Every day in the United States, approximately 25,000 arrests take place. In roughly 20 percent of them, the person resists. That is 5,000 people resisting arrest on any given day. Of those, according to Scot Cohen, between a third and a half are experiencing a mental health episode. And 97 percent of them are unarmed and not violent. These are not the faces most people picture when they imagine a police restraint call. They are people at the worst moment of their lives — in psychiatric crisis, struggling with addiction, or simply overwhelmed in a way that no baton, taser, or pepper spray was ever engineered to address.
Scot Cohen is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Wrap Technologies (NASDAQ: WRAP), a publicly traded public safety company he founded in 2016 after years of watching his father and brother serve in law enforcement. Before building Wrap, Cohen spent more than three decades in capital markets, co-founding Iroquois Capital, a New York hedge fund that managed approximately $300 million in assets, and structuring hundreds of deals across industries. He walked away from that career to ask a question most finance professionals never would: what happens to the person on the other side of the call when the tools available to officers were not built for the situation they are actually in?
The Crisis the System Was Never Designed For
The tools officers carry today have not meaningfully changed in decades. A gun, a taser, a baton, and pepper spray. That is the standard issue belt. For a subject who is armed and actively violent, that toolkit has a logic. But Cohen points out that the most common scenario in American law enforcement looks nothing like that. “Ninety-seven percent of the time, the subject’s unarmed and they’re not violent,” he says. The problem is systemic, not individual — officers are issued tools calibrated for the extreme and then sent into situations that demand something different entirely.
The legal landscape around this has shifted dramatically. Cohen points to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Barnes v. Felix, which established a “totality of circumstances” standard for evaluating excessive force cases. Under this framework, everything matters: whether an officer arrived escalated, whether they raised their voice too early, whether their training included verbal de-escalation techniques. Every choice an officer makes from the moment they arrive on scene can now be weighed as evidence. That shift changes the calculus for departments across the country. The old argument that officers simply used the tools they had is no longer a sufficient defense.
Why De-Escalation Is Not Soft — It Is Strategic
One of the most persistent misconceptions in public safety is that prioritizing de-escalation represents a weakening of policing. Cohen pushes back on this directly, and his argument is grounded in behavior, not ideology. “When you come onto the scene and you’re escalated and you come in with a heavy hand,” he says, “there is a very good chance you are going to arouse the situation.” That is not a political position. It is a predictable human response. When one person enters a conflict already elevated, the other person’s nervous system responds in kind. Escalation begets escalation.
Cohen describes what he calls “pre-fight indicators” — signals that a situation is about to escalate that officers can learn to recognize and respond to before the critical moment arrives. The skills required to act on those indicators are communication, persuasion, and judgment. These are not soft skills. They are precision tools. And according to Cohen, they have been largely absent from traditional law enforcement training, which has historically focused on what to do once force becomes necessary, not on the window of intervention before that point is reached.
What the BolaWrap Was Built to Do
Wrap Technologies’ flagship device, the BolaWrap 150, operates on a principle Cohen describes as pre-escalation. It is a handheld remote restraint device that deploys a Kevlar tether to safely restrain a subject from a distance, using light and sound to distract and disorient before the tether is deployed. It is not classified as a less-lethal weapon. Cohen is deliberate about the language: Wrap has reclaimed the designation “non-lethal,” a term Cohen says had been effectively erased from the industry’s vocabulary. “When you ask governors, mayors, attorneys general, congress, senate, they don’t even know that there’s no non-lethal,” he explains. “They’re just thinking less-than-lethal.”
The distinction is not semantic. Less-lethal tools, including tasers, have caused deaths. The BolaWrap’s field record is different. With thousands of reported deployments and tens of thousands estimated overall, Cohen says the device has resulted in zero deaths, zero serious injuries beyond what he describes as a band-aid at most, and zero litigation. That record, he says, is what no other widely used law enforcement tool can claim. The device is now deployed across more than 1,000 agencies in 60 countries, and Cohen says usage is up fivefold in recent months as both training infrastructure and favorable policy shifts have accelerated adoption.
“If the data didn’t support this, I would shut this thing down. I had every opportunity. And there were moments that I wanted to. But this thing solves a really important problem.”
Scot Cohen, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Wrap Technologies
The Training Problem Nobody Talks About
There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. The average department has 10 officers. New York City has 36,000. That disparity is not just a staffing issue. It is a training infrastructure crisis. Small departments do not have the resources to implement modern, evidence-based training protocols, and the result is that the vast majority of American officers are working with tools and policies that have not materially evolved in a generation.
Wrap’s early approach to training was to send instructors directly to departments. Cohen is candid that this model failed. “We tried, it was a mistake, we failed and paid the price for that,” he says. What replaced it is a digitized learning management system built around a different theory of retention. Rather than eight-hour classroom sessions delivered via PowerPoint, the platform delivers two-to-three-minute training modules, repeated over time, paired with virtual reality scenario practice. The goal is not exposure but retention, and Cohen says the deployment data has already begun to reflect that the new model is working.
He also points to something less obvious: what gets reported versus what gets recognized. Most departments report use of force. Almost none report force avoidance. Cohen describes a department in LaGrange, Georgia, that began formally tracking and crediting officers for situations in which they successfully avoided using force. Officers received recognition for de-escalation outcomes. That data also entered their professional records, creating a documented counterweight to any excessive force incidents. Cohen believes force avoidance reporting is one of the most underutilized tools available to departments trying to shift their culture from the inside.
What Community Trust Actually Looks Like
The relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve has eroded in measurable ways. Recruiting is down. Budgets are under political pressure. And Cohen argues that the focus on high-profile failures, while warranted, has crowded out coverage of what is actually working in cities where new tools and training cultures have taken hold. He describes five cities where BolaWrap programs are paired with genuine community engagement, and where the results feel, as he puts it, “like family.” It is not a vague feeling. It is built from specific choices made at the leadership level, on both sides.
Cohen visited Memphis after the city found itself managing a $500 million excessive force case. What he observed surprised him. “When you go meet the officers and you start meeting the city legislators and you start looking at their response to resistance policies, they’re making changes,” he says. Memphis, notably, has moved to a “response to resistance” policy framework rather than a traditional use of force policy, a distinction Cohen considers significant. Resistance, he points out, is the most common dynamic in the field. Force is the escalated response that follows when resistance goes unaddressed. Naming and governing those situations differently creates space for different outcomes.
The Leadership Lesson That Applies to Every Industry
Cohen did not come from law enforcement. He came from finance. And in nine years of building Wrap, he learned that entering a highly resistant institution with a product and an idea is not enough. “If you’re gonna ask somebody to do something, do it yourself first,” he says. When his team could not get department leaders on the phone, Cohen started booking flights. He showed up at roll calls. He sat in patrol cars. He listened. And what he learned was that the device was being used far more than anyone had reported, which gave him the evidence he needed to keep investing, financially and emotionally, through years of what he describes as dark periods.
The principle he offers for anyone trying to lead change in a system built to resist it is deceptively simple: align purpose with destination and then do not stop. “If you’re lucky enough to identify what your purpose is, don’t let anything stop you,” he says. For Cohen, the destination is specific. He wants every officer in every department to carry a non-lethal restraint option. He wants it mandated at the federal, state, and local level. He acknowledges that destination has not yet been reached. But the trajectory, measured in deployment data, policy shifts, legislative attention, and community outcomes, suggests the distance is closing.
The Change Is Already Underway
Cohen is not asking people to take his word for any of this. He points to the data. He points to departments that have expanded their programs after seeing the results. He points to courts whose decisions are now creating structural incentives for exactly the kind of cultural shift Wrap has been advocating for nearly a decade. The question is no longer whether a non-lethal restraint option works. The question is how quickly the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies can access the training, the tools, and the policy frameworks to make it standard practice.
The human cost of the current approach is not abstract. Cohen describes a mother who reached out after the BolaWrap was used on her son during a crisis. Her message was gratitude, because without that option, she believed her son would not have survived the encounter. Cohen says he has many stories like that one. They come from both sides of the call. That is the measure he returns to when the work is hard and the pace is slow. The system can change. In the places where it already has, the evidence is accumulating, one avoided tragedy at a time. Scot Cohen has staked nearly a decade, and a great deal of his own capital, on the belief that the rest of the country will eventually catch up.
