Meet Stephen McMahon | Inventor: Blue Chirper, Non-Aggressive Diversion Security device

We had the good fortune of connecting with Stephen McMahon and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Stephen, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I didn’t invent the Blue Chirper with any thoughts about “starting a business”. I did it out of pressing necessity.

Back in 2022, during the BLM riots here in Santa Monica, our rear garage storage room, which had been our Laundry Room before the bldg was converted to condos, was broken into and robbed. We had 3 young families in our 7-unit condo bldg at the time, along with 4 older legacy homeowners. The storage room was filled with expensive, convertible car seat/strollers, bicycles camping gear, etc. Young family stuff. Much of that was stolen. We had not had a robbery like this since our HOA was established in 1974.

But, we had cameras back there and they shot pictures of the robbers faces and their car’s license plate number, so the homeowenrs believed that this info would be the key to getting their stuff back.

I am President of our HOA, and have several members of my extended family in law enforcement. So, I was able to run the tag of the getaway car and it came up with an address down in Lakewood. One of the young mother homeowners went on the ‘Offer Up’ website and actually found our stolen property, with an address? In Lakewood; same as the car. So this seemed like a slam dunk to get our property back but, of course, it wasn’t. When the SMPD officer finally showed up to take a report, and I showed her all of this evidence, she just sort’a shrugged and said: “There’s nothing we can do.”

I know, from cousins in law enforcement, that prosecutors will not prosecute this type of crime, i.e. property crime. Because it just doesn’t pay. The perps have no assets. Arresting trespassers, burglars and/or vandals, taggers, etc. is a career-ender for a young cop. Prosecutors want nothing to do with them.

But our homeowners were apoplectic when I told them the cops could do nothing. That’s when our HOA made a commitment to spend the funds to beef up security.

At the about same time, L.A. County Health Services began distributing free hypodermic needles and crack pipes in Santa Monica’s Reed Park, which is cat-cornered to our bldg. Thus turning Reed Park into “The Largest Open-Air Drug Mall in West Los Angeles”.

The addicts began leaking into our, unsecured rear garages to get high and ‘fade” (basically black out for 4-8 hours).

Since it wasn’t possible to secure our rear garages, because the bldg was built in 1961 when this wasn’t even a remote possibility, there was little we could do, physically, to stop them from moving in, using and crashing in the convenient hidey-holes of our partially subterranean rear garages.

Since our bldg is also directly across Lincoln Blvd from St. Monica’s church and schools, there is no permit parking on streets in this district. So the assigned parking spots in our rear garages are important, especially for young mothers, with young children (bldg had a 7-yr-old, a 6-yr-old, a 3-yr-old and a 20-month toddler at the time). So these moms, returning from work, daycare pick-up, grocery shopping, etc. were entering their assigned garage spaces, with kids strapped in carseats, and were being jumped by homeless addicts, coming off a fade, looking really scary, who knew they could panhandle these women, hard, scare them and their kids, in this confined space, and it would yield a good-sized handout, for more drugs conveniently available in Reed Park nearby, and a $2 pint of ‘Fortified Wine’ (grape-flavored Sterno) from Santa Monica Liquor just 2 blocks away. Also, these guys knew that the cops could/would do nothing about it.

So, we decided to provide phone numbers of some of the retired old guys in the neighborhood, like me, to these moms. They could drive by their garage spots and look in. If they saw squatters in there, they would drive around the block, while calling one of the men who would go back, run them outta there, and then the moms could safely park and download. This sort’a worked for a while.

Until, one day, I was taking a shower, heard the phone ring, machine picked up but I couldn’t quite hear it. Finished shower and while drying off, I heard a call for “Help!” from my answering machine. Sounded bad. So I ran back to the rear garage. Two of these monsters were circling her car, yelling at this young mom with her 20-month old daughter strapped into the car seat next to her, trying to boost money outta her. I was enraged and ran them off. But the damage was done. Mom crying and her little girl, so terrified, that she couldn’t even cry. She was catatonic, in shock. I will NEVER, in my life, forget that look of terror on that little girls’ face – and THAT was the impetus that drove the Blue Chirper into existence.

After things calmed down, I went back to my condo. Devastated. That night I told my wife: “That tears it. I gotta DO something. I don’t know what. But I’m doin’ SOMETHING. For sure.”

About a week later, I had begun formulating the idea. Take an intense blue strobe light, because this makes it difficult to see the color blue (retention of vision) and thus, hard to find a vein to shoot up, Also makes it hard to sleep. Combine that, somehow with the sound of crickets, because? It is really irritating. Also, this is a sound ‘Found in Nature’ and, thus, would not be a CPC §415 (Disturbing the Peace) violation (I checked this with a prosecutor I knew in the DA’s office downtown) and, somehow, control these two elements with a motion detector. That, maybe, could drive these guys out of our rear garages?

But as time went by and my rage mitigated, my confidence also waned. I began to realize that a.) I had no idea how to actually build this “system”, and b.) that the other HOA homeowners would vote to fund some silly boondoggle like this, since even I had no idea how I would actually construct it.

But I finally proposed building and installing “it” in the storage lockers of our rear garage to the HOA homeowners in an online meeting, telling them that I would have to finance my experiments with our General Fund. I estimated that it could cost as much as 750 dollars. To my utter surprise, they were not nearly as skeptical as I was and they unanimously voted to fund it!

So now I had to create it. First, I ordered a 12-volt blue strobe light from Amazon, using the HOA’s debit card. That was easy. Then I went looking for a circuit board, hopefully that would operate from a 12-volt power source, that would supply the cricket ‘chirps’. I slowly discovered that a cricket chirping device, like I needed, did not exist anywhere in the online world. I would have to create one from “scratch”.

I found an audio “engineer” online and we started ordering parts to create the cricket chirping board. After 3 attempts, and 3 melt-down failures, and blowing through about $1,000 of the HOA’s General Fund money, I realized that this wasn’t going to work. It was time to cut bait.

I went to my wife, explained that it was “impossible”, at least for me, to create the cricket chirping board and that I wanted to quit before wasting any more of the HOA’s dough. She told me that was “ridiculous”. I couldn’t quit now; I’d already spent $1,000!

I then tried approaching a couple of the other HOA homeowners, hoping for a more sympathetic take, describing my failures and that this was something I just didn’t know how to do. That it had ‘sounded’ like a good idea, but I was incapable of doing it and it was starting to get expensive. Like my wife, they both insisted that I couldn’t give up now because I’d already spent so much money on it. And, we really needed it!

At this point, I personally wished I’d never even brought this stupid idea up to the HOA. And, bottomline, even if I did get a circuit board to chirp like cricket, and somehow mated it and a strobe light, I had absolutely no idea how I was going to control them both simultaneously with a motion sensor! And, worse, deep-down, at this point, I no longer believed that the device would divert anyone away from our rear garage, much less hardcore homeless drug addicts.

But I pressed on and, finally, after blowing more than $1,200 on failures, I jettisoned all of the electronic work I’d done before, and starting completely over. I, somehow, I got a circuit board to chirp, reliably, over & over again, without overheating and melting down.

Then the plan was to simply hand these elements over to a professional electrician who would marry them to a motion sensor and install the components in the storage units at the head of the parking spaces in our rear garage.

Fat chance.

The first electrician I contacted, who worked for a contractor who did a lot of fixes for our HOA, was highly thought of and very experienced. I showed him my two working elements, the strobe and the chirper (which unfortunately ran on different voltages, BTW) and described my plan to him in detail, with drawings. He looked at me like I had two-heads. Then, politely, backed away from me and wouldn’t even return my phone calls. Same thing with other electricians that I asked to bid on our job. They wanted nothing to do with my cockamamie idea.

So I had to learn about motion detectors myself, which are called PIRs (Passive Infra Red Devices). I bought my first one on Amazon and it was delivered the day after Thanksgiving, 2023.

By February, 2024 I had the three elements: the PIR, the chirper audio board, and the strobe light actually working together and installed them, myself, by climbing up into the storage units and cutting holes in the floors of those units with a rented jigsaw from Home Depot. By now, I’d spent over $2,100 of the HOA’s General Fund, but at least I had a working prototype, ready to test.

I installed a cheap nanny-cam in the garage celling, facing the storage units on a Wednesday in early Feb, 2024, and app’d it to my wife’s phone. I wanted her to see, for herself, what a mistake this whole thing had been. I knew that the local addicts would be receiving their free hypodermic needles and crack pipes, the very next day, during Reed Park’s Thursday afternoon distribution program (Thanks, Barbara Ferrer!) and would find their way into our rear garage along with their ‘Fentanyl’ load and Fortified Wine. So, we would soon see if our chirping device would have any effect, whatsoever, on the homeless guys who got high and faded in our rear garage. I was, secretly, doubtful.

The next night, right on schedule, two homeless addicts staggered into our rear garage. The nanny-cam sensed them, lit up and started recording. When they got near the convenient cubby hole space below our storage units, the strobe/chirper device sensed them and started intensely blinking-blue and chirping relentlessly. They didn’t even bother to squat, turning tail and hustling outta there. One saying something like: “WHAT the fuck is that?” and the other: “We’re outta here!”

I could not BELIEVE it! It worked! My wife started a 5-minute I-told-you-so lecture, complete with video back up, which she distributed to all the homeowners. The next day everyone in our bldg., and subsequently the neighborhood as the video spread, was talking about Steve’s great new invention that had chased the homeless guys out of our garage.

Then we started getting videos, over & over, of homeless guys entering our rear garage, seeing/hearing the strobe/chirper, and booking right outta there. My ‘invention’ was an unqualified success.

But, there was still a problem. It had diverted them from our garage – and – into the other garages in the alley near our bldg. So those bldgs. needed devices, too.

So when I met with landlords of those bldgs, and proposed putting the devices in their storage units at the head of the garage parking spaces, like ours, they told me that wouldn’t work. Because apartment bldgs are different than condos. A lot of tenants, when they move out, ask to keep renting their storage lockers. And the landlords accommodate them. Why not? It’s basically free money for no effort. This is very common in Santa Monica. Some of these storage locker pack-rats have been paying rent on storage lockers they haven’t even seen the inside of for thirty years. So clearing them out to install the electronics was a no-gamer. One of the landlords told me: “You gotta put that thing in a box”.

And that is how the “Blue Chirper” was born.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
I was a Director of Photography (a DP) based in L.A. in the TV/Film business for 30 yrs

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Start up the 14 Sierra Hwy to Vazquez Rocks, then Red Rock Cyn, then, at Mojave, the 395 up to Fossil Falls, Lone Pine, the Alabama Rocks, then on to Mono Lake and then the Tioga Rd entrance into the most beautiful spot in the world, the Yosemite Valley. Hit Sequoia National Park on the way back to L.A.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My wife, Patty Namkoong and some of the homeowners in the 1041 Lincoln HOA, inc: Corey Greenwell, Sheri Eddebbarh, and Maggie Seid

Website: https://bluechirper.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluechirper/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@StephenMcMahon-s9k

Other: Next Door: https://nextdoor.com/profile/0159D4f_n526ghNx5

Image Credits
I certify that we own all of these images