ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) today recognized a collaborative effort between Sandia National Laboratories and Law Enforcement Technologies, Inc. (LET) with a 2003 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer.
The annual awards recognize successful efforts by federal laboratory employees to transfer government-developed technology to commercial industry. A panel of experts from industry, state and local government, academia, and the federal laboratory system judge the nominations.
Sandia and LET received one of 22 Awards for Excellence given by the FLC this year. Sandia was a recipient of two of the 2003 awards. See “Sandia security assessment tool for dams, power transmission systems, and water distribution systems recognized by Federal Laboratory Consortium” for more information about the other winning Sandia project. The awards will be presented this evening in Tucson, Ariz., during the FLC’s annual national meeting.
The award to Sandia and LET is the result of a collaborative project to develop and test a product that gives law enforcement officers the ability to quickly identify, at the crime scene, individuals who have recently fired or handled a gun. LET, headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., is an R&D company engaged in the development of high-tech tools for law enforcement.
The concept grew out of discussions about the needs of law enforcement officers between LET CEO Greg MacAleese, a former police officer and detective, and members of Sandia’s Explosives Components Facility staff. LET later funded Sandia to develop and test an approach to packaging a laboratory chemical detection technique in a small, inexpensive, and reliable field test kit.
Sandia, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, transferred the technology to LET in November 2001 through a license for commercial production and distribution.
The resulting product, called the Instant Shooter ID Kit, already has helped police identify the perpetrators in dozens of homicides and has resolved uncertainties about the shooters in several suicide investigations.
The kit includes a fiberglass swab that, when rubbed on the skin or clothing of a suspect or on the surfaces of a crime scene, picks up chemical residues scattered when a gun is fired. When the swab is soaked with a proprietary liquid chemical, spots where trace amounts of residues are present turn blue against the white swab. A detection takes three to five minutes.
Police departments in 75 cities are using the kit. LET market analyses based on the first three months of sales predict a distribution of more than 30,000 kits next year with gross sales of more than $500,000.
The U.S. military also is exploring use of the kits for identifying terrorists in urban and rural areas. Police agencies in Europe, Israel, and Australia have expressed interest in using the kits, as well.
For more information about the Instant Shooter ID Kit, see http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/2002/tech-trans/isid.html.
For more information about LET Inc., see http://www.lawenforcetech.com/.
The FLC, organized in 1974 and formally chartered by the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, promotes and coordinates technology transfer efforts by creating an environment that facilitates the rapid movement of government-developed technologies into the U.S. economy. More than 700 federal labs and centers and their parent agencies are FLC members.
FLC media contact: Tom Grayson, 856-667-7727
LET Inc. media contact: Paul Weklinski, 719-380-5557