Former assistant sheriff goes into business with police pursuit warning system
DevObal Admin • Apr 24, 2019
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During a 37-year career in law enforcement, Tim Morgan saw more than his share of high-speed police pursuits that ended badly.
It was one of the aspects of the job that bothered him the most, especially as a supervisor.
Morgan, who was assistant sheriff for Pickens County until 2012, had long had a nagging feeling that there must be a way to warn the public when a chase is on other than a blue light and a siren.
“We have warning systems for flood, lightning, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Yet more people are killed annually in pursuits than all four of those combined,” he said, citing statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
He’d had an idea bouncing around in his mind for several years on how that could be done, but he didn’t know how to go about turning it into a product.
Until he met with Mark Reid Davis, director the Pickens Innovation Center, a new entrepreneur resource center in Pickens.
With help from Davis, Morgan and his wife, Trish, have developed that idea into a working system that’s in the beta testing phase.
They plan to unveil it in March and have it on the market by summer.
“We think it’s a tremendous need and something that’s potentially life-saving,” Morgan said.
Market demand
It’s also something that could find a huge market.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says an average of one death a day can be attributed to police chases. The agency counts a total of 11,506 chase-related deaths since 1979.
But a USA TODAY review last September of police reports and internal documents, court records, police-car videos and news accounts based on police statements found that the NHTSA overlooked at least 101 such deaths in 2013 – understating the total by at least 31 percent.
The number of injuries is likely to triple the number of fatalities from police chases, Morgan said.
There’s no requirement that law enforcement agencies report chases, he said, which makes calculating the total cost in lives and damages difficult.
You don’t have to look far to find pursuits that have ended in disaster.
A lieutenant with the North Greenville Fire Department was killed last September in a wrong-way crash involving a suspect who was running from deputies.
On Christmas night 2014, 22-year-old Taylor Miller of Simpsonville died when the car in which he was a passenger was hit by a Highway Patrol trooper who was in pursuit of another vehicle that had sped through a safety checkpoint on State 124 near Woodside Avenue.
In April 2014, a 70-year-old man in Travelers Rest was killed when an SUV driver hit speeds of at least 100 mph going through Travelers Rest as he was fleeing from police.
The state Department of Public Safety pursuit policy allows vehicle pursuits “only when the necessity of the apprehension of a suspect outweighs the risks created by the pursuit.” But sometimes that’s difficult to judge.
Morgan nearly lost his own life in a pursuit years ago.
He and another deputy were chasing suspects in a home break-in along a mountainous road when their patrol car ran off the road around a hairpin curve.
“Had it not landed exactly right between two trees, we would have gone another 150 feet down the embankment,” he said. “My arm is still crooked from the injuries of that.”
The financial costs of police pursuits are enormous as well, Morgan said.
“It’s in the billions, with property damage, financial payouts to survivors with lost wages, with a disability, with hospitalization. It’s a huge payout,” he said.
It’s not a problem in the United States only.
Deaths in police pursuits have tripled in the United Kingdom over a four-year period, and it’s also a major issue in Japan, Malaysia, and other countries, Morgan said.
So he’s expecting a worldwide market.
Based on research by patent attorneys and graduate students working with the Morgans, there’s no product like theirs on the market, Trish Morgan said.
Public safety focus
Concern for the public out on the highways when a pursuit is underway is what’s driving Morgan’s business plan.
“There’s no good pursuit, just like there’s no good war,” he said. “But you’re going to continue to have both.”
“It’s something that nobody really knows what to do with,” he said. “The pursuits are deadly, they’re bad. You continue to try to regulate them as best you can but you can’t outlaw them.
“This is hopefully a way to better manage them and notify the public.”
A big part of the challenge is the unpredictability of a police chase.
“They’re unpredictable, they’re fast and they’re deadly. So you just have to monitor them as close as you can,” Morgan said.
But the system the Morgans have come up with – details of which are being kept under wraps until March – promises to solve that problem.
The idea involved using five different pieces of existing technology to create a system that would be free for the public to use, said Davis, who is helping with the product development.
The product the Morgans have developed unifies these tools and makes their use seamless, “and it saves lives,” Davis said. “That’s the beauty of what the two of them have done.”
Business background
Although he worked for the Sheriff’s Office for most of his career, Morgan started out in business management at Milliken after earning a business degree at Erskine College.
“It was a good organization, it just wasn’t fulfilling,” he said.
So after a year, he left for the Sheriff’s Office, starting out as a deputy. He took a cut in pay to do it but said he felt a calling.
“It just felt like something I wanted to do or needed to do,” he said.
He left the Sheriff’s Office after an unsuccessful run for sheriff in 2012, when his longtime boss, C. David Stone, retired.
Since then, he’s been working for Blue Ridge Security, which he says has been “very supportive” of his entrepreneurial venture.
Davis believes Morgan’s background as a pilot helped in his ability to envision his product. Morgan has been flying since the 1970’s, often transporting prisoners who have been extradited.
“He sees everything in a dashboard. All the complexities of the aircraft are right in front of him as a pilot,” Davis said. “That’s what he’s done with his business. He’s set up a business where all of the components are right in front of him.
“So he’s piloting this business as he’s piloted aircraft. It doesn’t matter how dangerous something is behind you, like a prisoner or whatever. He still has control of the aircraft. And I see him doing the same thing with his business.”
His wife, Trish, who has been actively involved in the development of the product, also has a background in business.
She owns a store in Easley called Home Decorators Warehouse. Before that, she worked in sales at the Reserve at Lake Keowee and also has been in pharmaceutical sales.
“I’ve been involved since the beginning with our team,” she said. “And going forward, I’ll be out selling the product.”
“Actually going forward, Trish will most likely be running the show,” her husband said.
The couple has a provisional patent on the product and is doing beta testing this month. Testing will be expanded in February and the product unveiling is set for March 7.
They’ve developed a week-by-week strategic plan through 2017 that calls for them to set up a storefront in Pickens this November.
The Morgans credit Davis and the Pickens Innovation Center with bringing their idea to life.
“We wouldn’t be here had it not been for the center,” Tim Morgan said. “Because this is something we’ve bounced around and talked about with different people for the past five or six years and it just never got traction because the people didn’t have the connections.”
They hope to use a local company on a contract basis to manufacture the product, in keeping with the center’s goal of fostering synergy between local entrepreneurs and existing businesses.
“This is not a cure-all,” Tim Morgan said of the police pursuit warning system. “Hopefully it will prevent some injuries.
“If it saves some lives, that’s the good part about it,” his wife said.
A task for will hear arguments for trying BY REBECCA HOLLAND If the man whose truck was caught in the path of a Baton Rouge Police Department pursuit in March would have known the chase was nearby, would he have been killed? If Maggie Dunn and Caroline Gill, the two teenagers killed when an Addis police officer ran a red light during a pursuit last New Year’s Eve, had been alerted, would they be alive today? No one can answer these questions, but Pursuit Alert founder Tim Morgan doesn’t want other families to have to think about similar kinds of "what ifs." He created a warning system that allows law enforcement to send real-time alerts to residents through an app. Notifications that a pursuit is within a few miles could prompt people to stop driving or be on the lookout for speeding vehicles. ...
LOS ANGELES - Would you use an app that warned you about a pursuit coming your way? Digital Siren developed an app that will alert drivers of any pursuits in their area… it works similar to an Amber Alert. "A high speech chase is the single event where and officer endangers the public the most, just simply trying to do their job," said retired law enforcement officer Tim Morgan with Digital Siren . Morgan started working on the idea after being part of a high-speed pursuit chase that killed an innocent bystander.
BATON ROUGE - Police chases have killed five people in the capital area this year, including two members of law enforcement. As the Louisiana legislature continues to debate the best ways to handle these chases, states like Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have some counties using the Digital Siren app. The app is free, and law enforcement would be able to send notifications to drivers' phones, warning them a chase is going on in their area. "We want them to be looking out for that fleeing vehicle, whatever the situation might be," said Tim Morgan, a former high ranking sheriff's deputy in South Carolina and the creator of Digital Siren.
MOBILE COUNTY, Ala. ( WKRG ) — There is an app that can alert those who may be in the area of a police chase, potentially saving lives. It’s called Digital Siren, and Mobile County has the biggest deployment of the system in the entire country. With the push of a button, law enforcement can notify anyone near a chase to get to safety. That button is installed in patrol vehicles and sends an alert to anyone with the free Digital Siren app. The app will also tell you when you’re out of range of the chase. “It’s kind of a no-brainer that we can alert the public of a high-speed pursuit that unfortunately kills so many people, innocent people,” said Charlie McNichol, the director of the Mobile County Communications District.
ST. CHARLES COUNTY, Mo. – A young man from St. Louis was killed in a crash caught in the middle of a police pursuit that happened in St. Charles County along Highway 94. Krystofer Batsell was 21 years old when he died in 2018. His parents were preparing for a birthday party for their other son when they received the news. “There should be some divine law that you can’t lose a child on another child’s birthday,” said Connie Batsell, Krystofer’s mother.
BRIGHTON, Colo. ( KDVR ) – Tim Morgan set up an email alert system for his inbox so he could keep track of news about deadly police pursuits around the country. That’s how he discovered two innocent people were killed in Brighton, Colorado, after a suspect, who was running from a rookie police officer in 2021, slammed into them. “I get multiple emails a day with multiple stories in each email,” he said, “and I have over 5,000 that I haven’t read yet.”
MOBILE, Ala..(WALA)--A new app we first told you about two weeks ago, is meant to help innocent drivers avoid crashes during police chases. Now police are hoping to get the word out. The free app called “Digital Siren” has only been in our area for a few weeks, but it’s already been used. Most notably during a chase last week in Saraland where two men refused to stop on Interstate 65 and hit an innocent driver. They were busted with 17 kilos of meth.
MOBILE, Ala. (WPMI) — It's called Digital Siren, and it lets you know if you're within two miles of a police chase. Patrol cars throughout Mobile County are now equipped with the technology.
MOBILE, Ala. (WPMI) — It's called Digital Siren, and it lets you know if you're within two miles of a police chase. Patrol cars throughout Mobile County are now equipped with the technology. When the chase starts, the officer hits a button. Within seconds, your phone gets an alert. "This is the best thing that I've seen in all the years I've been monitoring car chases, to where we can at least do everything we know that we can do to try to protect the public and innocent people," said Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran. It's meant to stop tragedies like the one last year in Thomasville. Megan Brunson, her 5--year-old daughter Ava, and her mother Wanda were hit head-on and killed by a suspect fleeing an officer in a chase. Mobile Chief of Staff James Barber credited NBC 15's Andrea Ramey as the catalyst for bringing this life-saving technology to the area.
Bay Minette Police want you to download another app to your smartphone right now. It's called Digital Siren by Pursuit Alert technologies. On its Facebook page , the department writes its teaming up with the company to help people stay alert during emergencies. Basically, Digital Siren is a warning system...much like the alerts we already get to our cellphones for severe weather and missing children. However, with this app law enforcement can send real-time messages to drivers when they're near an emergency response. Several Alabama law enforcement agencies are using Digital Siren, after recent high speed police chases have ended tragically.
PursuitAlert
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Home OfficePO Box 1536Pickens, SC 29671864-404-5136
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PursuitAlert Digital Siren technology is protected by U.S. Patent No. 11,302,176 B2, US Patent No.10.832.561 B2, as well as other foreign patents.
