SafeDefend founder Jeff Green hopes that no one will ever have to use his company’s product.
But if the SafeDefend Personnel Protection System must be employed against an attacker, the former school principal has designed it to buy time and save lives in schools, hospitals, government buildings and corporate offices.
“It’s going to make a difference somewhere,” Green said. “But I truly hope that this system sits in a school or in a business or wherever it may be located for 20 years and is never opened.”
The SafeDefend system gathers nonlethal self-defense tools in a fingerprint-activated lockbox unit that, when opened, sends an emergency alert to 911 dispatch, as well as a text notifying building authorities to begin lockdown measures.
The tools include a flashlight that can be quickly turned into a high-intensity strobe light to disorient an assailant, gel pepper spray, an expandable baton with a “window break” feature, flex handcuffs, a blood-clotting agent, a whistle and a high-visibility vest for the wearer to be recognized by arriving law enforcement.
Green’s inspiration for SafeDefend began on Dec. 14, 2012, the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 children and six staff members were killed by an armed intruder.
At the time, Green was principal at Starside Elementary School in De Soto, Kan. The tragedy in Connecticut made him reassess his school’s safety plan. And he thought about his own three young children.
“It was the first time I really felt afraid as a principal,” he said. “SafeDefend didn’t start as a business. It started out as a principal and a dad trying to figure out something we can do differently.”
Green asked fellow educators, parents and law enforcement officials for guidance on how to better empower his teachers and staff if they came under attack. By early 2013, he had developed a prototype for the SafeDefend system and formed an LLC, which he initially believed he could run as a side business.
Ultimately, he made the difficult decision to step away from his rewarding career in education to entirely devote himself to SafeDefend.
“It came down to me thinking I could really make a difference and potentially save a life,” Green said.
Each SafeDefend unit costs $500 with free training, plus fees for installation and monthly monitoring. “In one of the schools we’re going into, it’s actually going to be parent-funded,” he said. “Our goal is to have 4,000 units in place by the end of the year,” Green said. “We understand that that’s a pretty aggressive goal. But this is an important product.”
