She was one of several former staffers to compare tasings, frequently held in the tiered atrium at Axon’s Scottsdale headquarters, to the Colosseum’s spectacles. “It looks like a scene from ancient Rome, gladiator-style,” said Valencia Gibson, a former international support manager at Axon. “Tase, Tase, Tase,” staffers chanted in unison in a March 2019 recording as a target stood in the line of fire. Sometimes they involve mid-career employees like Blank, but often they are used to initiate interns or new recruits into Axon’s all-in culture, according to numerous interviews and videos seen by Reuters. Staff tasings, known as “exposures,” are corporate rituals at Axon. Tuttle did not respond to requests for comment. James defended Axon’s culture, describing it as “a collaborative environment of mission-driven individuals who join forces to deliver an extraordinarily profound impact on society.”Īxon said that staff tasings have never drawn formal complaints and are conducted with “the utmost focus on both psychological and physical safety.” Blank said he never felt pressured by Axon. “It was truly toxic.” Shawn Gorman, a lawyer at Axon until 2019, said of Axon’s culture “We strongly object to any implication that Axon pressures employees to engage in activities against their will,” said Andrea James, the company’s chief communications officer. The company and its chief executive officer, Rick Smith, said employees are not pressured into anything. In statements to Reuters, Axon disputed that staff tasings are hazardous.
It’s “unhealthy at best, dangerous at worst,” said Jennifer Chatman, a professor studying workplace culture at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. The tasing exercise struck several workplace experts consulted by Reuters as an outlandish and unnecessary hazard. Shawn Gorman, a lawyer who worked at Axon until 2019, said the company had a high-pressure culture of loyalty, unlike anything he has seen in nearly two decades of practice. Less well-known is the all-in corporate culture at Axon, which has tested employees’ commitment and fealty in unusual ways – through measures that some embraced wholeheartedly but others felt were extreme and potentially dangerous. Axon says that more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in 107 countries use Tasers. Its best-known product is the Taser, the device it developed to temporarily immobilize criminal suspects with darts that deliver electric current, providing police with an alternative to firearms. It describes its mission as a noble one: saving lives. Axon employee Ross Blank lies face down from his tasing at a company event in January, in a screenshot of a video he posted on LinkedIn.Īxon, a corporation with a market capitalization of $15 billion, has a dominant position in its niche of electroshock weapons and body camera technology for law enforcement.
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