First Response with PepperBall CEO Bob Plaschke
"First Response," is an interview series hosted by PepperBall CEO Bob Plaschke. This series aims to shine a spotlight on the thought leaders within the public safety industry and provide a platform for these individuals to share their experiences, insights, and the valuable lessons they've learned through their careers in law enforcement.
First Response with PepperBall CEO Bob Plaschke
First Response Podcast with Bob Plaschke, Episode 20 - Barton Bollfrass - The New Tools Protecting First Responders
A flood isn’t just water. It’s noise, darkness, panic, a moving car you can’t predict, and a victim who might fight the person trying to help. That’s why we brought on Barton Bollfrass, a Navy EOD diver turned technologist, who builds training environments and tools that mirror the chaos without the body count. Barton walks us through Fathom Tanks, the physical simulator that puts first responders into rushing water around real vehicles, with reluctant “victims,” lightning, sirens, and the stress that makes or breaks decisions. When teams can fail safely and reset in seconds, they learn what matters: how to move, how to communicate, and how to bring everyone home.
We also dive into the gear side of the job. Barton’s RoboRounds lab takes on hard problems with simple ideas: break complex automotive glass at standoff using ultra-hard ceramics so officers create an opening without closing distance; use compact “tangler” rounds to snag drone rotors over yards of airspace, avoiding explosives and collateral damage; and blind hostile sensors with LIDAR-disrupting payloads that smear and scramble optics without destroying property. These tools pair with non-lethal platforms like PepperBall to expand options between talking and force, giving responders space and time when scenes turn volatile.
The throughline is practical innovation for public safety. Most flood drownings involve vehicles, yet few responders get live, realistic reps on submerged cars. Drones smuggle contraband and scout borders, but low-risk defenses are scarce. Cameras and robots multiply watchful eyes, yet reversible ways to neutralize them are rare. Barton’s approach closes those gaps with stress-realistic training and precise, purpose-built technology. Listen to hear how these systems work, the data behind their design, and the stories from teams who say their rescues felt exactly like the tank.
If this resonated, share it with someone who cares about first responders, subscribe for more behind-the-badge stories, and leave a review to help others find the show. Got a scenario we should tackle next? Tell us—we’re listening.
The front line of policing is loud, but the voices behind it, you know, they're a lot louder and I think, frankly, a lot more interesting. Hi, I'm Bob Plaschke, and this is First Response. This is the number one podcast that takes you behind the badge and uncovers real stories and experiences of first responders from all walks of life and the topics that shape public safety today. If you're curious about the guy or the gal behind the hero, and they are indeed truly heroes, and the topics that they care about, take a listen. This is kind of your front row seat to hearing some of the really interesting voices out there and more importantly the heroes. This podcast is sponsored by Pepperball, where I have the honor to serve as CEO. PepperBall creates unlethal alternatives to guns at least used to keep themselves and the public safe. Today, I'm super excited to be joined by Barton Bollfrass. And Barton, a longtime native of the great state of Texas, is a very accomplished Navy diver and spent many, many years in the Navy serving our country. That's not why he's on the show today. Barton is a technologist. And this is one of the few times that we'll not have somebody who actually has a badge who is serving the public. This is someone like myself, actually, who is a technologist who builds innovative solutions for public safety uh responders. And Barton is the founder of Fathom Tanks. This is a uh a capability or a simulation. And the name tanks should kind of give it away, but it it's a simulation, a simulator for uh firefighters and police officers who need to do rescues of folks in floods. And so basically they NCL described, they get in tanks and uh and they actually simulate what a flood looks like with a car and and how to get people out of a car, how to get people out of a of a really you know challenging situation, dark, heavy, uh rapidly raising uh waters and the like. And this trains them in anticipation for what they have to do for floods. Barton also is a uh an innovative kind of an inventor of sorts for different types of um composites or materials that the police officers can use uh to deal with unique situations that they encounter. And we'll talk about that today as well. So it's when you think about a firefighter or a police officer, you normally think about it as someone just running into a fire or someone running um kind of you know, chasing down a burglary suspect. But it really is much more complicated than that, and the technologies they need are much more complicated. Um, so it's great to have Barton, who uh uh not only does he a proud graduate of Texas AM, but is also a graduate of Texas. Um so Barton, first question for you: who's gonna win today this um this game? Who's your favorite for the Texas versus Texas AM game this Friday? Yes.
Speaker:That's the safest answer that'll get me through Thanksgiving. Half of my entire family went to AM, and half of my entire family went to UT.
Speaker 1:So uh, but what's funny is is my uh there are multiple people in my family who attended both AM and UT. And so uh Thanksgiving is always a very intense uh but very uh reserved uh in whoever wins. It's you know, next year, next year you'll get next year.
Speaker 2:Well, some of at least half of your family is gonna be happy this Friday.
Speaker:No matter what, half of my family will be happy.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on that very politically correct answer. So, how did you uh get involved in um in serving public safety? I I I've described to listeners how I, you know, I was um unintentionally but very happily brought in in providing um uh working with FirstNet, which is a uh kind of a network, uh uh wireless network for public safety um and emergency responders. Uh, and I that's how I got um kind of hooked into serving firefighters and police officers. But um yourself, how did you get involved?
Speaker 1:I have um bizarrely, my entire life seems to weave in and out of um of being surrounded by law enforcement and first response. I um unfortunately in the 1970s, my family was uh stalked and terrorized. And uh by by the age of eight, I was incredibly fluid with uh the legal system and trying to uh maneuver that, but the police were instrumental in protecting my family, and that that really weighed heavily on me. I went on to serve in the military. I was a Navy EOD diver. I uh served four years and then uh got out, went and started to study industrial design, and suddenly I kind of saw a way. After watching a single video of some first responders practicing this rescue in a boat ramp, I realized after taking Navy dive training that there was a much better way. And then spending 10 years in the film industry randomly, uh, I saw a correlation between incredibly elaborate sets and the work uh that the training uh that was available. And I figured if you could compare or combine these incredibly elaborate film sets with no cameras with actual Navy style water training, you could create uh a simulator that would actually revolutionize the training of first responders rescuing individuals from a submerged vehicle. Uh and then after that, uh I spent a lot of time working with first responders, police, fire. And the more I spent time around them as an organization, uh, the more I started to see ways I could improve by applying technology in the same way to the police force. And so that kind of led down the led to RoboRounds, which then is you know technologically innovative payloads for for police. So the last, you know, if not my whole life, uh I've been surrounded by military, law enforcement, fire. It's just kind of in me now.
Speaker 2:Well, and you and I have broken bread, and we've talked about the privilege it is that we both have to serve such brave folks. And it's you know it's the best kind of the highest use of our own commercial talents to do that. Going back, let's talk first about the uh the the flood simulator that you've created um and that is now being kind of rolled out across the country. I think it's fascinating. It's it's in effect, um there are lots of simulators for folks that don't spend a lot of time in policing. There's a lot of virtual reality simulation that that police officers and firefighters use to train, whether they'll put on headsets or be in uh kind of a large studio of screens, and they'll have scenarios that presented to them, of which then they respond. And it really attests their mental kind of preparedness. I think yours is a bit different. Yours is actually a true physical simulation where they're actually in the water. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Um when I went through explosive ordinance disposal training, they made certain that when you made a mistake, um, you really felt it. So sometimes there was a distant charge that would go off, or um, you know, that that incredible amount of weight. And so the I realized that for incredibly effective training, you have to feel the level of stress that you feel in the moment, which is why when police go to a range, they shoot live rounds. Why when fire goes to a live training uh like at TEAKES or Disaster City, they fight a live fire. But for submerged vehicles, no municipality will let you put a vehicle in the water. And I realized you needed to have rushing water around a vehicle with a live victim who was not your friend, who would not be helpful to the rescue, and instead would make it as difficult as possible. And you could go through that scenario repeatedly safely. And the way to do that is uh a completely tailored environment. So an above-ground tank, uh six feet deep, you fill it halfway with water, and you have massive pumps push a river's worth of water skipping across the surface. Put a real vehicle on there or a bus, plane, a box culvert, whatever you want, and slowly train in an actual live rescue scenario, and then you finally end with the lights off and real thunder and lightning and you know, helicopter sounds and police lights. And by the time you're done, we keep getting notifications from first responders who come back from live rescues who say, This was so realistic to your training, I could not tell the difference. And our team came home alive. The victims uh were rescued and weren't victims. They, you know, everybody came back and we credit the tank. And that that's all I wanted to do was give all of the first responders an actual realistic opportunity to fail without getting hurt.
Speaker 2:It's uh great. Uh well, first of all fantastic in terms of you being able to create that um scenario uh and that situation. It's something I always try to describe to my friends who are not in public safety. They ask, you know, what does an officer or a firefighter do when they're not, you know, um solving a crime or not fighting fire? And the answer is that they train. And they they train an um an inordinate you know proportion of the time, much more than we would in what we do in terms of taking training classes or um kind of outside educational classes. They spend 20, 30 percent of their time training to be prepared for these um extraordinary situations of which only they are capable of dealing with. And you know, as an example, on the police officer, they go through a lot of live fire training, but they do a lot of live fire training where they're they're presented with scenarios where they you know they'll have pop-ups of of the you know the bad guys versus the the good, you know, the good people when and how to make to how to make those split-second decisions about who to engage. And what you've described in the flood tank is just another example of the of the amazing amount of work that they put in to be prepared, both physically and mentally. It's um, at least to me, it's it's so impressive uh how much they are the the time they have to put in to be prepared for these situations. Because I would imagine getting someone, you as a Navy diver, getting someone out of a car in the middle of a flood is not easy.
Speaker 1:No, no, it's um it's paralyzing level of fear. Uh you don't know what's underneath the water, when the vehicle is going to move. You don't know what the reaction of the individuals inside are going to be. And we try um, you know, to create something to where, and we don't offer the training, we just we I invented the equipment. So the first responders and the NFPA, National Guard, whoever is using these, they they tailor their own level of of use. But the NFPA uh uh you can take all of the NFPA's training in these tanks and get certified in doing so. But where it becomes the most uh problematic is when you have a reluctant victim. So in the past, the scenario was sunny day at the creek, the for the whole fire department would be having a barbecue, you would all wear life vests, you know the victim, you say, hi Tom, hi Bob, and you rescue each other, and then you have barbecue. The problem there is that it's created a 31% death rate among the first responders in a world where 76% of all drownings involve a vehicle. That's a really hard statistic to buy. But more most people die during a flood, not at the beach or at the lake or at the pool. Large numbers of people die during floods. And as a result, those vehicles are counted. But only 4% of first responders have ever taken flood rescue training on a live vehicle. And when they do, it's usually on a sunny day. You know the victim. So when you go to training in a more realistic scenario, and you have someone on top of the vehicle who refuses to leave until you save their loved one inside. And you, you know, you don't know how to you don't know how to wrestle that argument with someone who won't come with you. And when they do, they try to drown you like a real person. And so you both pop up, all the lights come on, the water stops in three seconds, like a movie set. And the victim is looking at you, and you're saying to them, you know, we just died. Not really. Let's go back to one, let's do this again, talk about why we both died, why this won't happen, how it can happen again. And they just kind of look at you with this sun look of if we were in a real river, even on a sunny day, we both would have just died. In 24, Bob, uh in North Carolina, Texas, and New York, they lost a chief or a captain or a lieutenant, I believe, in all three states in one year doing sunny training on a sunny day in the river or creek. Because a snag drowning doesn't matter if the weather's bad. And so being able to train somewhere that's hyper-realistic without the fear or threat of getting an infection or drowning is what helps people get through that repetition. Just like a live fire exercise with the police. Could you imagine them leaning out and throwing their gun at the target instead of a bullet? That's kind of what first responders were forced to deal with for the last 50 years. So now we've got requests coming from all over the country because flooding, just like here in Texas, we had that terrible incident most recently. And in North Carolina and everywhere else. It's just, it's it's everywhere.
Speaker 2:70% of drownings in the United States are caused by um are uh the result of someone drowning a car.
Speaker 1:76%. And it's global, not just here. It's a it's global statistic. 76% of all drownings involved a vehicle. To be very, very fair and accurate, that number fluctuates between about 69 and 76 back and forth. But that range is consistent because of think of all of the tsunami victims, of all the the coastal flood victims. Every time there's a hurricane, and it once the water passes the beach and it comes inward, it's considered a flood. It's not considered uh, you know, sea wash, it's considered flood. So everybody that drowns inland is a flood victim and is a drowning victim. If you were in your car, uh so it's it's a huge statistic. But the worst one is four percent of first responders have ever taken training or had any kind of training on a submerged vehicle.
Speaker 2:And these are scenarios and situations where um it's and this is you know, this is why you know I'm so um humbled to sit in front to serve these folks. These are police officers and firefighters who absent from the training are still have to dive in and still will dive in and still will try to figure it out on the fly. Right. Uh and um and you know, it's not if if we are on the sidelines, you know, where if you and I are on the in the kind of the creek side and a car goes under, you you you may get you may jump in and do what you can, but but you you don't you aren't compelled. Um these officers by you know by by their their their um their very nature and their sworn oath jive in and and go um and to your point and do it only with when only four percent of them even have the training. Yeah um you know this this you know kind of leads to the other other part of your world, which is um um uh RoboRounds, which is um uh kind of an RD center that produces different composites, different capabilities to help police officers deal with a bunch of odd uh unusual situations that they're forced to deal with. Um and where they don't uh and we're all trying to make sure they get the right level of training. Why don't you describe a little bit about Robo Rounds and about what type of scenarios you're trying to help police uh officers prepare for in those contexts?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Um we try to do two things. Primarily, one help solve future problems that we see are going to be an issue, kind of like with uh drones, rotor-based drones that are a real problem with contraband drones for prisons. Uh, and then we now see how they've been weaponized uh in the Ukraine war and now around the world. Um we try and come up with solutions before they become a problem, but we also try and use technology to solve uh a few of the existing problems. My favorite inventor is Dyson, and one of his first, he has a lot of good quotes, but one of his very first was find an existing problem in the world that is already proven and just try and improve it. Just try to make it better. Uh and uh a good example was we were talking with the NTOA, uh, the National Tactical Officers Association, and they were discussing an issue with the efficacy or distance, the two related, uh, how far they could be when trying to attack glass. Um and we thought, you know, they're they as they said, you know, we would love to get farther away. And they said, no, I said, Do you have any trouble dropping the glass? They said, you know, it's just the we want to be farther away. The farther you are from a fire, the fireman is more protected, the farther you are away from something. Police can be more protected. And we thought, okay, you know, we'll see what we can do. So we apply technology, uh, not necessarily um just innovation. We really we go down the entire list of of testing uh so every single change can be measured versus um making the large guesstimates. So we try and apply technology to some of the existing issues and then just make them better, uh, but both tomorrow and today.
Speaker 2:And when you say, well, let's be more specific, when you say glass, I think what you mean is breaking um glass in a kind of a car or vehicle building. Tough glass. Yeah. And for those folks who are not police officers, um, there'll be many, many times a day across the United States, police officers will need to get people out of uh cars. Um, it may be a scenario where um uh a husband and wife are arguing and they don't want the police officers to kind of interfere. It may be where someone unfortunately has kidnapped someone, um, where they don't want to come out of the car. It may be that they've intoxicated and frankly just are you know using drugs and don't really have an awareness and you know are um can't you know can't kind of uh can't kind of get themselves out of the car. But you you have a car, it's it's uh someone stolen a car as an example, and the car is um on the side of the road, and now the the police officers have to try to figure out how to do it. Um and and what I think you've said, Barton, which is correct, is that going up to the car with a hammer, if you might or an axe is possible, but it's not particularly safe because you don't know what the person might do inside the car. And so the idea is to try to break the glass um at a distance and then um insert things like pepperball projectiles or other um other chemicals. Uh we're an organic irritant, but put something inside the car that then induces the person to come out. So um how did you come up with? So this is this is one of the products that you've built. Um, how did you come up with that as a concept? This is a to your point, as Dyson would say, a problem that needs to be solved.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll I'll I'll joke about it anecdotally. Um, you know, I hear children can break a spark plug and throw a piece of the white spark plug underhanded at a piece of glass, it's very, very thick, and the glass will drop like it was nothing, like it wasn't even there. Um, this is I what I've read. And so uh uh having read this many, many decades ago, I decided to see if that was something that still applied. And when you have a direction and the direction technology seemed to be going was more dense, we thought, well, a more dense object is going to carry a lot more uh energy to push through the glass. And the lighter uh elements that are insanely hard, like um uh aluminum oxide or zirconium, uh, these are incredibly hard to the point to where they will drop glass without penetrating the glass. And so if your goal is to not go through, but to actually transfer that energy to a very fine point, we decided to test that. And so we went through a series of using a syringe to drop um uh liquid into another chemical, and when it would hit, it would solidify into a ball. And then we would treat that, and we went through a series of hardening these materials to the point to where, like a spark plug, they're formed and then baked. And once you bake them, they become even harder. And that's the process we followed. And so in the end, what we had was is a perfect sphere because of gravity uh and dropping of it in the liquid, but we also had something that was uh the second hardest substance on the planet, and when thrown at even a nominal speed, it was incredibly effective at dropping glass. And so um, what better combination than with PepperBall? And that made ultimate sense.
Speaker 2:Well, and in and again, we um I usually don't talk about pepperball on these podcasts, but we use our launchers, or I should say the SWAT officers or police officers across the country use our um launchers and they they insert the RoboRounds projectiles filled with small um circular pieces of this hard substrate. And when they hit the glass, the glass breaks and nothing and it comes straight down so that the person inside is not um uh affected. And it's really an effective way of opening up a window, truly opening up a window for the police officers to do what they need to do uh to get the uh the person out safely. That that's one example. Now, the the work you're doing with drones is also super interesting. So you should maybe tell the audience about the tanglers that you've you've invented that we can project out of our launchers as well.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Um and we're very proud of it. Um we realized that the most logical solution to the drone issue was the rotors. They're the most vulnerable, they're light, they're very breakable. Um, so getting something in them to tangle them made a lot of sense. Initially, there uh we saw a net round. Um uh after we were doing our testing, we saw a video, and I think it's a very popular shotgun net round, but we noticed very quickly um that wind resistance was really the issue. And when you're throwing a line or a flexible line or a net or anything in the air, the level of wind resistance is just it it kills it. It just it instantly stops it. So we thought, all right, well, what if this could be something that um is thrown like a person in a cannonball position and then opened up surprise when it got there? We would need something to time it, or what if it was a secondary measure? So we put a foot of flexible line, and that flexible line started with uh monofilament line and then wire, and then ultimately found that uh we were able to buy a machine that makes dog tag chain and we use a specific metal, and we can make our own links of what looks just like dog tag chain and fan pull chain, but it won't not. It you can coil it really well. And we were able to get a foot of this chain into a pepperball uh sphere, to a round um shell. We went to an army base in uh Austin and we flew uh single, double, and three uh sets of three drones over the tree line with four and six rotors each, and we put plastic um mortars below them. They looked very realistic. Uh I unfortunately made them too realistic. So the the neighbors around the base started calling and saying you're under attack. We got in a little bit of trouble. But we um so we we painted them uh uh pink and orange so that nobody would would think that they were they were dangerous. Uh but we were able to acquire them at 400 feet away. And then with two individuals firing on rapid succession, we also tried it on uh the full automatic, uh, which is a lot on the the paintball versions, um, what we had access to as a from the civilian world. Um and we found that they were successful at operating like a shotgun. They can reach a long distance, they're not very accurate past um 100 uh uh 150 feet with a sphere, just like any musket ball or uh any any real sphere at that distance. Um and and we were really excited when uh the VXR uh uh uh round showed that sort of that that accuracy. But in the beginning, we found that much like bird hunting, you have to throw a large volume into a specific area, and when you pull a trigger on a shotgun, you don't hunt birds with a rifle, you hunt with a shotgun. You throw 300, 400 pellets into a circle, and when you eat the bird that you've hunted, you only spit out one pellet. So it came down to hit ratio, and we found that when these um when launched for about two or three seconds, uh two individuals or two barrels, or we even created a um a fixed amount of two and four barrels, within about two or three seconds, there's enough chain in these balls to fill a circle about 10 feet wide at uh 200 feet, and uh about 15 feet wide at 300 feet. And when these hit the drone, they were able to wobble and flip the drone, but also they pop out and this chain flies out and gets caught up in the rotor. So it had a primary and a secondary uh attack that was so effective we had uh attracted the interest of the uh of the Marine Corps, the State Department, um, the Army. Uh but the law really is what's uh you know been finally up until now, uh recent, with um President Trump and this administration and a lot of overseas interest have finally said, hey, drones are a real problem. Uh the cartel is now sending people to Ukraine to learn, they're bringing the education back, we're gonna see it on our border here. So uh having something that you could fire that had no collateral damage at airports, seaports, stadiums, prisons seemed to be the next logical solution, and hence the Tangler round.
Speaker 2:And so for those that um are not experts in drones, which I would assume very few are, um uh bad guys will fly drones, and they do it today, they do it on uh hundreds of drones a month, will fly over uh corrections facilities, and they'll fly over and they'll drop uh uh materials, drugs, um other uh guns, cell phones from those drones. And and the and it's very difficult for um, and it uh up to this point it's been very difficult and expensive for. Agencies to deal with them. And on the border, the cartels fly drones for surveillance so that they can get a sense of what officers might be engaging the people that they're trying to smuggle across the border. And then use drones for other criminal activities kind of to provide surveillance. So the ability to deal with those drones, and particularly kind of on the fly, is what this, these um, these tangler rounds are used for. As Barton has said, the uh the FAA currently limits and constricts how um uh emergency responders, police officers, law enforcement agencies can engage in the air because that they're they're sensitive about um knocking out commercial aircraft with whatever technologies may be used. These tangle arounds, though, can be used at low distance and at low at low altitudes, and so are much more effective. It's uh an emerging, it's an emerging technology and an emerging kind of challenge of which the U.S. law enforcement has to deal with. It's another, you know, it's yet if if they have to, you know, if emergency responders have to go in and get people out of cars, they now have to deal with drones as a as a a threat to to uh what a threat to them and to the threat to the public. You also have a different um another set of rounds, and these are the uh rounds that deal with ring cameras and LIDAR sensors. Talk what talk a few minutes about them before we wrap up.
Speaker 1:So we um have three divisions, uh pneumatic, center fire, and ranged. Um initially we had to design payloads for all three, and then we as a company agreed we would approach each of them individually year after year, as opposed to all of at once, because it was just too much work. But we uh initially invented a an anti-robot, an anti-robotic nine millimeter and 45 uh caliber round, whose uh goal was to penetrate uh standard military uh robotics and deposit a jamming material inside that blocked the incoming and outgoing LIDAR signals, which is primarily how they um communicate and navigate. Uh and that payload we found when dispersed in a ranged munition burst, uh like a 40 millimeter uh marker or smoke cloud round, we found that it was incredibly effective at creating a physical barrier that the drone and robot uh LIDAR on the other side could not see through. And so we began to test that on various targets such as ring cameras, uh drones, uh, and we found we had to come up with a really effective material that blocked uh the incoming and outgoing LIDAR signal. It scrambles it, smears it, delays it, uh it has a whole range of effects on it, not just blocking it.
Speaker 2:So this would be uh so use case in for the listeners would be um you're uh about to um um uh engage a drug um operation, and the drug operation is well uh uh protected, and they'll have cameras that surround the drug, uh the location where the drugs are being made or distributed. And the police need to find ways to disable those cameras or those sensors so that they could actually um engage in a way that makes them safe. And these scramble rounds help do that. Um, and so another example of uh unique technologies that I think we're all trying to produce that'll help make keep police officers safe. Um, Barton, yeah, I could go on, as you know, you and I could talk about this forever, um, but um there's only so much time in the day. So we'll finish up, and I have one just last question for you. Yeah. Um we try to do on first response is we make a small donation in the your honor to um thank you for taking the time to talk to us and educate our audience about these types of topics. Where can we make a uh a donation for you today?
Speaker 1:Definitely. Uh Flood Rescue Foundation uh is an organization that we support completely. Flood Rescue Foundation uh takes in and aggregates uh flood donations from nonprofits and we streamline them directly to two different organizations, and that's the first responder teams in the region that has been affected by the flood directly, and we also send them directly to the uh animal shelters that are housing the animals that have been affected and that flood in that region. Uh, we just got through sending all of our donations for the year or for the last quarter to uh the recent floods in Texas. So um there's floods everywhere. Trust me, they're in your state as well. Yes, absolutely, in California for sure.
Speaker 2:Um well, thanks everyone for spending the time with Barton today. I thought was interesting is his background coming out of the Navy and and him identifying you know a challenge, you know, identifying not one but many challenges that public safety emergency responders face. You know, the first being how to deal with floods and how to deal with getting people out of cars. 70% of people die in floods from being inside cars. A nd only 4% of police officers and firefighters trained to deal with it. Um clearly a problem and an area that we can we can do better. And then the different kind of rounds, the different types of materials and capabilities that he's inventing to help uh law enforcement deal with unique situations, getting people out of cars, engaging um uh bad guys who have a lot of cameras, um, uh, or even bad guys who use drones in that context. It's it's just tells you the number of challenges that law enforcement agencies face today. It's and it's good that we have people like Barton there. So wrapping up, again, you've been listening and hopefully enjoyed listening to me. My name is Bob Plaschke, and this is First Response. It is a podcast dedicated to understanding the stories behind the people that wear a badge, who um the very brave first responders, more than a million out there in the United States. I am very privileged that this is sponsored by PepperBall, the company that I have the honor to be the CEO of. And again, PepperBall, you we deploy non-lethal tools that allow police officers to do their jobs but not have to use our guns and and not have to suffer and keep themselves and uh and the and the public that they serve safe. Until next time, be safe out there.
