A couple of years ago, in Roanoke, Virginia, deputy U.S. marshal Mike Thompson and his female partner were escorting a 43-year-old convicted bank robber from jail to a local clinic. As the deputies walked their charge back to their car in the clinic parking lot, they were ambushed. A man holding a long-barreled .357 yelled, “Freeze! Put your hands up!” Thompson raised his hands and deliberately stared into the eyes of the man, who was only a few yards away.
When the shots burst out, the prisoner had started a dash for freedom. Thompson grabbed him by the back of his prison uniform, threw him to the ground, and put his foot on the man’s neck. Revolver in both hands, the deputy swiveled in a wide arc, scanning the deserted parking lot for another accomplice, possibly a driver for a getaway car. There was no one else.
The idea is that people don’t get good at what they don’t practice. Most cops don’t get into life-threatening situations very often; in a typical career of 20 years or so, the average cop doesn’t even fire a gun in the line of duty, much less get into a TV-style gunfight. Yet a cop needs to remember that the next routine traffic stop or call about the same raucous, drunken neighbors could be the one that turns his or her family into mourners.
“I wasn’t real happy working there,” Remsberg says, so he started free-lancing on the side, originally for detective magazines. On his first anniversary at the Sun-Times, he quit to free-lance full-time. The next 20 years included a stint as a principal writer of the final report by the Walker Commission, which investigated the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It was at MTI that Anderson met Pierce Brooks, another practitioner of police survival techniques and a legendary former Los Angeles homicide detective. During a distinguished 21-year career at the LAPD, Brooks had been the chief investigator on the onion-field cop killing and the department’s expert on serial murderers, including the one portrayed in the pilot show of Dragnet. When Anderson met him, Brooks was the police chief in Lakewood, Colorado, and was at MTI working on the movie to accompany his book Officer Down, Code Three, the first book to focus solely on officer survival. He and Anderson “struck it off real well from the start,” Brooks says.
Though there’s never been a business relationship between them, Calibre’s founders still stay in touch with Brooks. “He’s considered sort of the father of the police survival movement,” Remsberg says.
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Brooks reciprocates the compliment. “Denny and Chuck put on probably the best presentation on survival I have ever heard of, by far,” Brooks says. He sent his son, a corporal with the West Covina (California) police, to a Calibre seminar several years ago.
