and manufacturers to design non-lethal weapons for policemen rather than soldiers, and whenever they made something he tested it. He assumed that manufacturers would be responsive, because the L.A.S.D. is so big-“Sixteen thousand employees, five thousand vehicles, and I don’t know how many boats and planes”-that he thought it could be a market in itself. As an incentive, Heal was willing to provide for free the expertise for which manufacturers paid consultants hundreds of dollars an hour.

Heal had a talent for describing to a manufacturer precisely what a policeman needed and whether or not its product worked well. Over the years, about twenty-five ideas that inventors and manufacturers have approached him with have become products, including a portable robot called a Throwbot, which has wheels and a camera and can go into rooms where someone might be hiding with a gun; the SkySeer, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a camera; the Pepper-Ball, a projectile like a paintball that disperses an irritating powder; and a few repulsive malodorants. Among those that haven’t worked out are the Bola Ball, which a policeman would carry on his belt and fling at running suspects (it was too difficult to master), and a device shaped like a pistol which used ultrasound to detect concealed weapons (it worked well on cotton and wool but less reliably on leather or synthetic fabrics). Recently, Heal has attended tests of the Active Denial System, or A.D.S., made for the military by Raytheon, which sends a beam of energy that heats a person’s skin to a hundred and thirty degrees within a matter of seconds. It is sometimes called the pain ray. Heal says that being beamed with it is like stepping into a scalding shower. “It’s the first non-lethal device in history to provide protection against lethal force, because its range exceeds rifle fire,” he says. The military hopes to use the A.D.S. in Iraq to disperse crowds or stop people at check-points who keep coming after being told to stop. It currently has little use in law enforcement, though. “If they gave it to us for free, we probably couldn’t use it,” Heal told me. The first police chief to use the pain ray on Americans would become famous overnight.

It isn’t so much that the police are uncomfortable about using violence when they feel that their safety is jeopardized; it is that often when they kill people they end up in lawsuits. When a non-lethal weapon is being tested, Heal says, the critical standard is whether it creates a “save”-that is, whether a person who would have been killed was instead apprehended, because the manufacturer can then cite the dollars saved from a lawsuit. The standing of any non-lethal weapon that creates a save advances from speculative to favorable. According to Nicholas, the non-lethal weapon that everyone desires is “the phaser where you can put it on stun.”

Non-lethal weapons can force a suspect to declare his intentions, and that sometimes leads to a save. Heal once took part in a gun battle with a man who was shooting at him and his fellow-deputies from behind a barricade. “He had a Winchester.458 calibre,” Heal says. “An elephant gun-the bullets are as big as your thumb. He’s shooting through cinderblock walls, and we’re using the holes to look back at him. Finally, he comes out with his hands in his pockets. We’re all yelling, ‘Get your hands out of your pockets.’ All around me, I can hear the slack coming out of the triggers-they’re about to shoot. It’s pretty clear he’s trying to commit suicide by cop, but what if there’s a weapon in his pockets? What gets us killed isn’t the ability to apply lethal force; it’s the reluctance to use it, and the reason we’re reluctant is that we can’t make informed decisions. The rules of engagement that allow us to use lethal force mean that we have to tolerate a lot more abuse and risk. With a non-lethal-weapon option, you don’t have to accept the conditions offered. What happened was, someone threw a flashbang at this guy, and his hands came out of his pockets, and we jumped him and wrestled him down. The flashbang enabled us to determine his intentions. That’s a save.”

HEAL IS ABOUT SIX FEET TALL. His carriage is erect. He has a large nose and sharp, elemental features-he looks a little as if a child had drawn him. He is exceptionally fit-he runs every morning before dawn, and sometimes he rides his bicycle a hundred miles in a day. His manner is emphatic, and his eyes sometimes widen when he speaks. He has blue eyes and brown hair cut short on the sides and a little longer on top. Several times a day, he plants his feet, takes a black comb from his back pocket, and draws it slowly across the front of his head, smoothing his hair with his following hand so that it stands up like a hedge. Commanders in the L.A.S.D. (there are twenty-eight of them) can wear their own clothes, but Heal would always wear a uniform. He was the only commander who did. “I have color-coördination issues,” he says. Heal grew up on a farm in Michigan. The trip he made at the age of eighteen, to San Diego, to join the Marines, was the first time he had ever taken a bus or a taxi or a plane. While he was there, he saw his first movie. His hearing was damaged during training, when a soldier stepped on a trip wire that set off a booby trap about a foot from his head.

Heal has been injured more often at work than he was at war. Between 1979 and 1982, he was a deputy sheriff assigned to South Central L.A., where, he says, he couldn’t drive down the street without seeing a crime. One year, he drew his gun so many times that the bluing on the barrel wore off. He has surgical pins in his hand from a fight with a glue sniffer. Another drug suspect broke his nose, leaving a scar between his eyes that looks like the flippers on a pinball game. (“It’s not pretty,” Heal says, “but it’s better than what I had.”) He was also hurt repeatedly in fights with suspects intoxicated with PCP, which is a dissociative anesthetic. “They’d take off their clothes, because their body temperature was so hot,” Heal says. “They’d be slimy hot, and they’d jump into swimming pools and showers, and, for whatever reason, they’d climb onto roofs. If you got a call for a naked man on a roof, that was PCP.”

PCP made even small men feel unnaturally strong, and a strong man was nearly impossible to subdue. “The only way to overwhelm them was with weight,” Heal told me. “We tried nets, we tried poles, ladders, fire extinguishers.” For a while, they tried throwing blankets over them and binding them with ropes. One man, a Samoan, required four officers to bend his arms into handcuffs. “Non-lethal’ was hardly a term in those days,” Heal says. “The non-lethal options were a baton, which all it did was get the guy mad, or tear gas, which they didn’t feel and tended to work better on us.”

Heal’s field trials of new weapons last several weeks or months and involve sometimes just a few deputies and sometimes as many as five hundred. In 2000, he tested the TigerLight, a flashlight that also dispersed pepper spray. Deputies carried pepper spray and flashlights on their tool belts; the problem was that fights broke out too quickly for them to get to their pepper spray, whereas they usually had their flashlights in hand. “When a deputy gets in trouble, he’s going to hit with his flashlight, and you’re going to get stitches, which almost always result in lawsuits,” Heal says.

Initially, Heal distributed twenty TigerLights. The deputies didn’t like that when the lights were upside down the pepper spray leaked on them. The manufacturer fixed the problem, and in 2005 Heal gave out five hundred TigerLights. “We figured if the option to use the spray in the TigerLight could reduce head strikes by even two or three per cent we’re going to recover the money the TigerLights cost,” Heal says. The difference was closer to thirty per cent. “It was a real sleeper.” He says that at the end of a trial the endorsement he looks for is that deputies complain when he takes the weapon away.

MANUFACTURERS WHO HAVE A PRODUCT that they want Heal to consider tend to bring it to him, but he also travels a lot. He answers anyone who contacts him, and he has spent a good deal of time driving around Southern California visiting inventors. Recently, I went with him to see David McGill, a retired member of the L.A.P.D., who had written a letter describing a device he calls the Carpoon. McGill and his wife live in Temecula, about seventy miles southeast of L.A. The Carpoon is designed to stop cars that are fleeing the police.

“People have thought of all kinds of harpoon devices,” Heal told me on the way to McGill’s. “Some shoot out the tires, some lock onto the car, then you drag them to a stop by slamming on the brakes. What we’re going to see here is called a running gear-entanglement system. His idea is he fires a probe that hits a tire then rolls a cable around the axle and kills the ability to drive the wheel. It’s the release part that’s a good idea-being entangled is not attractive. Nobody likes entanglement. You’re entangled, he spins out, which makes us spin out; it’s like a boa. There’s so much civil liability with that. Even if a bad guy’s breaking the law, he was safely breaking the law until we spun him out.”

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 handlers 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.”

MORE 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.

IN JANUARY, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Department on March 31st. At that point, he had received 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 HEAL 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.

“The third thing with this is that, after we started working with them, they had a major technical breakthrough. They made it so you can throw a switch and turn it into a microphone. On rescues, we can point it at somebody and have them hear us, and then we can have him talk to us, even though there’s a helicopter, say. He can participate in his own rescue.”

Heal got out of the car, and I followed him to the company’s door. “First time I came here, I thought, My job is to encourage this guy, not crush him,” he said.

Vahan Simidian turned out to be tall, with dark curly hair. He took us into a warehouse that had a big garage door at one end which had been raised. On a tripod in the parking lot was a square block of speakers about four feet by four feet. Beside it stood Colich, who was a few inches smaller than Simidian and a little heavier. Simidian said that the membrane, which he called a diaphragm, vibrated like vocal cords. “The difference between our technology and the rest of the world’s is that our sound goes out in parallel beams,” he said. “It’s called a plane sound source.”

I asked what that was, and Simidian said, “Drag, how do you explain a plane source?”

“Big surface that vibrates and creates tones that project forward,” Colich said. “What you normally have is a single-point source, where everything radiates outward.”

“Conically,” Simidian said.

“Spherically,” Colich said.

It is as if a line of sound had left the magnet speakers and remained intact, Colich explained, instead of a wave in the shape of a V that became wider and weaker as it travelled.

Simidian walked us about a hundred yards across the parking lot and had Colich play a sound that he called a wobble tone, which was a little like a siren. I didn’t so much hear it as feel that I was in its way.

“Play the machine gun,” Simidian yelled. “The.50 calibre.”

The report sounded as if it had come from a weapon the size of a backhoe. All around us, birds took to the air.

Heal was grinning. “Did you hear the brass shells hitting the ground?” he asked.

“If there’s crowds around, and they hear that, they’re going to disperse,” Simidian said.

We walked across the parking lot and into the warehouse. At the far end of the room was a microphone. Simidian gave me a pair of headphones, then he walked outside, so that the microphone was about eighty feet away from him. I stood with my back to him while he crushed a dry leaf, and I heard it as if it were in my own hands and I was holding them against my ear.

“Keeping the good guy away from the bad guy until the good guy knows what he’s up to is the point,” Simidian said. He told me that two governments-the American and the British-were using the speakers in Iraq to clear neighborhoods and to tell people at checkpoints to stop.

Heal asked Simidian if he could play the dog tape for me, but Simidian said he didn’t know where it was. “Everyone’s frightened of that,” Heal said. A deputy had played the tape outside a junk yard where he thought a gang member was hiding. Then, Heal said, the deputy announced that he was sending in the dogs, and a stream of gang members came out.

ALEC WILKINSON has been a writer at The New Yorker since 1980. Before that he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that a rock and roll musician. He has published nine books-two memoirs, three biographical portraits, two collections of essays, and two works of reporting, most recently The Protest Singer, about Pete Seeger.

Coda

Sid Heal retired in 2008 and rode his bicycle from Los Angeles to his childhood home in Michigan. “4,163 total miles over sixty-three days, fifty-eight of them pedaling,” he wrote me, “78,000-plus feet of ascent. Had more storms than I would have thought possible. Everyone said that this was the worst spring in their memory. Started with windstorms in Arizona and then wind and dust and the Trigo fires in New Mexico. Hit the southern end of the Great Plains at Trinidad, Colorado, and then headed north. Got caught in the hail and thunderstorms all the way through Colorado and Nebraska and then stiff and cold headwinds in the Dakotas and then freezing temps through northern Minnesota and then warm rains through Wisconsin and Michigan. In fact, it rained on me every single day for more than two weeks from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to Davison, Michigan.” He continues to teach at the war colleges and to consult and is working on a handbook for people who use non-lethal weapons.