The numbers are specific enough to stop you cold. In the United States, approximately 25,000 arrests happen every day. In roughly 20 percent of them, the person resists. That is 5,000 resistance situations daily. Of those, 97 percent involve someone who is unarmed and not violent. For decades, the tools available to respond to those 4,500 daily encounters have been unchanged: a gun, a taser, a baton, and pepper spray. None of them were designed for a person who is frightened, confused, in a mental health crisis, or simply having the worst day of their life. The consequences of that mismatch show up in headlines, in courtrooms, and in the lives of officers and community members on both sides of the call.
Scot Cohen is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Wrap Technologies (NASDAQ: WRAP), a publicly traded public safety company he founded in 2016 after watching his father and brother dedicate their careers to law enforcement. Before building Wrap, Cohen spent more than 30 years in capital markets, co-founding Iroquois Capital, a New York hedge fund that managed approximately $300 million in assets. He walked away from that career to pursue what he describes as his higher purpose: replacing force with science. Over the nine years since, Wrap has grown from a single device into a full public safety ecosystem operating across more than 1,000 agencies in 60 countries — and is now expanding into drone technology, counter-drone detection, and federal defense partnerships.
The Three Things That Have to Change Before Anything Else Does
Cohen is direct about what he got wrong in the early years of building Wrap. “When we first started, we actually thought it was going to be 100 body cam footage of the BolaWrap working and the rest of the country would have to take it,” he says. That assumption did not survive contact with reality. What Cohen discovered, over nearly a decade of working inside one of the most resistant industries in the country, is that technology alone accomplishes almost nothing without the two things that have to come first.
The first is training. The second is policy. And according to Cohen, they have to arrive in the right order. Departments across the United States average just 10 officers. Scaling modern, evidence-based training across 18,000 agencies is a genuine infrastructure problem, not a motivation problem. “If the policies don’t support it,” Cohen explains, “it will never get traction.” That insight reshaped the entire direction of the company. Wrap now leads with policy development, working at both the federal and local level to establish frameworks that make new tools usable in the field, before the technology is ever introduced.
Why the BolaWrap Works When Everything Else Escalates
The BolaWrap 150 operates on three simultaneous inputs. First, a 2,000-lumen light burst disrupts what Cohen calls the OODA loop — the observe, orient, decide, act cycle — giving the officer a critical first-mover advantage while the subject is momentarily disoriented. Second, a sound blast compounds that confusion. Third, a Kevlar tether deploys to restrain the subject’s legs, removing their base so that officers can safely move in for hands-on control. The entire sequence is designed to happen before a situation escalates — in what Cohen calls “the pre-escalation window.”
The logic behind the device challenges a fundamental assumption in law enforcement: that closing the distance on a resisting subject requires pain or the threat of serious force. Cohen points out that pepper spray does not work when you are moving toward someone, because the spray will affect the officer too. Tasers deliver 50,000 volts, which has caused cardiac complications in people with underlying health conditions. Baton strikes create injury and liability. “Officers are coming in and getting hands,” Cohen says, “and when you close the distance with hands, it’s super dangerous because people don’t like to be touched.” The BolaWrap removes that contact problem entirely. After more than 10,000 reported deployments, the device has produced zero deaths, zero serious injuries, and zero litigation.
How Eight-Hour Training Sessions Became a Two-Minute Repetition Model
Early in Wrap’s history, training followed the standard law enforcement model: eight hours in a single session, classroom format, heavy on PowerPoint, check a box and move on. Cohen is unambiguous about why that approach failed. Retention after eight hours of continuous instruction is poor for anyone. For officers who then return to active duty and may not encounter a specific situation for months, the gap between training and application is wide enough to make the training nearly irrelevant.
Wrap’s current training model works differently. The company built a digital learning management system that delivers sessions in two-to-three-minute bursts, designed to be repeated over time rather than consumed once. The format is paired with virtual reality scenario practice, including constitutional policing training covering landmark Supreme Court decisions that officers need to understand — Barnes v. Felix, Graham v. Connor, and Tennessee v. Garner. “You can’t just check the box,” Cohen says. “You gotta really get with the work.” The goal is not exposure but genuine retention, the kind that holds under pressure in a real encounter. Cohen reports that as the new training model has rolled out, deployment numbers have risen sharply — usage is up fivefold in recent months.
“I want every officer, federal and state, to be carrying a BolaWrap because I know that every day in this country there is resistance, and I don’t want officers hurting themselves or escalating a situation. I want to give them an option.”
Scot Cohen, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Wrap Technologies
The Drone Threat No One Has Figured Out How to Detect
The conversation around public safety has expanded dramatically in recent years, and Cohen argues that drones represent the next critical gap in the country’s preparedness. The threat is already active. Armed with a $200 consumer drone, any individual can target buildings, crowds, critical infrastructure, or public events. What has made this threat especially difficult to address is the emergence of what Cohen calls the “silent drone threat” — drones that operate without radio frequency signals, making them invisible to the most common detection systems currently in use.
Traditional counter-drone technology relies primarily on radio frequency detection: when a drone operator signals the drone, that signal can be intercepted. But bad actors have learned to eliminate that signal, directing drones autonomously. The remaining detection method is thermal imaging, which has been in use for 30 years. The problem with thermal detection alone is its limitations: it cannot reliably distinguish a bird from a drone, cannot see threats beneath a canopy, and cannot detect anomalies in large bodies of water. Wrap has partnered with an Israeli company to bring a technology to the United States that layers polarization imaging on top of thermal detection. While thermal sees heat signatures, polarization sees materials and objects. “When you look at objects and heat signatures,” Cohen explains, “the AI starts to complete the picture for you.” The combined system, which Wrap will manufacture at its Virginia facility, allows threats to be tracked earlier and more accurately than any purely thermal system currently available.
What a Full Public Safety Ecosystem Actually Looks Like
When Cohen describes Wrap as an ecosystem rather than a product company, he is making a specific point about what customers actually need. “Nobody’s looking for just a piece of technology,” he says. “They’re actually looking for an end-to-end solution.” What Wrap has built over nine years is a layered system that moves from policy development through threat detection, officer training, physical restraint tools, virtual reality scenario practice, body cameras, and now drone response capabilities. None of those pieces work in isolation. All of them have to be coordinated.
The drone component of that ecosystem follows the same non-lethal philosophy as the BolaWrap. Wrap has developed a shoulder-mounted device capable of six to nine shots, applying the same sight, sound, and restraint sequence at greater scale. That same system has been mounted on drones, allowing autonomous first-responder deployments to use non-lethal restraint from the air. A netting system for counter-drone operations is also in development. Cohen is clear that putting lethal or high-voltage payloads on autonomous drones operating in urban areas carries risks the public will not accept, and should not have to. “You can’t put 50,000 volts of electricity on robots and drones,” he says. “It just won’t work.” The non-lethal drone response is, in his view, the only path that is both effective and politically viable.
Reporting on What Goes Right, Not Just What Goes Wrong
One of the most practical and underutilized ideas Cohen raises is a shift in how law enforcement agencies track and report their own performance. Currently, most departments report use of force. Almost none report force avoidance — the situations where officers successfully de-escalated, made an arrest without injury, or resolved a resistance situation without elevating to higher force options. Cohen describes a department in LaGrange, Georgia, that began formally tracking force avoidance and giving officers documented credit for those outcomes. The results were meaningful in multiple directions: officers felt recognized for the work they were already doing, the data entered their professional records, and the insurance implications for the department shifted in a positive direction.
Cohen believes this framework needs to expand nationally. When an officer faces an excessive force allegation, a documented track record of force avoidance is relevant evidence. When a department is negotiating with insurers, a lower force-use profile reduces liability exposure. When a community is trying to understand whether policing in their city is moving in the right direction, force avoidance numbers tell a different story than force use numbers alone. “We should not just be focused on reporting on the bad,” Cohen says. “We should be reporting on the good too.”
The Measure That Actually Matters
Cohen has spent nine years and, by his account, more than $175 million — including a significant personal investment from his own capital markets career — building toward a destination he can describe precisely. He wants a BolaWrap on every officer’s belt, federally mandated, in every city in the country. He is tracking 100 specific departments where the tool has been adopted, and in those departments, he is watching force incidents decline, litigation drop, recruitment improve, and local media coverage of policing shift in tone. “That’s just the beginning,” he says.
The shift Cohen is working toward is not only technological. It is cultural, legal, and institutional. Resistance-to-force policies are starting to replace or augment use-of-force policies in some jurisdictions. Constitutional policing training is being built into digital learning systems that can reach 18,000 departments without requiring an instructor on a plane. Drones are beginning to operate as first responders in some cities, arriving at scenes faster than patrol cars and keeping officers safer in the process. The infrastructure for a different kind of public safety is being assembled, piece by piece, in the field.
What Scot Cohen is asking of communities, officers, and policymakers is not trust in a product. It is attention to a system — one where the tools match the actual nature of 97 percent of the situations officers face, where training sticks because it is practiced rather than checked off, and where the measure of a good outcome is not just that force was used correctly, but that force was avoided entirely. That shift is already underway in a hundred departments. Cohen intends to see it in every one.
