Brite-Strike's LED-technology gloves saving officers' lives

Glenn Bushee put in his time as a police officer on the South Shore before founding Brite-Strike Technologies Inc. to use LED technology to solve some of the lighting problems he encountered on the force. Now his company is also tackling the problem of officers being struck by drivers at night.

Founded in 2006 by Bushee and fellow officer Jon Neal, Brite-Strike mainly makes tactical flashlights for use by security, military, and police forces, using high-power light-emitting diodes that can much more easily withstand shocks than bulbs and draw less power so batteries last longer.

Rodney H. Brown writes in the Journal of new England Technology that most of the funding for Brite-Strike came from friends and family initially, with Bushee committing $1 million of his own money. Since then, Brite-Strike has gone public, trading on the Pink Sheets, and the company has taken some funding through a stock placement by Thomas Hagerty of Thomas H. Lee Partners. “Tom Hagerty is a personal investor in the company,” said Bushee, noting that it was not through TH Lee.

Bushee designs all of the devices Brite-Strike makes, at least in the early stages. Those products are focused on the growing “less than lethal” security market.

All of the company’s flashlights have three settings — high-power, low-power, and strobe.

The strobe is disconcerting to a sober individual in full daylight, but is nausea-inducing and incapacitating at night to someone under the influence, Bushee said.

In contrast, the new product Brite-Strike is making to help save officers’ lives is a pair of tactical, fingerless gloves that have a translucent, reflective, plastic octagonal stop sign on the palm, into which Brite-Strike puts a high-power LED that flashes with a range of up to a quarter of a mile. On the back of the glove are reflective translucent green strips, with two LEDs.

Brown notes that in traffic-handling situations, the gloves themselves can clearly indicate stop or go to drivers from a distance much farther away than the reach of their headlights.

Even though it has just moved into a new facility in Plymouth that is large enough to handle its product-assembly operations, Brite-Strike is a small company. That works to its advantage, Bushee said, in that it can adopt the latest LED technologies for its products more easily than a massive company. “You’ve got to be very careful not to get caught with last year’s technology,” Bushee said. “Being small and agile sometimes is good.”

With just six full-time employees in Plymouth, Brite-Strike has grown to just under $500,000 in revenue last year and is expected to reach profitability in 2011, according to Bushee. Giving away the first 200 pairs of the new gloves to law enforcement departments around the commonwealth was not a direct step on the profitability path, however. The gloves cost between $30 and $50 per pair, and replacement LED lights for them run about $2.50. Brite-Strike also makes a pair with flashing red and blue lights for bicycle and motorcycle officers.

Todd Bailey, an officer with the Kingston Police Department, received one set of those gloves Brite-Strike gave out earlier this summer. He said they are now a default part of his equipment. “I use them for directing traffic, especially for traffic details at night,” Bailey told Brown. “Put an LED glove on, and it probably triples the distance you can be seen.”