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Robert Kaiser, CEO of the body armour company PPSS Group, was stabbed repeatedly with a chisel by one of his own staff, Colin Mackinnon. Kaiser was then slashed by a machete, and bashed on the back twice with a baseball bat. As Kaiser then told an audience on day two of the International Security Expo at London Olympia last week, there was a rattling in his brain, but he was unscathed. Because he was wearing Auxilam, the company’s new anti-stab body armour.
As Kaiser earlier described to the audience, the ballistic threat in the UK is ‘close to zero’. Rather, the largest threat to security and law enforcement people is from being pushed or beaten up, he said. In between comes the risk from ‘blunt force’, whether of stabbing from knives, spikes or needles, all demonstrated on Kaiser as carried out by Mackinnon; Kaiser was wearing the Auxilam under his business suit and shirt.
The armour is aimed at besides private security and police, prison staff and others facing risk of violence. Kaiser suggested that anti-stab vests should be replaced every five years, because they degrade; but Auxilam, created from a carbon fibre composite material, has an unlimited lifespan, Kaiser added, and is ‘virtually indestructible’. It’s available from January 20. For more about the product, and its certifications, click here.
Earlier, Kaiser went through some of the reasons for knife use in crime; and why the shift from guns. The most important reason, he said, was the availability. For more, see Kaiser’s article.
Pictured by Mark Rowe; part of the PPSS stand with other body armour at the Expo. For a one minute video showing Robert Kaiser demonstrating the properties of Auxilam, visit https://www.ppss-group.com/. The demo need not have come as a shock to readers of Professional Security magazine, as the July 2018 edition featured a similar demo by Kaiser, to an invited audience in Canary Wharf in London Docklands, again to prove Kaiser’s point that he does not just ‘talk the talk’ about his company’s protection products.
The International Security Expo 2020 runs at the same venue on Wednesday and Thursday, December 2 and 3, alongside a sister show about international disaster recovery. Visit https://www.internationalsecurityexpo.com/.
