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Peoria-based startup ShotHawk aims to defend against active shooter events

LEFT: ShotHawk co-founder and CEO Brandon Johnson speaks into a microphone while seated at a table in front of the WCBU banner in the station's master studio. RIGHT: A red ShotHawk SPOT unit is mounted on a black wall.
Joe Deacon
/
WCBU
LEFT: ShotHawk co-founder and CEO Brandon Johnson discusses the startup company's development of an active shooter threat response system in the WCBU master studio. RIGHT: A red ShotHawk SPOT unit is mounted on a black wall.

A Peoria-based startup is developing a system aimed at neutralizing threats from active shooters and other mass attacks.

ShotHawk is working on AI-driven technology that would use non-lethal deterrents such as pepper gel against would-be assailants.

“We're trying to mitigate active threats in public environments, whether it be schools or any other venue that may face that threat,” said Brandon Johnson, ShotHawk’s co-founder and CEO.

“Our autonomous responding unit would basically be engaged by either a panic button or a security system – so it's not completely autonomous; it's got to have something triggering it.”

Johnson said the ShotHawk model would be more proactive than other weapon and shooting detection systems such as ShotSpotter, ZeroEyes and Defendry.

“Other shooting response services out there don't really engage,” said Johnson. “We're trying to take it to that next level, engage them and make sure that, you know, they're not going to be able to continue on with their attack.”

Johnson said the concept emerged from reaction to school shootings such as the 2022 attack in Uvalde, Texas, coupled with his experience living through the tornado that struck Washington in 2013.

“We were talking about, ‘this [Uvalde] seems like a natural disaster,’ except the difference is you can't prevent natural disasters,” said Johnson. “And we were like, ‘well, this is totally preventable. What could we do to prevent it?’

“Being engineers, back at the time in engineering school, we were like, ‘well, let's see what we can do,’ and sure enough, one thing led to another. We came up with an idea that was pretty rough at first, but eventually got it down to something that seemed pretty viable.”

Last month, ShotHawk announced it received a combined $100,000 in grant funding to continue developing its technology. That includes teaming up with Bradley University on a $75,000 Illinois Science and Technology Coalition [ISTC] innovation voucher to place 30 of ShotHawk’s SPOT units across the state.

“Bradley students are helping us determine these locations with location profiles that they're working on, and we are working on delivering the actual units and putting them out,” said Johnson. “These are limited functionality units, so they don't have the actual non-lethal on them. It's really just kind of for us to check our back end and make sure everything is set up well before trying to do a full launch.”

The other $25,000 comes in a Technology Industry grant from the City of Peoria that enables ShotHawk to establish an operations base at the downtown Distillery Labs innovation hub.

Johnson said the ShotHawk system is “pretty much fully developed,” and they’re now working on fine-tuning the product.

“We just, about a week ago, actually had our first extremely successful test,” said Johnson. “Before, we've had each part of it working since about July, independently. We posted a video on LinkedIn back in October of another part of it working, and that got some pretty good traction. Where we’re at right now is we finally got the whole thing working all together.”

Johnson said they’re trying to ease concerns about the AI system potentially identifying something that isn’t a weapon as a threat.

“Part of that is why we have the triggering mechanisms that it does to activate it,” he said. “But if it identifies something that is not a weapon, that's why we have it so it's can easily be shut down, and we're working on trying to make it as robust as it can to make sure that that type of situation does not even happen in the first place.”

Johnson said he believes taking defensive measures against potential mass attacks can serve as a deterrent against future incidents.

“Quite simply, we don't think policy is going to fix this problem,” he said. “We think that we've got to be on the front lines.”

Joe Deacon is a reporter at WCBU and WGLT. Contact Joe at jdeacon@ilstu.edu.