Melissa Faith Hart

Founder & CEO

Melissa Faith Hart is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of eBodyGuard. She created the eBodyGuard personal safety, evidence, and wellness technology with its eBodyGuard Safety Card and eBodyCam, which are available in the App Store and Google Play. These are key components of the vendor-agnostic eBodyGuard Smart Discovery Platform, which integrates discovery both within and outside of criminal justice IT systems. Her 20 years of experience working with law enforcement and District Attorneys led to the first criminal eDiscovery system in the nation.

Melissa spent 17 years in corporate America, mostly with Xerox. She later served on the Pink Tax on Mobility initiative, sponsored by New York University, investigating the reasons why women pay more for transportation than men. She is working with NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) to improve the efficiency and passenger safety of transit systems.

Using her certifications in Six Sigma Business processes as a core principle of solving business problems, Melissa focused deeply to understand the criminal justice system. She brought in experts from Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to help improve this very burdened and siloed process. She later became the executive director of the program supporting the process of automating criminal discovery, integrating 363 law enforcement agencies to expedite the passing of evidence within 72 hours.

Melissa believes personal safety is a primal right, and has invested decades in learning the cultures and the technologies of these systems. She remains determined to help transform systems to better support our communities.

Rita Smith

Executive Director of Victim Services Alliances

Rita began working as a crisis line advocate in a shelter for battered women and their children in Colorado in 1981. She has held numerous positions in Colorado and Florida since then in several local domestic violence and sexual assault programs and state coalitions, including Program Supervisor and Director. She was the Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence for nearly 22 years. She has been interviewed by hundreds of newspaper reporters and appeared on many local and national radio and television news shows, including The Washington Post, USA Today, People Magazine, National Public Radio, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.

She currently is a Senior Adviser for the National Football League on their efforts to end violence against women also serves as Vice President of External Relations for domesticshelters.org and Executive Director of Victim Services for eBodyGuard. She believes that advocacy and social change are intricately connected and cannot be done separately.

Heather Joyner

Executive Director of 911 Alliances

Heather Joyner is a veteran with over two decades of public safety telecommunications experience.

Heather served as the full-time 911 Director with Halifax  County Emergency Communications, located in Halifax, North Carolina.

In her role as a 911 Director, Heather oversaw and coordinated all activities of the Public Safety Answering Point, including research and implementation of new technologies that provided citizens with the best means for contacting 911 within rural areas of North Carolina.

Heather has a degree in criminal justice and shares her expertise by speaking at national conferences and consulting on many committees, including the Lake Gaston 911 Task Force Executive Board and LAPSEN Dispatch Pathway Specialist.

Karl Wilmes

CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Systems) Compliance Officer

Karl Wilmes serves as eBodyGuard’s CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Systems) Compliance Officer.  Karl retired as the Chief of Police for the City of Federal Heights, Colorado, in 2018. During his career in law enforcement, he led three agencies, including serving as Homeland Security Director for the state of Colorado and Deputy Director for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI). During his tenure at the CBI, Karl served as the State of Colorado CJIS Systems Officer. Karl has a broad range of local, state, and national experience in law enforcement, public safety and security. He has provided consulting services to Law Enforcement agencies in a variety of areas, focusing on CJIS data sharing, biometrics, strategic planning, investigations, training, and liability reduction.

John Mackey

Executive Director of Law Enforcement Alliances

John Mackey serves as Law Enforcement Ambassador and Advisory Board for eBodyGuard. He has been a law enforcement professional in three Colorado counties with five agencies for over 40 years – 20 as a police chief serving a resort town, urban city and two college/university campuses. John is the retired Chief of Police of Edgewater, CO. During his tenure he implemented CJIS standards, IT and eDiscovery enhancements and established a Property & Evidence Unit. He also developed a collaborative group of nine law enforcement CEO’s, the “Alliance 9”, which led Colorado’s best efforts in multiple collaborative grants and first ever projects that unified agencies for stronger community policing efforts. He has also served as Criminal Justice Adjunct Faculty and on the University of Colorado Leadership Council on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Prevention.

John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Education from University of Massachusetts, Boston. John has received numerous awards, including the Denver Regional Council of Government’s Distinguished Service Award, an FBI Service Award, a Governor’s Service Award, Sheriff’s Star for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, and the Lakewood Police Hall of Fame.

George Brauchler

Executive Director of Justice Strategies Alliances

George Brauchler is the former District Attorney for the 18th Judicial District in Colorado, the largest judicial district in the state with more than 930,000 residents in Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert, and Lincoln Counties. A veteran litigator, Brauchler has taken more than 140 trials to verdict in state, federal, and military court over the past eighteen years, including several of the state’s most publicized cases, including the only prosecutor in the nation to have prosecuted three mass shootings including Columbine, Stem School Shooting and the Aurora Theatre Shooting. In addition, he has also been a regular adjunct faculty member of the University of Denver College of Law, Colorado Law, and the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy JAG Schools, earning a reputation as one of the most prolific lecturers and trainers on trial advocacy in the nation.

Brauchler, who is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, has served as Chief of Military Justice for Fort Carson and with the 4th Infantry Division and the U.S. Division-North in Iraq.

Brauchler was intimately involved in the first judicial district ever to pilot, execute, and provide the incubation necessary for the first statewide Criminal eDiscovery solution in America. It is still in operation today.

Dr. Leigh Wall

Senior Managing Director of Smart, Safe Cities Alliances (America)