Login
iscover
Canberra-based technology company ShotDot has officially launched its shot recording device into the American law enforcement and military market.
To continue reading the rest of this article, please log in.
Create free account to get unlimited news articles and more!
Three congressmen and representatives from local law enforcement agencies, government, and industry attended an official event for the new device in Salt Lake City earlier this year on 12 March.
The ShotDot™ device, which fits into the already existing space of a standard police, military or commercial issue Glock pistol, accurately records the time, date, and number of discharges from a firearm.
ShotDot chief executive officer, Dr Peter Moran, said the company has received interest from law enforcement agencies and military departments within Australia and the United States.
“The ShotDot™ is now in production out of our Ogden, Utah facility in the US and we will be marketing the product formally at the Utah Chiefs of Police Association annual conference,” Dr Moran said.
Users of the device can access the tamper-proof data for judicial and administrative reviews, weapons performance, maintenance review, and other purposes.
ShotDot Full Length Promotional Video from ShotDot on Vimeo.
“The Glock market in the US is huge, and we want to get the ShotDot™ out to law enforcement, Homeland Security as well as into the commercial market," said ShotDot executive director Dominic Kelly.
Kelly said the new device promotes efficient weapon review time and concrete results from action situations where there may have been multiple persons shooting.
“If investigators are trying to reconstruct an incident where 20 officers might have fired their weapons, it becomes very difficult, time consuming, overly complex to decipher who discharged their firearms and when, and can end without a clear result,” he said.
“In some examples, there may be more than 100 shots fired, and then an after-incident and judicial review. Investigators are trying to find out whether shots were fired in a correct way, but currently, the only resource they have is a police officer’s own recollection, the collection of casings, and inspection of weapons.”
“If you can, from each weapon, accurately determine when each weapon was fired, down to the millisecond, which this technology will do, then they can reconstruct that event and know who fired first. This is extremely important from a self-governance point of view for insurance, safety, internal and judicial review. This is what the ShotDot™ does.”
The device can also differentiate shots from other forces, non-shot events, such as weapon drops which can occur in the line of duty. Kelly said, in the future, it could be enhanced to count shots in real time to assist the user or send an electronic transmission when the weapon is fired.
“There are opportunities for development via an upgrade like a live-shot alert — a transmission sent to a central dispatch so they can be prepared for a response,” he said.
Dr Moran further explained, “We’ve spent four years on the fine-tuning the accuracy of the technology, the time and date is recorded extremely accurately. It’s linked to weapon and individual, there’s an anti-tamper switch which logs if it is tampered with.
“There’s no location recorded at this stage, but we can look at that in the future or it could be used for counting shots in a military situation and advised to an earpiece.
“There has been some interest from state and federal police in Australia, but we are focusing on the market in the US before coming back to Australia to build our capability here.” Dr Moran stated.
“The main aim (long term) is to enter the market with Australian military and law enforcement here and set up manufacturing capability within the Commonwealth.”
Kord Defence business development director, John Baird with the ShotDot device in Canberra.
