 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey Aloha and welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. This is Andrew, the security guy. We're here with another episode of Security Matters and today we've got a very special guest, Terry Parks with Sight. Stop Sight. Terry is an inventor, an owner of Stop Sight and we're going to have an interesting topic today about sort of a hostile intruder response and this is not something that I think everyone really pays attention to but response times to these types of incidents vary. Inevitably the intruders there, the adversaries there cause in trouble for a while before we have a chance to intervene and we're going to get into the broader discussion of that and then in the ideas that Terry's created to deal with that. So Terry Aloha, thank you so much for joining us. I do want to apologize to my viewers. We had an issue with our live stream so we've got Terry's wonderful mug shot there. Sorry it's not a mug shot. It's his head shot. And Terry, we're going to keep you on just on the head shot today. I'm so sorry about that. We'll get you hopefully another episode where we can get you live or get you in the studio at some point in the future. So anyway, go ahead and give us a little bit of your history. I know you're the inventor owner of Stop Sight and tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, it's a pleasure to be with you Andrew and your guest or your audience I should say. I'm the guest. Yeah, I'm a 70 year old who has from the earliest time I can ever remember just always thought there was a better mousetrap or a more exciting way to do something. And so when I was even a little kid, I was trying to make a perpetual motion machine. I remember that was kind of my first big venture. By the way, I haven't succeeded in accomplishing that. Yeah, no one else in there. But when I do, I'll be sure to let you know. Thank you. But but my life has been just very eclectic. I I've been in business in many, many different realms, including development of properties, building, built log homes for a while. I was a pastor for many years and was in energy conservation and all of the realms that I've been in, and those are just some of them, I always look for maybe a cutting edge way to do things or a more efficient way to accomplish something. A lot of the things that I'm mostly involved in in terms of invention innovation had to do with something in my life experience, not all of them, but many of them. And this stop site, the anti predator mitigation system that I have put together is it was born from some experience with my wife and her the attack on her and also others in my life that I've known about who were even killed with predator attacks. So this is not something that's just a theoretical or scientific issue to me. And I my heart goes out like most people, most people's hearts do when when they see people mowed down innocent men, women and children. And I'm the same way. And so I started thinking many years ago, there's got to be a better and more efficient and quicker way to to mitigate attacks. And so that got me thinking and it resulted in stop site. That's a good story. And we're definitely going to get into stop site a bit. I am. I like to ask my guests. And I think I can probably guess at maybe what keeps you up at night. But given the security environment that we live in in the United States, which is a very, you know, secure country by and large. When when you're when you're laying there at night and you you're probably iterating on your latest ideas. But if you think of it from a security perspective, what what are the things that do keep you awake at night? Well, I guess I can't say things keep me necessarily awake, but they're awake. I'm awake longer. Let's put it that way. Okay. And I'm thinking I'm thinking a lot about situations with loved ones, but also people that I don't even know thinking about how that so often they're just sitting ducks when it comes to people's evil intense deadly intense. And that bothers me greatly. I I'm a very protective person. And I don't like to see innocent people in any way, messed up, disturbed or injured or certainly not killed. And that bothers me. And I know that with the societal breakdown in some ways and and other issues, we have mental illness in my own immediate family. I know that that's a factor. But regardless of what the factors are, when you get in that situation, I think about that, even when I'm sitting in a restaurant or in a public place, I've often mentioned to people, you know, if someone came in right now, and started blasting away, there isn't a lot we could do. And so, fortunately, it's it's it's rare when statistically to be in that situation. But when it happens to someone, I believe we have the resources to address that particularly in large venues and in public places. And I'll just say one other thing, Andrew, the thing that bothers me the most, I think in overall in life, is not ignorance so much or impotence or incapacity or that type of thing. It's that we know more than we do. We have resources, we have technologies that we could apply to many things, but we're so slow to do it, so reluctant to do it. And by now, stop site, that somebody should have beat me to this a long time ago, but they just didn't. So I decided I was going to take it on. But that's what bothered me as we know more than we do. Yeah, I am interestingly, I had an author of what's your plan on last week, James DeMeo. And he's authored a book really at for parents to talk to their children about what you mentioned that, you know, when you're going to go to a venue, when you're going to go to a place, what sort of responsibility you have with your family to those others, you know, in your life, as you mentioned before, you know, to help them at least be prepared to at least have their head on a swivel to know where the exits are, to know where the fire extinguisher is, to know what means of egress or what means of hiding or perhaps possible, you know, in their media environment should something occur. And it's interesting that we don't talk about this in such you mentioned that, you know, we've got technology that we're very slow to bring to bear on some of these kind of problems. And in the same way, we don't tend to want to even talk about the problems that can occur themselves. And so I like to get your take on, do you think that fear of these topics is a problem for our culture? Or is it just easier to hope that it won't happen to me or to those others that we love or the others others that we're responsible for? You know, in the security industry, I feel like that's our, it's a privilege for us to bear that responsibility and to share that message and to protect others. But others don't always seem to want to protect themselves or leverage those things they can do for themselves. What are your, what are your sort of thoughts on on that as you've had these discussions with folks? Yes, well, even when I was a pastor, I mean, the last subject people wanted to talk about was death. Yeah, of course, no one like to talk about things which are fatal or or dangerous. And I shouldn't say no one does that's that's not accurate. But so the bulk of the population prefers to avoid talking about difficult issues rather than talking about them. And I've listened a lot to experts who are training people in active shooter attacks and so forth. And they all kind of say a very similar thing. And that is that even though people would like to think that they could be more prepared, it bothers them, especially children, of course, but but also very sensitive adults to even bring the subject up. It's just a subject to avoid. And I understand the reaction. And I'm not blaming anyone for that because it's not pleasant. And many people feel like, well, what could I do? I mean, you might teach me how to, you know, lock a door or something. But what am I going to do in a situation that's desperate like that? And so there's the sense of helplessness, even with the training and with it, also a fair amount of confusion. NPR had an interesting program recently about that, that that even when you train, when the actual events occur, a lot of that training isn't immediately applicable, because you have to adjust and also it gets to be confusing as well. So when I looked at this issue, Andrew, I thought, well, you know, training, I'm not against training by any means, I think we ought to be as prepared as we can be in every respect. But I don't think we can train our way out of this problem, because we can't train everybody and everybody cannot be trained effectively and for every situation. But some training just doesn't stop a bullet. It just doesn't. And there's only one thing that'll stop a bullet and that's something powerful enough to do it. So yeah, it's a good point. You know, I've, you know, in my military career and military law enforcement. So we had, we had several scenarios that we trained for, you know, and you do in classroom training, then you're doing instruction. But then when you go out and they put you under stress, a simple thing like making you run in place for a few minutes before you start to run through your reaction, really debilitates your capacity to think or to respond properly. So your point that training, we can't train our way out of this, I think it's really well made. I, I'm a big fan of awareness. I'm a big fan that everyone should do their best to, you know, be aware of the situation they're in. You know, if you're walking around with your head buried in your phone, you're not seeing anything going on around you. And that's that is to your adversary's advantage, obviously. So, but, but there is a point at which I, let me ask you another question. In talking with other folks, do you feel that people think that like society's just going to take care of it? Like when I go to the venue, the venues got it handled like those, those $12, $15 an hour guards and we need them. I'm not not deriding them. But, you know, do I wonder if people feel that the venue or the place that they're going to actually has all that covered and they don't have to worry about it? Have you run into that sort of of an idea from folks? Yes, I think there's the whole psychological realm that no one wants to feel hopeless in a situation. And so what we all tend to do is to for our own sense of sanity and security, we want to think that everything's taking care of, like you said, and OK. And I've had people say, we don't need something like stop, so we got police to do that. And that's what we pay them for. And, you know, it doesn't take very long to just say, well, you want to look at a few examples where those paid police find men and women for the most part, some cowards, but some, most of them, yes, pretty good and dedicated. I have them in my family and appreciate them very much, but they're not well suited to this kind of situation because in most cases, they get there after the actions over with or shortly thereafter. And if they do get there when the action is going on, many of them put themselves in severe danger themselves and they spend their time just trying to trying to take cover while they're while they're doing something. And it. We can talk about a couple of the recent cases in that regard. OK, but let's I tell you what, let's I tell you what, Terry, let's we'll let's take a quick break. We'll go pay some bills for about a minute and we come back, we'll get on response times. And that, I think, is goes right to the heart of what stop site can do. So we'll be right back in about one minute. Thank you. This is Think Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one in six American kids who struggle with hunger. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more. Go to hungeris.org to make breakfast happen for kids in your neighborhood. If you're not in control of how you see yourself, then who is live above the influence? Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech, Hawaii's Hawaii food and farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurant tours and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m. And we hope we'll see you next time. Hey, Aloha. We are back to this episode of Security Matters Away. We're on with Terry Parks of Stop Sight. And I understand, Terry, you said that there's a you have an audio feed, some Hawaiian music in the background that you're from our broadcast. I don't myself, but someone who was watching it was saying it's been on the whole time. OK, we'll get production to look into that, make sure we're there. If nothing else, we're recording this, so we'll have this recording and we'll go from there. So we were talking about response times when we left. And I think this is a critical thing. I do not. I think that the public relies on that response force, which is going to do its job. It's going to show up and it's going to go to work to mitigate the threat. But most of these events occur very rapidly within a few minutes. We have a potentially large loss of life casualties and many, many more minutes before we probably get local law enforcement response on site. So you have some examples of that, obviously. And I think this is right where an idea like Stop Sight plays in. So do you have, just off the top of your head, any of those metrics from some recent events of how long it took for the response to arrive? I think it was 20 minutes at Parkland. There are 20 plus minutes. Yeah, it's interesting to watch the events unfold on these. And I was looking at an FBI report as well on kind of collectively to average out and to draw a pattern with these type of events. And even though police many times get there amazingly quickly after receiving an alarm and alert, it's usually at least four minutes before they can get there at the very minimum. And the average time is eight minutes. It goes between four and 11 minutes in most events. Wow. However, most events are over within five minutes. Sure. Most of that time the attacker has freewheeling and virtually no resistance. So as in Las Vegas, that shooter, of course, that was an unusual situation and he was up in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, but he was shooting for 10 minutes. Sure. And he had, I think some of this is the ability just to how much ammo can someone physically carry without being noticed. Whereas he had access, he had all that ammo in the room, whereas the guy who walks on your site, if he's got cases of ammo, he's a lot more obvious. So I think maybe some of that, these guys can shoot up hundreds of rounds of ammo, which they carried very rapidly and then they're done and they're headed out the door. Yes. Well, and one of the things about StopSight, since it's designed to be a comprehensive technology, it has detection of capabilities with heat signature. So that man, had there been StopSight, for instance, in the hallway of Mandalay Bay, there's a good chance, as well as magnetic imaging, which can go with it. There's a good chance that those weapons would have been detected, actually, but we can't say for absolute sure and I wouldn't say that as an absolute, but that's what the design is about. But the point being is that Parkland's an excellent example. I don't know, Andrew, if you've seen or any of your audiences seen the 14 plus minutes, they just released that with the commission on security and kind of chastised some of the police officers because no one went into that building or even really came close to it for the seven minutes that the shooter was in that building and then he left and completely left the property with no one interdicting him in any respect. Even though there were officers all around the region and they were just hundreds of feet away and then when Carl Ridge got there, they started to move toward the buildings. Robert did not and neither did the on-site security person but no one has hindered that shooter for the seven minutes he was shooting and no one even got to the bleeding athletic director who died on the way to the hospital for 10 minutes. All of that could have been seen and interdicted and communication with the shooter all of that time and also up to lethal, I say up to lethal mitigation. It doesn't have to be lethal because there's also disabling mitigation too, but all of that just points out the fact you have all the police you want in the area and there were a ton of them at Birkeland before this was all over, but they just listened to the shots and you have the human factors going on all the time. Sure. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about, so when we get into active intervention, so you took a look and said, hey, we've got a lot of technology. I mean, I think of a drone, for example, a lot of technology in a package that flies, unmanned and delivers a strike against an adversary. So that's controlled, of course, by an operator. So same idea of deploying some technology into a site that can take advantage of technology, censoring technology, locating technology, targeting technology, and then perhaps delivering some type of a lethal or less than lethal type of a mitigating technique. So what initially, and let me ask, how long were you thinking about this and what initially got you to say, look, I'm going to sit down and design this now. I'm tired of tiptoeing around the idea. Well, I thought about it before, but when 9-11 occurred and they had these planes in the air and they were talking about the hijackers and so forth, I thought to myself, now, there's no reason why there couldn't be a compact interdiction and, well, up to lethal response that could either disable or take out someone who's hijacking an airplane. It could be dismounted and it could be operated even by the pilot if it needed to be, but it could be operated even from the ground if you have the right kind of data throughput. And so that got me thinking, there's no reason to leave it up to passengers to try to have to deal with this situation if you have the ability to open up a device which can not only see, but can laser accurately, I mean, pinpoint accurately, take someone out or disable them. And it has to, of course, be above the action to some degree, but there's even room in an airplane for that. And so stop site was, first of all, I thought about it, first of all, not just in regard to the Columbine and other incidents like that. I was thinking about it at that time, but I was thinking also about the transportation and aircraft in particular. And as I thought about all the applications, including neighborhoods and everything else, I thought, well, okay, it's time to start looking at the technologies available, start putting them together and seeing how comprehensive can a technology be that does not operate on its own? It is not dependent upon something programmed properly as to when makes decisions. These are real operated by real people, real law enforcement people in real time, but just like video games, this is no game, but just like video games, the idea is to safely from a safe position to accurately and be able to thoroughly and completely as completely as possible, take care of the problem as soon as you can detect it. And so that's the idea behind stop site to have the mounted stop site units, which aren't really big. They're mounted up high on walls and in corners and so forth. They're up above the action so they can look down on to some angle on what's going on. And these have detection devices in them and then that alerts real time law enforcement and centralized facilities that are, this is all they're doing is to monitor and stop site. So these are not officers that are on duty or something like that. They are people who are highly trained for this specific purpose, but they have to be credentialed as law enforcement because they're going to be hurting people or potentially killing attackers. So they have to understand that the shoot don't shoot and escalation of response and things like that. Yeah, understood. Yeah, so as I started looking at all those possibilities and it's just the way I think I don't have a hard time thinking about multifaceted responses and solutions to things. That's something that comes fairly natural to me not because I'm so smart it just because I think so shallow that I don't think of all the problems first. I think of the solutions first, but check the problems out. That's probably a gift out of thinking. It's a good thing. So it wasn't too hard to think about all the possibilities that a technology could have if it were remotely operated. Sure. And if the technologies could be compactly designed and deployed. And so has this, so have you done some beta development? Is this a thing that I saw that there's not, I think you have maybe some room left for some investment but by and large you're kind of ready to go to production or what's your sort of status there with the build? Well, you know, my favorite, my own definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has multi mega million dollar ideas but not enough money to buy a cup of coffee to tell somebody about it. Sure. I just said. So the stop side as well as some of my other innovations, the biggest obstacle is that early funding. I, at one time I was going to self fund this. The Great Recession took care of that. And so it's very difficult to get large complex technologies of this sort started. So I've made contact and I'm still making contact with some pretty good sized companies that have been in the business a long time and they have a heart for what I'm doing. It's just a question of whether they can business wise incorporate that. I'm willing to do a joint venture and that type of thing. But otherwise I've been contacting many people who are in the realm, some who are money people and so forth to see if they have a heart for doing a first round funding the development, the design, all the technological issues as well as the implementation is very expensive for something like this. The first round though to make sure we have international patents in place. It's patent pending, but we have a lot of patent work to do on it. And that required a little more design work. So we've got about a minute or so, Terry. Go ahead and just give me whatever your final thoughts are or whatever appeal you'd like to give to our audience and then we'll wrap up after that. Okay. Well, I would encourage anyone listening or watching is it where I guess? Watching my mugshot to take six minutes to look at the stop site video if they would. That's on ParkSystems.com. It's spelled with two S's in the middle, ParksSystems.com. And it's the first video. There are others there of other innovations of mine, but that's the one that's featured. That will help them see a little more of what this is about and the why isn't workforce. The other aspect of the appeal is that if someone has, they don't have that great resources, but if they have some resources they would like to see put to something like this, there's opportunity for founding shares. I'm forming a new company brand new. I'm not planning to be an officer in it. I don't want to mix the invention with the administration, but I would be their heart and soul and of course very heavily vested to do the first round. Then once we get the first round, I believe the second round funding and third, which will complete all the marketing and so forth. I think those will come much more easily if the first round is there, but without the patenting global patenting all in place, you can't even get the second stage. All right. Terry, thank you so much for my audience out there. ParkSystems.com, take a look at stop site. Get involved with this hostile intruder intervention. We need to minimize this response time because security matters. Thank you so much, aloha.