Barricaded suspects pose some of the most dangerous scenarios police face. Without eyes and ears inside their location, officers can often gain only limited insight into their state of mind, roiling emotions and level of continuing risk.
Four years ago, such a suspect emerged from his standoff location to shoot a police officer in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania. A bulletproof vest saved that officer’s life, and an upgrade in technology by his employer now makes the outcome less likely to happen again.
‘A better idea what we were working with’
Today police departments in the Mount Lebanon area can turn to LETS Corp.’s newly upgraded Respond+ package for flexibility in their hostage and crisis negotiations. An enhancement of the original LETS Respond product offered since 2020, with some key new features requested by users, Respond+ is a multifeatured app-based platform that can include the company’s Throw Phone+.
The Throw Phone+ has front and back cameras that can stream video concurrently, providing a near-360-degree view, and can work on Wi-Fi when there’s no cellular coverage.
“It’s a locked-down device the suspect can’t get into and access the Internet or message other people, and the audio and video are always on,” said Ben Fitzgerald, chief technology officer for LETS Corp., which has provided advanced communication and surveillance tools for law enforcement and crisis teams for nearly 20 years. “Law enforcement has complete control over which cameras are on and when the audio is on. You can remotely activate and deactivate any of the cameras or the microphone at any time. And once you turn them on, it’s basically a surveillance tool.”
That might have made a difference for Officer Rob Barnes, the victim in 2021.
“We didn’t have the app at the time, but there were negotiations going on,” recalled Barnes, who leads the hostage and crisis negotiation team for the adjoining Dormont Police Department. “[A camera or recording device inside] definitely would have helped. We’d have had a better idea what we were working with. As it was, we didn’t know … what his actual state of mind was. He had weapons stacked at the windows and the windows barricaded – he was set up for an ambush.”
Negotiation becomes a close call
That was a real risk – the man had already killed his parents.
The incident began when George Tratras called 911 and made that startling confession. Local police knew Tratras already, having responded to his home on multiple previous occasions for mental health-related issues. So, playing it cautiously, officers requested mutual aid from neighboring departments, established a command post across the street and began setting up a perimeter.
When they were ready, they called Tratras, who was initially calm and said he wanted to surrender. Then he burst from the front door shooting. One shot struck Barnes, an eight-year veteran of the Dormont PD, in the lower torso. Tratras then escaped the scene as police assisted Barnes and another officer who’d injured his knee.
Tratras’ flight didn’t last long – he quickly wrecked while being pursued and shot himself in the head. Barnes, despite being shot by an AR-15, emerged with only severe bruising and a shoulder injured in the ensuing fall.
Today he keeps the bullet at home on a shelf. “It makes you grateful to be here every day,” Barnes told local station KDKA a year after the July 2021 incident. “It gives you a different outlook on life to realize how close you can come to not being here in one moment, especially in this profession.”
Everything’s in the app
It’s far from an exact science, but getting a throw phone to Tratras might have provided additional intelligence for Barnes and his colleagues in 2021. While officers then were able to call Tratras directly, they nonetheless operated without a real idea of his true agitation level and plans. Any additional insight from inside and ability to share it might have helped prevent or mitigate their injuries.
That extra insight and advanced degree of recording control – especially useful in jurisdictions with strict eavesdropping/wiretapping laws that require both parties’ consent – is just one aspect of what LETS Respond+ brings to modern police negotiations.
Beyond the throw phone, key aspects of Respond+ include:
- Enhanced team messaging, with the ability to share photos and videos.
- Greater use of texting.
- Video calling.
- Real-time AI-powered voice-to-text transcription.
- A situation board that collects location and scene data from disparate sources into a single user-friendly display.
In the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area, where Dormont and Mount Lebanon are located, Respond+ is used regionally. Allegheny County has dozens of small police departments – Dormont’s, with just 13 personnel, is one. Fifty years ago, several of those departments and their municipalities came together to create the South Hills Area Council of Governments (SHACOG), a nonprofit cooperative body that lets them address mutual interests jointly. It currently serves 23 municipalities and 316,000 citizens over 223 square miles.
SHACOG’s services include a Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) that handles special operations. That CIRT group operates the Respond+ account, providing access to its member departments.
SHACOG became an early user of the package after a 2024 incident where a mentally disturbed man barricaded in his home resisted communication by phone. That ended tragically when he charged officers with a knife. “Situations like that, where we have people we really can’t communicate with, is one of the reasons we decided on getting the app and throw phone,” said Barnes.
They looked at a few other products before connecting with LETS Corp. and trialing LETS Respond. That was a positive experience, Barnes recalled, but they requested a few tweaks. Many of those, as it happened, were being incorporated into Respond+. LETS Corp. offered them the chance to become an early user of the upgraded platform.
“Respond+ is app-based, where the previous one was web-based,” Barnes said. “That’s great because if we get a call, we have everything inside that app instead of being spread out. We’re actually talking about getting the app on an iPad and putting it up on screens, so we don’t have a blackboard anymore.”
‘It opens up a lot of doors’
With its first use, the app’s ease of sharing information paid off for officers. It was a barricade situation where the subject initially refused calls. When they finally connected with the man, Barnes wasn’t at the command post, but he and the tactical commander were able to listen in remotely – another capability of the Respond+ package.
“We had the tac commander, the incident commander, and me, the negotiations team leader, all being able to listen to the negotiations in real time,” Barnes added. “That let us get an idea of what we needed to do from a tactical standpoint. It opens up a lot of doors – we don’t have that tyranny of distance because now we can log in and listen to the communication.”
Strategically, the area’s departments like to keep their operations centers at a certain distance from actual incidents. That enhances safety but, with the tactical team using radios, could pose occasional challenges from an information-sharing standpoint. A secondary benefit of Respond+ has been that it lets negotiators operate in an environment that’s isolated and free from distractions, while everyone still gets the key information needed.
For more information, visit LETS Corp.
