411: Tim Pearce—Accuracy Under Fire

Well, hello, friends.

It's us again, Micro and Chuck Klausmeyer.

And this is the way I heard it.

Specifically, this one is the way Tim Pierce heard it.

He's our guest, a former cop

who, I mean, of all the beats in all the world, wow.

South Central, right after Rodney King, up to his neck with the blood and the crips.

And man, does he have some stories to tell?

He does, and he spills a lot of them, and one that's just incredibly tragic.

Yeah, full disclosure, I didn't invite him on to hear many of the stories that we heard, but I was so grateful to hear them.

I invited him on because I think Tim has invented, well, I know he's invented a product that's going to save a lot of lives.

Yeah.

I don't know how many, but maybe an awful lot.

Our friend Gavin DeBecker is very bullish on this invention, which you were kind enough to field test here on the podcast.

I got the feeling that you were really delighted by that as you got to control the buttons on it.

And do you want to tell people what this device is?

It's a device that you can operate remotely.

It is essentially, think of it like a garment of sorts.

It's a sleeve that you can put on either arm.

And the sleeve has electrodes, think of them as electrodes in there.

When you hit the right button and turn the right dial, it sends an electrical jolt, about 66 volts, into the musculature of the person wearing said device.

This will cause things like your bicep and your forearm to contract

uncontrollably.

Thereby immobilizing your arm.

Yes.

Why would you want to do this?

Because when you're shot in the course of duty.

You said duty.

I did say duty.

And full disclosure, we also almost called this episode on Duty Booty

because

Tim met his wife and they became partners.

They were partners, then they became husband and wife.

And then wouldn't it be strange if we were the other way around?

You know what, honey?

I love you so much.

I want you to ride with me through Watts.

Oh my God, this story.

You know what?

I'm not going to tell you.

I don't want to give it away.

I want you to hear it as I heard it.

But I want you to know that as I'm talking to this guy, I'm thinking what I really need to get to is this remarkable life-saving device that simulates the effects of being shot without being shot.

That I'm wearing through the entire episode.

Waiting to be shocked slash shot.

Now, it takes us a while to get there because, like so many other plans, mine was ill-conceived.

In that, the unexpected value of listening to a guy like Tim for the better part of 90 minutes is that you get some insight into being a cop that I'd never heard before.

And I know a lot of cops.

I'm friendly with cops.

But this guy is special.

How he came to the force, his journey through the skilled trades, his journey as a self-appointed lifeguard.

The fact that he winds up as a mad scientist, entrepreneurial inventor

with the wife that accompanied him on this unscriptable journey.

It's just something you need to hear in his own words.

And thankfully, Tim Pierce is not at a loss for them.

We call the episode Accuracy Under Fire because that's the name of his company.

You're going to want to check it out online.

Surely there's a URL we can mention now as well as.aufire.com.

The videos are unbelievable.

You're going to want to see this thing in use.

But first, I think you're going to want want to hear from the man who invented it, learn about the tragedy from which this triumph was hatched, and enjoy, truly, a good cop.

This is the way I heard it.

Right after this.

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All right, here we go.

First things first, thank you for the amazing gift, Tim.

You're welcome.

This is some of the best scotch there is, and

I'm not going to enjoy it right this second.

But my pledge to you is it will be gone the next time we meet.

You're going to enjoy that.

I certainly did when I was introduced to it.

Like I said, you could drink that for breakfast every day.

You'll see.

There's that fine line.

It's like once your scotch and your whiskey becomes the way to start the day, you might be having an interesting day.

Yeah.

I say this as a guy who's had many interesting days.

I introduced you properly in the preamble and fawned all over you, but I didn't know you were going to rig Chuck Up in the device.

Can you explain what my producer is wearing there?

That is AU Fire, which is...

short for Accuracy Under Fire.

And it's a gunshot wound simulator that I created.

And it actually was created out of a tragedy at LAPD,

which we'll talk about.

But it, interesting enough, there's really not that many products out there that simulate getting hit by gunfire.

Why?

You just can't shoot at somebody in training.

It's kind of left up to officers to, you know, they're kind of out there with a hope and a prayer that when it happens, that they're going to pull through.

They're going to be able to pull their inner Rambo out and fight back accurately and effectively when they've been shot and they're under attack.

Yeah.

There's so much simulation, though.

I mean, there's simulated ammunition, there's rubber bullets, there's all sorts of other things.

You know what?

Before we dive all the way into it, let me just tell you that from my perspective, you're here because I got a front row seat to a lot of this stuff in the Dirty Jobs days.

You know, the 100th job, we went to Fort Bragg and went through all their training exercises.

And I did similar things with similar branches.

And I've always been interested in this.

And then, you know, Gavin came on this podcast, Gavin DeBecker.

Listeners will know him as the guy that started one of the premier personal service protection organizations in the country.

And so when I heard about what you had done, I immediately called Gavin.

And Gavin was like, Oh, we're in touch, and we're going to place an order.

So that's what got my attention.

If you've got him super interested in this,

then I think it's something that the country probably needs to know about.

A lot of people are doing a lot of really important work in your space, but I ain't seen nothing like this.

Yeah, it does not exist.

I mean, it's brand new.

It's many years, overnight success in 15 years, basically.

Right?

I've been working on it for a very long time.

I was surprised when I got into the police academy in 1996.

I was a construction worker before that with Department of Water and Power.

I was a helper, basically, a laborer.

And then I get into the police academy in 96, and I remember seeing the...

Well, how's that happen again?

I mean, like one day, you've just had it with the construction game, or was policing always a thing in the back of your mind?

No, it was actually never a thing.

It's never a thing I imagined I would do.

I don't know.

I just wasn't that type of guy.

I didn't think.

It was actually took a year off from Water and Power and I went and moved over to Hawaii and was doing construction there on Oahu.

Every day after work, I would body surf at this beach called Sandy Beach.

World-class body surfing beach.

Really dangerous and a lot of fun.

And I would hit it five days a week for a year.

And several of those days I was out there, I made a couple of little, I don't know, like micro-rescues where I'm just watching somebody.

And if they were getting, you know, a lot of tourists, when you come out of Waikiki Beach and you head down the coast, Sandy Beach is like one of the first ones that looks accessible.

And so they pull in the parking lot and they go jump in the water with their rental boogie boards.

They're out there in the mix.

And so if you're not paying attention, you can get sucked down into the lava field down there, right?

They call it gas chambers.

So I would swim out and tell people, hey, you better move up the beach, you know?

And sometimes I would look down, the lifeguards are reading their paper or whatever.

And I think sometimes they don't care if the tourists get smashed.

Teachable moment.

That's how you thin the herd.

And there's a lady out there swimming.

She was out there forever.

So I'm like, god she has to be tired so I swam out to her I'm like hey you okay yeah yeah yeah I'm fine and I remembered back to learning swimming as a kid and I remember lifeguard saying some people's egos will override sure and they drown that way because they won't admit they need help

and so I caught a couple more waves I'm like she has to be exhausted so I swam out there hey I started talking to her.

Where are you from?

And she just like locked onto me and I started swimming backwards up the beach to a safer spot.

And she just was glued to me.

And then finally, and I'm watching the set waves and everything.

And finally, I timed it.

And I'm like, hey, you probably touch right here.

And her eyes just blew like this.

And she just panicked and went straight for the beach.

Wow.

And she was out there panicking, but not showing it.

And so I had a bunch of little things like that.

One guy was out there from Montana with his like eight-year-old son.

And they were on their buoy boards upside down.

And they were getting sucked into down towards the lava field.

So I went out and I ended up just taking the kid away from him, just swam his kid away because he wouldn't listen to me and pulled the kid to a safe spot and got him in.

Describe the lava fields and what happens if you get sucked into one.

It's like glass.

It's like black glass, just sharp lava, and there's no way to get out of the water there, right?

So the current will take it, and then it becomes cliffs.

So it's just very dangerous.

And I just saw it happening, and the dad wasn't listening to me.

I had kind of warned him two times.

And then finally, I just said, I went out and I grabbed the kid's board and I go, hey, what's your name?

Where are you from?

Blah, blah, blah.

Swam him away.

And then the dad realized, oh, and he started following.

So one day I'm sitting on the beach.

I'm like, why do I care?

Yeah, what are you doing?

I mean, that's such an interesting,

I mean, it's not unheard of, of course, to want to help someone in distress, but you're like, you're looking for problems that aren't self-evident.

Exactly.

And I was looking up and down the beach, and nobody else seemed to really be caring.

And so what's different about me?

And I thought, okay, maybe I need to be like an EMT or a medic or something like that.

Because I was in construction, I was labor side of it, unskilled.

I needed a career.

I think I was 23, 24 at the time.

So I started looking into trade schools there in Hawaii, and there's two, three-year waits.

I decided I would go back to LA and try to get some training and come back.

Because, sidebar, if you have mastered a skill in Hawaii, in the trades, you have more work than you can ever.

finish, ever do.

You're in demand.

You can basically set your own schedule, from what I've seen.

What a great place to work, huh?

Beautiful.

It's not bad.

We would be on these mansions up on the hillside, surf shorts, work boots, and tool bags, drop your bags at lunch, jump in the water, get some food, go back to work.

It was outstanding.

Loved it.

So this is interesting, by way of backstory.

You're a body surfer, and I assume you surf too, but...

But your story is body surfing, and you're a self-appointed lifeguard because you look around and the lifeguard's reading his newspaper or taking a nap.

And you see people who aren't even in distress, but something in the reptilian part of your brain says, I don't know, I think they're in trouble.

And then you take it upon yourself to swim out and separate a boy from his dad, knowing that the dad will follow and they all live happily ever after.

Actually, that one, I sent the dad in to teach him a lesson.

He was about 20 yards behind, and I was like, Okay, go in there, right there, right there, knowing he was just going to get hammered.

He needed to know.

Teachable motion.

Exactly.

But I got back to LA, and then I was sitting in traffic and I was looking at this motor cop

and I was like, okay, his job is indoors, it's outdoors, it's mental, it's physical.

I had some martial arts background, so I was a little bit scrappy.

I'm like, I could probably do that part.

And I knew I didn't need a college degree to be a cop.

And I knew I could make a livable wage at that.

And I was tired of the construction side of it.

It wasn't a way I wanted to go.

And I thought, maybe I should try that.

But I'm actually not, I don't know, I guess the cop type where

rules

are suggestions usually.

I'm kind of cowboyish, I guess.

And attention to detail was never my thing.

But ultimately, I end up getting into LAPD.

And

1996, I got into the academy in March of 96.

And I show up there, and when we have Black Line Monday, four o'clock in the morning, everybody lines up.

And there was a female recruit who was sent out.

They had like a two-week lead class with the females.

And so this woman was sent out there to get us all in order and get us up into the building.

And she looked miserable.

I remember standing there looking at her, going, Who is this grumpy chick?

Who she thinks she is?

And the next thought was, Not, I'm going to marry that girl, but I did.

Wow.

No, that's a, yeah, there's a lot of distance between those two points.

Tell me about her.

So her name was Christina Rapati.

We had a big class, 120-something people.

LAPD was recruiting real heavily back then.

And she was in a different squad.

So I didn't really know her, but I knew she had a great reputation.

For context, this is pre-Rodney King.

Yeah.

No, right after.

Right after.

Whoa.

Well, you buried that lead, too, then, didn't you?

You went and joined the LAPD

at a time when the LAPD

was probably not the wish fulfillment or the aspiration of a lot of people.

You know, it's interesting, is people were telling me back then, when I would tell them that, hey, I want to be a cop, they're like, man, you don't want to do that.

This place has changed.

The job is ruined.

It's terrible.

terrible conditions.

And I really thought about it.

And then I realized, I said, you know what?

the people who had a career leading up to Rodney King and were still in it their norm was flipped upside down

I'm gonna come in and this is gonna be my norm how it is

so I might have a different perspective of the job and I'm so glad I made that decision because had I listened to them I would have missed out on an amazing career and the amazing people I met You know, it just sent me on this trajectory that is incredible and I'm proud of.

Well, I say a lot because we've had more than a few cops on the show and I kind of maybe now somewhat glibly say

I can't remember a tougher time to be a cop than right now.

But maybe then.

What's your take on all of it?

It was a tough time to be a cop, no doubt.

Like when I got to Southeast Division, we were running about 80 to 90 murders a year in basically five square miles.

So we're talking, this is South Central.

Yeah.

Yeah, LAPD Southeast Division.

Let me back up.

When you get out of the academy, you go to your first division where you get trained with a training officer out in the field every day.

I went to Central Division, which is downtown LA.

Dirty jobs.

When I was working Water and Power, I was doing some really dirty jobs, and I remember telling my partner there,

watch, LAPD is going to put me somewhere dirty, and they think that this is, they're going to show me, you know, where did I end up?

Skid Row.

Skid Row, walking a foot beat, basically the graveyard shift.

And

that was interesting.

You'd be on 6th and St.

Julian, there'd be 300 people in the intersection.

It was like a casting call for thriller.

Just zombies everywhere.

And because you're in uniform, you're standing there and they would just come around you and split like the Red Sea.

And you just had this front row view of what, you know, just what this was.

It's all mental illness, it's all drug addiction, it's homeless.

And it was thick back then.

But I got this front row seat, and I really thought it was interesting.

So I do probation there, and then I wheel out and go to Southwest Division, which is like the Crenshaw District, just west of USC, over to the Crenshaw Mall, out to La Cienega, Vernon, up to the 10 Freeway, right?

And that is like a middle-class area, but highly infiltrated with gangs.

So it's interesting.

You'll end up in a house chasing a guy, a gangster.

Mom works for the DMV, sister works for Water and Power.

Great, you know, jobs and everything.

But brother is a full-on hardcore Crip or Blood or whatever.

Back then it was the Crips and the Bloods.

Those were basically the split bill.

Yep.

So worked there, and that's where I met back up up with Christina.

We actually got partnered in patrol.

At that time,

this is our first year on the job as new officers on our own.

And I remember she had already a great reputation.

And when the watch commander read off our names being assigned together in roll call, I remember thinking, oh, no.

Not this one.

Yeah.

This one.

I remember her.

Yeah, she's

cranky.

And she's going to make me look horrible, right?

She's so much better, right?

Right.

So I'm nervous and we get in the car and usually there's a little discussion.

This is where I keep my backup.

This is what I have, blah, blah, blah, in case something happens.

And there's this little thing you do.

And we pull out of the station and immediately we see this car full of gangsters and we go after it and we pull them over and it gets heated quick.

How do you know they're gangsters at this point?

You know, I don't know.

I don't remember what that situation was, but they were.

They turned out to be.

Pulled them over for some violation.

It got really heated.

I kind of lost my cool and I'm thinking already right off the bat

I already screwed up and she's going to judge me.

I get back in the car.

She starts cracking jokes and I'm like, oh my god, this girl's kind of cool.

And it turns out we end up being on the exact same page with law enforcement and we realized quickly that gangsters were like the cancer of the city.

They're ruining it for everybody, right?

And

we really wanted to get into the crash units.

And so we were just working hard, and they actually were starting to talk to us, recognizing that we were doing good work out there.

Why were they called crash units?

It was community resources against street hoodlums.

It was, yeah.

I knew it had to be an acronym.

Yeah, yeah.

Because there's no way you're just going to, you know, and we'll call them crash units.

Yeah.

Cool name.

Yeah, interesting.

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So work in patrol, she was my patrol partner for,

I want to say, almost two years.

And then we had a third partner on the car, and Phil Cuesta was murdered by 18th Street.

Phil Cuesta was one of the crash officers.

And responded to that, one of the craziest scenes I've ever been on.

Nicest guy.

I remember I would pass him in the locker room and I remember always looking at him.

I'm a new officer, so he's a crash guy so you know I kind of you don't say anything you don't talk to him really

and I said you know I got to meet him I got to say hi to him he seems like such a nice guy the next week he was dead oh

and then eventually when they opened up his spot in the unit Chris they pulled Christina and I into the crash unit and we started working the Rolling 30s Harlem Crips which was from Martin Luther King up to

Jefferson sometimes up to Adams turns bloods up there.

And from basically USC all the way across to Crenshaw, right?

That whole big area.

40 years plus of entrenchment.

And we went at it hard with those guys.

You're not coming out there with a big stick.

Like, you're the boss.

They'll eat you up.

There's a game to play.

You have to feign respect and all that kind of stuff.

But we got them with a lot of felonies.

They put hits out on us, Christina especially.

And then.

Hits that are widely recognized among one gang, both gangs.

Like, do you guys pose an existential threat to the whole ecosystem?

Or do you get, you know, can you be friendly with the bloods, but not the Crips as a cop?

It just doesn't work that way.

No.

You have relationships with these guys.

There's some that it's always going to be locking horns, no matter what.

There's no changing that.

There's some that will play the respect game.

And there's a lot of them that they're real characters, you know, and there's a lot of really smart ones.

You develop these relationships with them, and they understand the game.

So their job is to try to get away.

Our job is to try to catch them, right?

Sometimes they win, sometimes we win.

As soon as you pat them down, you can sit there and have a conversation with them

regularly.

That's our job.

Get to know them.

Know who they are.

Know what their MO is.

If they're not on probation parole, know their tattoos, know who they hang with, what cars they drive, who their baby mamas are, who their mamas are, right?

And you're like a

reservoir of intelligence because when they go do a crime in another city and there's some kind of clue bringing back there, we're the ones that are going to identify them.

Oh, we know him, we know that tattoo, we know that car, we know those guys, you know.

So that's your job.

It turned out to be a lot of fun, and it turned out to be a perfect job for me.

I really enjoyed it, and I got good at it.

Which is strange because I hate conflict.

Yeah.

I'll do anything to avoid conflict.

I've been that way my whole life.

Well, maybe that's a good thing for a cop.

Yeah.

But to be drawn to it at the same time, that's the thing that's interesting.

And speaking of interesting, you've used that word three times now, at least.

Once to describe the transition, I would imagine, from going from paradise, where you're body surfing, into skid row,

right?

I mean, you're standing there as the crowd sort of parts around you because you're in uniform, and you describe that whole moment as an interesting moment.

Most people would go with any number of other descriptors, right?

All day long.

So it's always interesting.

Why are you attracted to this cranky woman?

That's interesting.

You know?

That's kind of interesting.

It really is kind of interesting, too, why you would go out to rescue somebody who doesn't appear to be in trouble.

So I'm just taking a mental inventory of the things that you, you'll do anything to avoid conflict, but you go out of your way to join the one police force in the country with the biggest black eye at a time in history when it was probably the blackest dude that's interesting but please go ahead you know i remember my thought process when i got on the job i was scared i remember one of my early traffic stops we had these were four gangsters in a van this way i was on probation we're on the

I think it was this 4th Street Bridge going across the L.A.

River.

We had stopped them there.

We're under street lights, like two in the morning.

And we got them at gunpoint.

And I remember seeing my badge shaking

on my chest, right?

And I'm like, calm down.

Like, get it together.

But it was just rattling on my chest.

You know how hard your heart has to be beating to make your badge rattle?

It's something that you get acclimated.

Most people say, I could never do that job.

And I would have been that guy.

But you get acclimated to it.

And then you get confidence doing it.

And you have to have officers show you how.

We'll talk about that.

But so you graduate, but I remember thinking,

put me in the hardest possible place first, and then everything else is going to be easy.

So I signed up for all the hard divisions, Watts, Southwest, Southeast, and 77th, Newton.

And

interesting.

Interesting that you would do that.

Just one to get that.

And I ended up realizing I didn't want to deal with normal people, normal people problems.

When you snatched a gangster with a pistol, some kind of felony, and you walked them into the station, your peers were like, hey, nice job.

Your supervisor was like, nice job.

The neighbors, the good neighbors are like, nice job.

You know that's what's going on.

They just can't say it.

So there's like no downside to it, other than the drama you've got to put up with to get to that arrest.

And it's worth pointing out that they can't say it because these people in the area you've described are literally trapped in their homes.

100%.

If you're not from the neighborhood, you're not tested and proven,

you stay in the house.

We arrested a kid for murder.

He was 16.

He was a Project Crip, PJ Crip.

I was out there with the homicide detectives.

And so, anyways, I grab this kid, and he's in cuffs.

I sit him in the backseat of the car, and I'm sitting sitting back there waiting for the detectives to do their thing with grandma in the house, interviewing her.

And I go, hey, man, I'm talking to him just like this.

I go, hey, man, let me ask you a question.

If I was some Hispanic kid, even black kid, and I moved into this neighborhood and I didn't want anything to do with the gangs.

Like, mom's moved me here.

I don't have any choices, but I don't want anything to do with the gang.

What's my life going to be like?

He goes, he looks at me, he goes, you better stay in the f ⁇ ing house.

Just like that.

16-year-old kid.

And it just like confirmed what I already knew.

Yeah.

But I wanted to hear it from him.

You see that all the time.

Because, look, if you call the police and they find out, your kids are going to get just hammered going to school.

They're going to get hammered at school to and from.

These guys will show up at your house.

When you move in, show you a pistol, say, anything happens around on this block, you come to me first.

Like, this is my block.

That kind of stuff.

We've seen where somebody moved in, pulled the U-Haul up, and 30, 40 people descend on the U-Haul, strip it clean, and take off into the wind.

And the neighbors will be like,

just welcome them into the neighborhood.

Yeah.

So, if you're an outsider, you better stay in the house.

Jesus.

I mean, look, I think a lot of people listening to this are probably asking the thing I'm asking myself now, which is, at what point does society just really go, okay, wait, take the gloves off.

You described it as a cancer.

Where's the scalpel?

Why aren't we removing the tumor?

What would it take?

What has to happen, if anything, in your estimation,

to get to that mindset?

I think it's widely accepted that you have to get to them young.

There has to be something else to do.

Education, young.

Sports, young.

A lot of these guys are being brought up in these houses houses that are just, the parents are horrible.

They don't have a choice.

And they're angry or neglected.

And the gang brings them in, gives them something to do.

It gives them purpose.

Everybody needs purpose.

It doesn't have to be good.

Bad purpose is purpose.

And I think that's part of it too.

So,

and actually,

what I've loved about the job is there's so much food for thought.

That's what I loved about working in the inner city.

is you're looking around.

It's so complicated.

There's no one solution.

But good education young and things to do young and sports to do young is a great start.

I get that that's what has to happen to stop the cycle.

But what do you do in real time when it's too late?

Like to anybody who's seen The Wire, anybody who's watched Homicide, like you get a sense that there's a point where you can do all sorts sorts of preventative measures to keep the fire from conflagrating.

And then there's a point where the building is fully involved and you just got to knock the flames down.

And that seems to be where you spent most of your life, is knocking the flames down.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, I don't think that's going to get any better anytime soon.

Actually, it's where AU Fire comes into play because a couple things have happened.

Police training to save money, keep people on the streets, has turned into PowerPoint training, right?

Theory.

All the shooting days, all the tactics days, all that stuff is pretty much gone.

Very little.

People assume that we get a lot of training as police officers and we don't.

In my experience at LAPD, but I hear it all over the place.

And then we have things like Yaval Day happen.

where because as an officer in training you're you're practicing overriding your self-preservation instinct for when that day comes, right?

PowerPoints do not do that.

So a Uvalde happens and they're faced with rifle fire in a small confined area and they're like, oh, we didn't sign up for this.

Or they don't have that practice of overriding and sacrificing yourself for the greater good.

And then we have George Floyd happen and the riots.

And so we have officers leaving the business like this.

We have violence going like this.

We have an economy that's going to be going like this.

So we're going to have less officers and much more violence.

And that's not going to turn around for 20 years, in my opinion.

Like I said, you have to be taught how to be a proactive officer.

You have to have other officers who've been doing it, who've muscled through it, and then they show you and they give you the confidence and you're practicing it and then you become good at it.

And then you can go out and tackle the hard problems, the hard people who are causing problems for everybody else.

Not Not every cop wants to do that.

I mean, we're all paid the same.

You sit at a desk or you go out and you tackle super hard problems, you're getting the same paycheck.

I didn't realize that.

Yeah, there's no advantage to it.

None.

Because you're just opening up coffers of drama for yourself and complaints.

It's gotten so tricky to be a proactive police officer.

Proactive meaning I'm pulling you over for some minor traffic violation.

I'm talking to you.

Now I'm digging and I'm finding out if you're on probation or parole.

If you're on probation, you have search and seizure conditions on your parole.

Now I'm

checking your car.

I'm looking for the pistol, right?

So I took an infraction and I found a felony in it, right?

There's a thousand different ways to do that.

But you have to be getting out and getting face-to-face with people.

And there is nothing about the business that encourages you to do that now.

Right.

So the proactive policing has been on a decline for a very long time.

And then George Floyd and all that just sent it over to Cliff.

Now, if the governor, the mayor, and the chief came out today, in my opinion, and said, guys,

we made a mistake.

The era of gotcha is over.

We need you to take the city back.

We need you to just crush the crime.

There are no officers that are going to trust that.

That's going to have to be tested.

The officers get in some really sticky, hairy situations that could possibly embarrass the department and they don't get their heads taken off.

We're not getting sacrificed for public opinion, right?

Nobody trusted anymore.

So they're not being proactive.

So the people who knew how to be projected.

Because no one has their back, or they don't feel like anyone truly has their back.

Exactly.

So the guys who are teaching people how to be proactive are leaving or have left.

And it's not being encouraged.

So let's say they say that, which we know they're not.

The era of gotcha is over.

It would take several years for them to become confident and start doing it.

But there's no one going to be left to teach them how to do it.

I'm sorry to inject with a metaphor, but it's just screaming in my head, man.

I'm thinking of the lifeguard who's reading his magazine and not really paying attention to the job at hand.

And then I'm thinking of the body surfer who is proactively policing a situation and just swimming out on his own.

That's the difference.

I mean, the quality that brought you to the force is the exact character that we ought to be magnifying and building up.

But not only are we not doing that, we're affirmatively discouraging it.

Or so it seems.

I don't want to put words in your mouth.

Right.

And you hear this all over the country.

I run around training people and other agencies.

It's pretty much the same complaint across the board.

which is scary.

I believe we're heading into really rough times, and we're going to have less officers and a lot.

I mean, the ambushes on police have gone up, I believe, like 100%.

It's almost incredible.

Yeah.

It strains credulity to think that there is an open season that's essentially been called.

You guys are in season.

There's no consequences for all the things that lead up to that, all the crimes that are leading up to that.

So it's just getting more and more ripe for attacks on police officers.

So this wasn't the exact environment when you met your future wife, but if you could kind of just go back a bit and just tell me, what were the circumstances by which you fell in love?

So we were well known as a partner team and well known in the gang units and everything.

And we had this great social network in the department and just such good people and great friends.

And

everybody started claiming like they'd be like, we know you guys are a thing.

He has an on-duty booty, huh?

I'd look at him like, are you crazy?

She won't even let me sit down to eat.

Like, we're eating on the hood of the car.

Taco Bell.

Let's go, let's go, let's go.

There's zero time.

I mean, this girl's driving the car.

Driving the night.

So she was the brains of the car.

I was the muscle, I guess.

But we would just start doing everything together.

We would start running before work and

she had moved down to the South Bay.

We'd just make any excuse to be around each other.

So it was working out before work, then working, and then she wanted to learn how to surf.

So I taught her how to surf.

And now that became, you know, we'd go surfing together.

And then

one day we were at the Baker de Vegas

race and the big party at the end.

And there were some cocktails and stuff.

And then, you know,

the magnets started happening, right?

It started attracting.

And there it goes.

And we were like the last two to figure out we liked each other.

It was one of those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like musical chairs.

Just me and you, kiddo.

Exactly.

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She was a phenomenal officer, widely known, top 5% of the department easily, if not more, smaller than that.

Super smart, super driven, not trying to be a tough guy or anything like that, just smart.

And she played the game really well with the gangsters.

Like, she got tremendous respect from them.

Because she did not back down from problems, from tough problems.

So,

at some point, you have to divulge that you're dating.

Yeah.

So we pull my lieutenant, Art Miller, outside.

And

we go, hey, LT, we got to tell you something.

He goes up.

I go,

we've started dating.

And he looks at me and he goes, hmm.

Wow, Tim, you really do like a challenge, don't you?

It's a lot of stomping and a lot of frisking going on over here.

So when do you get married?

We got married in 2003.

I had a little girl, Jordan.

So I'm working down in Watts at this point in the gang unit there.

She's back up in Southwest Division working like a crime suppression unit.

We actually ran a race that morning.

down at El Segundo, or Dockweiler Beach.

It's a race they do every year for fallen officers

and fundraiser.

So my gang unit put a team together.

She jumped on our team.

I've got a picture of us standing there with a couple of the guys in my gang unit, my daughter, 16 months old, in my arms.

It's 10 o'clock in the morning.

We just finished our run, our race.

We go home.

We give my daughter Jordan to my mom.

Christina goes off to Southwest Division.

I go off Southeast Division.

We're working.

Our schedules are crazy.

changing all the time.

So 10 o'clock that night, June 3rd, 2006,

10 o'clock that night, I'm in Jordan Downs housing project.

That was my responsibility, the Grape Street Crips.

We hear a help call come out up in Southwest Division.

So my partner, Skye Stevens, and I start racing up there, down Century Boulevard, jump on the 110 freeway.

We're in the emergency lane heading towards the Coliseum and get off at Coliseum.

And we're just responding to a help call.

You don't know the nature of anything.

It's an officer-down help call.

Yeah.

So that's why we're coming from southeast to southwest.

So we're racing up there.

I've completely forgotten that Christina's working.

So we get on the freeway and Scotty goes, hey, Christina working?

I go, oh, yeah, she is.

We switched over to Southwest frequency, and it's on Leighton and LaSalle,

right in the middle of Rolling 30s Hood.

So I go, well, that's her hood.

She's probably in this, like, not thinking she's one hit.

And we're getting off at Coliseum.

My phone rings in my pocket, and I look at it, and it's her sergeant, who's a friend of ours, Robin Brown.

And I remember turning to Scotty, I go, here it goes.

I go, what's up, sergeant?

He goes, hey, Tim, where are you at?

I go, I'm getting off at Coliseum right now.

He goes, it's Christina.

I go, yeah, I know.

I figured it out.

I'll be right there.

Scotty's driving like a wild man, just

getting us there.

I remember yelling at him.

I'm like, Scotty, calm down.

You crashed.

We don't get there.

Like, just cool it.

Let's go.

We get there, and a bunch of other officers have gotten there ahead of us

to back up, to lead up to that.

What she was doing is she's coming down Denker towards Martin Luther King Boulevard.

On the corner of Martin Luther King and Denker is, on one side is the police station.

On the other side is a little mini mart.

This guy goes into the little mini mart, hoodie, bandana, gun, holds everybody up.

He's about 50 years old.

He holds everybody up, takes their money.

The victims run across the intersection to the front desk.

Hey, we just got robbed.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Male Black just took off northbound on Denker.

The desk officer's picking up the radio, getting ready to put this out.

Well, at that same time, Christina is coming down Denker, sees a guy who sees her black and white, and he kind of ducks behind a car like he's going to dump something.

It catches her and her partner Joe's attention.

They're like, hey, let's grab him.

So she's passenger.

They pull up.

She hops out.

Hey, come here.

Boom, the The guy runs.

Guys run all the time because they think we know what they did last week.

Right, right.

Right?

Or whatever.

They've got some rock or some weed in their pocket.

And when you're a gang officer, you really don't care about that stuff.

You're looking for bigger things.

But they don't know that.

So he's gone.

He's running.

She's chasing him.

It was actually her third foot pursuit of the night.

Earlier, she had caught two Rolling 30 gang members in different foot pursuits, and they dumped whatever they had, and someone took it.

So she didn't have anything to rest them on.

She caught them, but didn't have a rest, so she let them go.

Is it your obligation, obligation, by the way, to pursue in a moment like that?

No.

Absolutely not.

And Roland 30 is the name of a gang.

Yeah, Roland 30 Harlem Crips.

So

she's chasing him, and looking at his hands, the hands are what kill you.

No gun in his hands as he's running.

He cuts across the lawn, runs up to there's a fourplex, four steps, big porch, and he tries to get into someone's house.

Now, these guys will run in anybody's house.

And then it gets super complicated, right?

And so she catches him at the door, grabs him by the shoulders, gonna rip him down to the ground, cuff him, figure out why he's running.

If he's got nothing, we're gonna, she's gonna let him go.

But

she technically could use force there, but she doesn't want to get a complaint for using force and not having an arrest.

So she's got to weigh her options, right?

She's got to know what she has before she even tries to use any force.

Even though legally she can, in policy, she can, but she's still going to get a complaint.

So

you have to play that game.

She went light.

That's what gets you killed.

So she grabs him by the shoulders, going to rip him to the ground, cuff him, figure out why he's running.

He spins and stuffs a pistol up under her armpit, shoots her above the vest.

That bullet goes through, breaks through those ribs, breaks that artery, hits her in the T2 vertebrae, and cuts her spinal cord.

She drops.

Her partner, who's a couple steps behind, stops on the grass as he hears the gunshot

and sees her drop.

And the guy stands over and shoots her three more times, trying to execute her.

And since Joe is on the grass shooting at him while he's trying to shoot her, he misses her.

He ends up getting her twice in the arm instead of getting her in the head or chest or whatever.

Joe's round hits the guy in the shoulder, spins him around.

The second round...

goes through the guy's back, goes through his aorta.

He ends up dropping dead next to Christina.

Luckily, Christina was like a CrossFit monster leading up to this, right?

You would run that morning, right?

Yeah.

A thousand times better athlete than I ever was.

She would push herself so hard.

This actually kept her alive.

But what else kept her alive is we were lucky, we had a couple SWAT officers working crime suppression in the neighborhood, which is rare.

They're always doing SWAT stuff.

And they had just been trained as medics.

They had just graduated from their medic class, I think, two days earlier.

And boom, they were there right on her and got her bag doing CPR on her.

Joe had his finger up inside the wound trying to stop the artery bleed up in her armpit.

I get there right when the paramedics get there.

They had just went up the steps and put their boxes down.

They're doing their initial assessment.

And the homeboy, the suspect, is out on the lawn dead.

And they'd pulled him out there to make room for her and the paramedics.

And

I hop over him.

There's a big, thick, syrupy purple arterial blood coming out from under her back, down four steps and out on the walkway, a big puddle on the walkway.

I actually slipped in as I went up the steps.

And I remember grabbing the paramedics by the shoulders and pulling them apart and looking at her.

And they looked at me and everybody was like, that's her husband.

I looked at her and she was sheet white, no blue in her eyes, completely dilated.

locked and fixed.

Now at this point, 10 years on as a gang cop, basically, you've seen hundreds of people in various stages of shot dead or dying.

I took one look at her and I was like, there's no way she's making this.

So we

get her on the board,

get her in the rescue ambulance RA,

take off for a California hospital.

Scotty and I jump in our car.

We're breaking traffic for the ambulance.

We lose it.

We catch up with them at the hospital.

And what's crazy is the doctor, the surgeon, was just at the end of his shift and was already walking out the hall.

He told me later, he was walking out the doors, out to his car, and the doors opened, and he heard the broadcast that an officer was hit.

Just barely heard it as he was getting into his car.

Turned around, came back in.

Next thing you know, we're all in the trauma room.

I'm in the trauma room with her, and I'm wedged in this little corner, and the thing on the wall is going, no pulse detected.

They had IVs in both sides of her neck, both arms.

both arteries and both femoral arteries and it was chaos as they were saying hey all her veins are shut down nothing she won't take on any blood.

And I remember standing there cutting all her stuff off, and give it, they don't know I'm her husband.

And I want to say that that's my wife.

But I remember in the academy, they told you, when you get on this job, there are going to be times your opinion does not matter at all.

You're given a job to do, and you're to keep your mouth shut and do your job.

And I remember standing there going, I want to tell them that's my wife,

but I don't want their attention to be diverted diverted for a millisecond.

I just got to stand here and take it.

You don't want them worried about you

in this moment.

No.

So they, all of a sudden, one vein opens up, and boom, there goes five bags into her.

Boom, boom, boom.

They get blood in her, run her over to CT, run her, and they come out and they tell me, all right, Tim, she's paralyzed and she probably will have use of her arms.

And I remember thinking, okay,

we got that.

And I remember this surfer who's paralyzed, Jesse Billauer.

I remember seeing him in a surf movie.

I'm like, I got to find that guy, right?

She goes to surgery.

I remember coming out, and there would be like 300 officers in the lobby.

And everybody turned and faced me, and it was like dead silent.

And I had to update them on what was going on.

And it's like...

The starting gun went off right there with that shooting.

And my life has been on a dead sprint ever since.

And

so she comes out of it, paralyzed from nipple lying down in a manual wheelchair.

And there was so much love and attention and well-wishing that came our way.

It was incredible.

Young mom, 16-year-old daughter, shot and paralyzed by a criminal.

Big story.

And the news was

on me every day in and out of the hospital trying to get me to make a statement.

We don't talk to the news, right?

And

I talked to Christina, I go, hey, just like obligatory, I said, hey, news keeps trying to talk to me.

Do you need me to say anything?

She goes, yeah.

Maybe somebody will see it that can help me walk again.

And I'm thinking, oh, I go, Christina, if I do that, you know this is going to change everything.

We're going to be on Front Street.

Every gangster in the country, you know, in the city is going to know who we are.

She goes, I know but i want to walk again and i'm thinking i'm sizing it up and i'm thinking she's so damn strong she's so headstrong she's so physically strong she's young if there's anything out there experimental or whatever she is the perfect candidate

and we're probably the most

prepared i guess our heads are always on a swivel we're almost always armed

If anybody's got to be in this situation, we're probably too good people to be in it.

So the department puts together a press release for me a press conference in the lobby of the hospital i go down there i don't even know what i said there's all these cameras everywhere i just spoke from the heart and uh and then we had chief bratton at the time and and he apparently had made started making connections with extreme home makeover you got to look at this family

There were a bunch of fundraisers that were held for us.

I mean, the help that came our way was unbelievable.

Yeah.

It was incredible.

And people would come up and just say the most beautiful things to her, give her hugs and kisses, things that every officer should be able to hear for the appreciation for what they do, the sacrifice they make.

And that went on forever.

Still happens to her.

So

Makeover starts talking to us.

They tell us, hey, you're one of five families being considered.

And I'm like, okay.

We were living in a two-story house.

Everything was downstairs, bedrooms upstairs, bathrooms upstairs.

So I was hiking her, like piggyback style up and down the steps.

And I knew we had to create a master bedroom in the garage and then eventually find a house.

So they started looking at us and then

we ended up buying a house over in Redondo Beach.

Ben Carl Rossi owned it.

Did a handshake deal and it was like a little 900 square foot house, 1,000 square foot house on a huge lot.

Looked like the backyard looked like a haunted pet cemetery.

We just all laid over.

Some cat lady had lived there and she had passed away.

Perfect.

i said i was like okay if they're gonna build a house for us and i told them i said hey do you mind if i find another place and they're like look you're not picked it's on you if we don't pick you there's five other families i go okay i know i got to rebuild anyways so i gambled bought that place wow we moved into it you had to live in it

and then the show happens

and that show i thought The ABC had like this magic crew that came around and just built houses for people.

They had it all dialed.

that's not it at all they go in and they go who's your best contractor in the south bay turned out to be uh cornerstone construction vic and linda

braden

the two of the wonderful

so vic and linda are not allowed to tell the other construction workers what it's for

they meet up at this church and they bring in all the people they've worked with over the last 30 years and they say guys you got to trust me this is for a good cause but we're going to build a house in a week just like that

and he has so much respect that they did it and all the materials is donated from all these contractors

they come swoop us up send us to cabo because we're surfers

Jordan, my daughter.

And we ended up having a week down there.

They had a great time.

And I thought, okay, this is a Hollywood production.

How far are we from the event?

Six months.

So six months later,

you're in a new place, pet cemetery out back, extreme home makeover shows up.

Then they send you to Cabo just to get you out of their hair.

I mean, you know what's up, but you don't know to what extent.

No.

And I had this construction background, right?

Yeah.

Dad was a MacGyver type guy, just did projects with him, and then

ended up in construction.

So I'm thinking, you know what?

They're going to slam this thing together.

It's going to look great on TV, but it's going to be a disaster.

I'll be fixing this thing for five ten years but hey it'll be better than what we have yeah right

I could not have been more wrong

when we got back and they did the move the bus and it was like it felt like a thousand officers out there the entire neighborhood everybody came together for that I mean it is exactly what you see on TV yeah it's way more actually

And I walked in there, I remember looking around going, holy smokes, this is absolute quality.

Soapstone counters tight everything was just quality beautiful beautiful craftsman home 3200 square feet one level yeah wide big everything it was just amazing

and that became like party central

party pad that's great

christina and i were like on a mission to recreate our life the way we had it before she was hurt just differently.

We were into dirt bike riding, fishing, surfing, anything adventure.

We were doing races, triathlon, stuff like that.

So we quickly fashioned a surfboard with some handles and a thing to tie her feet together, got some people, got her out there, swam her out.

We're pushing her in the waves, you know, she's bodyboarding a surfboard instead of standing up.

We rigged up a little one-man fishing.

Tim, I'm sorry, man, I got to jump in.

I was trying to imagine

being on a surfboard, she doesn't have the use of her legs.

And this is six months after the event.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That whole

interesting.

Very, very interesting.

Very interesting.

Yeah, we would put somebody at shore and somebody kind of halfway and then I'd have my fins on.

I'd hold on to the front of the board and swim out backwards, pull her out.

line up the waves and time it, shove her in as fast as I could, And then every once in a while, she'd catch one and she'd ride it.

And she had the biggest smile on her face when she'd ride.

It was a lot of work.

It was a lot of work to get that smile.

Everybody was down to help her in any possible way.

We modified a little one-man fishing pontoon, put an electric motor on backward and a bucket so that she could fish on the lake by herself.

We got her a Doom Buggy with hand controls because we were all dirt bike riders.

And so she could do that with us.

Of course, she flipped it a couple times.

Sure.

She went end over end on one and flipped sideways.

And I ran over, and we all grabbed it and flipped it over.

And I go, You okay?

She goes, I can't film anything anyways.

Yeah, she's incredible, man.

She's the toughest woman I've ever known by far.

Oh,

we had a little boy two years after she was paralyzed.

What?

Yeah.

So he's now

two at this point.

I can't think of a single appropriate question to ask.

Right.

Yeah, he'll take your mind from you.

I don't want to pry.

And yet, when we're done,

I'm going to ask you some questions.

But, okay, congratulations.

So, what's his name?

Lucas.

He's now six feet tall, 210 pounds, water polo stud.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, he's amazing.

Okay, look, in the interest of time, knowing that we can talk for six hours but can't, take me to the moment where you say,

enough of whatever it is we're doing.

You just described it.

You went on a sprint beginning with that gunshot.

Yeah.

So when did you, I mean, did you slow down or did you just change course?

What happened to get you on this entrepreneurial path to create the device that poor Chuck has now been wearing for the last hour and five minutes?

Dumb.

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After that race, I kind of stopped all the events.

Said, look, it's time to stay home.

Movie nights, Friday nights, whatever.

I'm tired of giving kids to my mom.

And she kept,

she started going downhill because I took all these distractions away.

At the five-year point, kids were three and six.

And she checks into Betty Ford for alcohol and pain meds.

Think, okay, 90 days, or six, 30, 90 days, our life's just going to take another turn, no big deal.

It turns into a two-year thing not to come home.

She learns a year into it that she's got a brain injury due to blood loss, undiagnosed.

And she gets diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

And when she checked into Betty Ford, she went, all that emotion, everything had been chasing her, just ran her over.

And she became like a very different person.

Suicidal, self-injury,

really scary stuff.

And that took us down this two-year path of all these facilities, several states, I'm taking care of the kids.

And about that two-year mark, I started,

I got out of gangs, went into gang detectives, then eventually homicide, cold case, gang-related, because her stuff was just going sideways more and more and more.

And that led to, two years into these facilities, it led to us getting divorced.

There was some real safety concerns with the kids that were legit.

And I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

I've been riding such a stress ball for so long.

And I thought, God, she can't take care of the kids.

There's no real good options in our family.

My sister's kind of the only option if I go.

And so

I filed for divorce so I could get custody, so I could dictate if I died.

Because I was still a cop,

right?

If I died, the kids go to my sister because she's the best option in both sides of our family.

Yeah.

And Christina had started saying she didn't want to come home to the makeover house, that just being home caused her too much PTSD.

And I was like, this is falling apart.

And my neighbor, who I didn't even know, really one day goes, Tim, she's never coming home.

And it was like one of those times where you actually hear somebody.

And I started realizing, like, she's right.

So it led to divorce.

So

that ended up being a really, really hard time.

And then I started having, like, I started looking like a crackhead at work.

I couldn't breathe.

I started twitching.

My friends were really worried about me.

You know, I couldn't focus.

And I had 10,000 cops that knew who I was

so it was like I had to be this good soldier 24-7

and so finally the Karina Lee my union president came and she's like you ever thought about retiring and I was like no but I need some time off and she goes let me just walk you through the process and they took good care of us took really good care of us they retired Christina full pension.

They retired me with a pension.

They gave me a paycheck.

And when I was home taking care of the kids, I had this idea.

Before Christina went away, we were using TENS units on her legs to fight off muscle atrophy.

TENS units?

Yeah, so electrical muscle stimulation.

So when you go to a chiropractor and they put the sticky electrodes on you and it contracts your muscles, right?

A little electrical current contracts your muscles.

So she did that in a ton of her physical therapy and someone gave her one unit to come take home.

And so before I put it on her, I put it on me, on my bicep, and I was playing with the dials.

I didn't read the instructions, but I was playing with the dials, right?

And all of a sudden it kicks on like full blast and it completely locked my bicep down and then let me go.

And I remembered back to the academy, our SWAT guys going, you guys have got to train with your offhand.

You might be in a pursuit, car crash at the end of the pursuit, crush your gun hand and the gun fights on.

You've got to know how to manipulate that weapon with one hand, do everything with it, right?

And I remember him saying, we'll handcuff our hand behind our back LAPD SWAT

I thought I don't know anything construction worker in the academy looking at the SWAT guy going that's archaic that's state-of-the-art we're gonna handcuff your okay I figured LAPD would have something more sophisticated than that but what do I know so fast forward now we're at like 12 years I've gone the job I light myself up with this tens unit I call Jen Grasso, who's our first female LAPD SWAT member, who's a friend of mine.

I call her and I go, hey, Jen, how do you guys simulate that you've been hit?

She goes, oh, we got this ball we tape in our hand, or we got a glove we tape shut.

I'm thinking, nothing's changed since 96, and nothing existed before that.

So

if I could make this remote control, then I could wire an officer up, send him into a scenario.

When he gets shot at, now I can hit him, I can completely incapacitate his limb.

And now he's forced under duress to solve the problem and finish the fight and survive.

So he's not controlling it.

You're controlling it.

With a remote.

So he doesn't know when it's coming, where it's coming, if it's coming.

But I tell you what, you put it on, I bet you've been thinking about it.

Maybe a little bit.

And what's crazy is it's only 66 volts.

It's the exact same thing as what you buy on a TENS unit over Amazon.

So what I was doing is I was putting sticky electrodes all over guys and I took a climbing harness and I cut it up and I sewed a camel back on the back and I had an engineer make it remote control for me, an electrical engineer and we had a 3D printed box.

And now I could basically like a control you like a puppet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I could make you do the macarena, right?

And so that proved the concept.

And then a real wealthy guy, Steve Robinson out of Beverly Hills who had taken on some ride-alongs, he comes down and he goes, hey, I got these seals at my house.

Come show your thing.

So I go over there, I light them up, they loved it.

They're like, you've got to put this into a garment.

Those guys don't love anything.

They're just not impressed, by and large.

They were by this.

One of them says,

he goes, you know why I like this thing?

There's nothing that can control me except this damn thing.

And again, just to understand its application, it's not taking place in a vacuum.

You've got guys in a real-world simulation.

There's all sorts of stuff going on around them.

And this is just one added way to take the, what you call the verisimilitude up a notch.

I don't know that word.

It's a fancy word.

The appearance of that which is real and convincing.

Imagine four of us going in on an active shooter, right?

As of today, it is pretty much all adult pretend.

Okay, they have semunitions, which is a fantastic product.

It's a paint bullets.

And we can shoot at each other, but it doesn't stop you.

It zings you for a second, but we're all competitive.

We're like, oh, I could take that, right?

I've done it.

I'm competitive.

I'm going to go.

I'm going to win this thing.

And so it's great for, hey, you got zinged, but it doesn't incapacitate you and force you to solve the problem.

Now,

there's a big gap in police training, right?

We train officers in weapons manipulation, tactics, communication, everything leading up to the shooting.

And then we teach them tach med, put a tourniquet on.

Okay, if you're putting a tourniquet on, you've been shot.

So where was the gunfight that you had to have won while you're shot?

There is no training in that.

From the chief down to the guy on the street, there's nothing but hope and a prayer and a fantasy for that moment.

Because how do you train it?

Right.

It's like this overlooked gap because there's just been no way to do it.

And people are starting to go like, oh, yeah, you're right.

And with all this active shooters coming up, what I say is with these past active shooters are going to get smarter watching the ones in the past.

I mean, the future active shooters are getting smarter.

The citizens are getting smarter because they hear gunshots, they're locking the doors.

They're buttoning the hatches.

Now these officers are going to end up in these long hallways, these long funnels of death.

It's going to be like a little mini beaches of Normandy.

And none of them know how to fight from injured.

It's all a fantasy.

They hope that they're going to be able to do it, but they've never been through that.

There is one product out there called Stress Vest, which is a static shock belt.

And I'm actually going to partner with them.

So that's like, I have a laser, I hit your receiver, you get a bite.

Ouch, ouch.

But it does not incapacitate.

But we're going to combine our products so we have both that and full incapacitation and no projectiles.

So this with just 66 volts will simulate the impact of a bullet.

Absolutely.

So we do like an ambush class.

I say, all right, hey, you're sitting, get a SUV, this is your patrol car.

You've backed in somewhere, you just finished a radio call, and you're going to touch up your report, right?

You're going to get ambushed.

The very first round that you hear is going to rip through that arm, it's going to crush that humerus bone, it's going to tear open that artery, and you have a massive artery bleed.

And you cannot get to your tourniquet until you win this fight.

And this guy's not going away.

There's only two kinds of shooters: the kind of shoot at you and run, and they kind of shoot at you and stay in it to kill you.

And that's what we're training for, and that's going to be on the rise.

I think if I had been successful with this even five years ago or leading up to that, it would have been too early.

But this is coming: less cops, more violence.

Okay, let's see it in action.

So

you're wearing number six.

Number six.

Number six.

So, like, I could pick, we could have six of us going in on a search warrant, right?

Nobody knows one through six.

So, what I'm doing is I'm dialing over to his number.

I could dial to whatever number guy I want to select, right?

Uh-huh.

And I run the intensity up.

I'm going to put him at three.

Four is the highest.

And you're looking, so you're the instructor, so you're looking at his back because he's going in a building, walking up to a car.

You're standing in the background going, I'm going to get him when the shooting starts.

Yeah.

So shooting starts, and you're looking at, say, his right, that's his right arm.

Right?

Yeah.

That is my right arm.

Can you do anything with that arm?

Not really.

Could you grab a gun?

Not with this hand, no?

No.

Could you, yeah, so that's gone, right?

Yeah.

As long as I hold that button down, he's locked up.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That's a lot better.

There you go.

Now, is it analogous to a collar on a dog?

So that's static shock.

Yeah.

It's not contracting any of their muscles.

It's just biting them.

Right.

Right.

And it's like, ouch, ouch, that's distracting, right?

That's all it's doing.

This is taking the limb out.

Now, if I hit them in the inner forearm, do you want that?

I don't know.

I do?

Yeah.

So, inner forearm,

put your arm up.

Ah!

I call that gang sign.

So that hurts.

Yeah.

That was not good.

The bicep wasn't as bad, but that's a...

Well, that's a denser muscle, right?

Yeah, like your forearm and your calf are about as dense as

and then hit that bottom button.

Oh, the bottom button here, yeah.

Hold your bus.

Is this the one we've got on his scrotum, is it?

Yes,

you just relax.

Hold your arm up.

I call that one Spider-Man.

Oh, man.

Because what it's doing is contracting his outer muscles and opening his hand like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, you want to have fun.

Spider-Man.

Do

these two at the same time.

Chicken wing.

That's the chicken wing.

Wow.

Okay.

Thank you, but look, this is very.

I've been a lab rat most of my life.

My company's called Lab Rat Productions.

It's good to see him enduring it.

So anyway, you can put it on either arm, obviously, legs.

Yeah, legs in the future.

Abs in the future.

Yeah.

I had to get it started.

Yeah, abs suck.

Oh, no.

But I can bend you over like this.

I'll bet.

So imagine trying to shoot offhand with your support hand while you're bent over and you're trying to move the cover and return rounds.

But that's what it's going to be like.

I can see why Gavin is into this.

Yeah, 100%.

Because you're training professionals.

Right?

You don't just come in on your first day and here, you've got people who have gone through all kinds of protocols, and this is sort of next-level stuff.

Pros know what to do in tough situations, but nobody knows what to do after you've been shot because it's nothing but theory.

Yeah, exactly.

It was that way in 96.

Was that way in 2011 when I patented this, 2011, 12?

Sorry.

Are you?

It was an honest massage.

Are you sorry?

Sorry, I had a weird twitch in my thumb that just happened to be over the red button.

Hey, how are the bookings coming for November?

really good super good scale one to ten

you hesitated

tell me about the business i don't want to ask you anything you don't want to divulge but how does it work as an entrepreneur how is this

are you going to be like really rich

i could use a break

i'm thinking maybe it's time for a break for dim oh my god you have no no idea.

Yeah, so we're running around introducing it.

People don't know what they don't know.

On face value, they don't understand it.

Or they go, oh, that's interesting, but they think, oh, that's a torture device.

Right?

But then when they see it in action, they realize, oh, okay.

And then when they feel it, they're like, oh, now I get it.

Yeah.

Right?

This completely changes the game.

And it is what they're going to face when they get shot.

And you want to have them figure that out in a safe environment, not on the street.

That's nuts.

And that's what we're left with.

So it's just introducing it to academies, to agencies.

We ended up getting the U.S.

Marshals, picked it up.

They have a five-day reality-based training that they're doing all over the country, and they're going to be running this.

We have Swisswat team and

Netherlands anti-terrorism team.

The Netherlands?

Yeah.

Yeah, I was introduced to them and they loved it.

They brought in 20 anti-terrorism teams for a three-day training over there in

our outside of Amsterdam.

And then they come away with that, looking at the best practices of each team, and they put this in as a reality-based piece to their training.

So they loved it.

So we have several agencies here in the United States starting.

It's new, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I spent really 10 years working on that and finally got it commercialized, the wealthy guy that I mentioned, he helped me get it to a commercial prototype.

Amazing amounts of money to get this done.

Do I want to ask?

Do you want to say?

I'm just interested in getting a thing from script to screen.

I mean, that's just the prototype.

Now you got to scale it.

Yeah.

What I've learned is a lot of people have ideas.

Very few people can turn an idea into a prototype.

Even fewer can make that prototype into a commercial product.

And then, can you get that commercial product into the market yeah and then from there can you get it to make enough money to build a business on and then overlaying all that can you run the business of it and one more thing can you protect yourself from competitors while all of this is happening both foreign and domestic

Yeah, I've had very, very, very wealthy people backing me, and that's been a way of holding that off.

Good.

Good.

Is there any doubt in your mind that this is going to save countless lives?

Absolutely going to save lives.

It's absolutely needed.

Here's a good story.

I'm at a trade show.

I'm showing off my prototype, and a Kansas City cop comes up to me.

He goes, that's a really good idea.

He goes, I was at a training in the Midwest.

And the instructor was an out-of-the-box thinker guy.

And he says, hey, whoever wants to volunteer, I'm going to come up.

While you're shooting, I'm going to hit you in the back of the leg with a taser.

He goes, there was a St.

Louis cop there.

And the guy says, I'll do it.

Gets hit in the back of the leg with the taser, stays on his target, hits it.

Three years later, he's on patrol in downtown St.

Louis.

And this is third-party story.

He's on patrol, comes around a corner, three bank robbers come running out like a movie.

He gets in an instant shooting, gets hit in the leg right at the onset.

Stays on his target, takes the guy down.

He ends up calling that instructor back and said, hey, remember when you did that to me three years ago?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He goes, this just happened to me.

I got hit right at the onset of the shooting.

He goes, the crazy thing was,

I was shot in the leg and it was a non-issue because I knew I could stay in my sights and stay on my target and hit my target.

That's what this is going to do for people.

You have to have that neural pathway ahead of time

on the asphalt while you're bleeding out in a gutter and the guys across the street shooting at you from behind a parked car and not going away is not the time to figure out if you can do this or not.

It's the difference between being startled and shocked.

Yeah.

Normal to be, you know, startled,

but to be able to function and to turn right around and save your life and the people around you.

I'm so glad that Gavin saw the value in that.

They gave us an order right away.

They're excited to use it.

I can't wait to see them using it.

Well, you know, when I first heard about it from Jim, I texted Gavin and I said, hey, have you...

Are you familiar with this?

And he wasn't at the time.

So I kind of think that this made it happen.

No, I texted this morning from the plane.

He's into it, man.

It's kind of crazy.

You can have a great idea, but it's kind of like the cure for cancer.

If it's on your shelf in your garage and no one knows it exists, it has no value.

Right.

Nobody knows this exists.

We're forever grateful that you're allowing me to talk about it.

Look, we talked to a guy a year and a half ago who's become a friend of the podcast, a guy named Arthur Lee, who invented a thing called LifeVac.

I think it will eventually take its place with the smoke alarm.

I mean, honestly, and maybe even a fire extinguisher, because if somebody's choking, you can take this thing and you can clear their airways.

You can do it to yourself.

You can do it to yourself.

You can do it to a baby.

He invented it in his garage.

I look around.

I saw it on Dirty Jobs and really every other show that I worked on.

There's a real fine line between a mad scientist and,

well, between Edison and Tesla, right?

It could go either way.

And who knows what the contemporaries will do, and who knows how history will remember you.

But like in our little world, it's easy to see greatness in an idea.

And it's easy to see majesty in a story.

And dude, your story, it's almost a trope to talk about triumph from tragedy.

And I'm sure you've heard about it and thought about it.

And obviously you're not at the end of the journey, but since you've shared so much, what is the state of things today with you and Christina?

So there was a long period where I had to kind of keep distance because

I didn't want to get triangulated with the kids.

So

everything's subsurface.

Kids, I've always talked about her as she's a hero.

None of this is her fault.

I still love her.

We're good friends now.

There was a period where I couldn't be around her because we were in a horrible divorce.

And I had to tell the kids, you know, like,

you know, it's just better that we, you know, your mom and I aren't friends at the time.

We just don't talk.

Everything was text and emails.

It goes circular thing, right?

And then when they got old enough, and my son got old enough and big enough, and I didn't have to be concerned about him anymore, didn't need the monitor.

This was probably at this point, almost four years ago now.

I went over at one of his water polo tournaments and I just sat down next to her and started talking to her like nothing ever happened.

And we've never spoken a word about what's behind us.

And now we co-parent with the kids.

We have dinners together.

She cracks me up still, birthday dinners and things like that.

This is the best I've ever seen her now that she's helping other people.

She will always have problems, right?

She has a brain injury in her frontal cortex and her amygdala.

And she has this swirling issue with the personality disorder.

And she has massive health problems always.

But she is the toughest woman on earth and she still has a great sense of humor and she's doing a great job with the kids.

My daughter moved in with her.

My son bounces back.

There's never been any rules where they can go only when.

But we had this amazing woman, Maurici Soza,

who was our monitor.

She was started out as our nanny and she was a very strong, very principled woman and she stuck with our family all the way through and through, was a best friend to Christina, but just watched out for the kids, made sure that, you know, there were no issues.

She's my godsend.

I knew my kids were not going to have a problem because I just didn't want Christina to get exhausted from this life she's living.

Look, I would never expect or ask anybody to share as much as what you've shared.

Thank you.

I mean, it's so personal.

It's so gut-wrenching.

But it is a part of this story.

And as we close, I just want to go back to something you said two minutes ago.

After all that acrimony, all that separation, all those hard feelings, you sat down next to your ex-wife and just chatted her up like nothing had ever happened.

It's the only way.

I'm just leaving the listeners with that as a public service for men everywhere, who whatever it is they're dealing with, the fact that that might be an option is, in a word, interesting.

If you want to see something else interesting, go to AUFIRE.com and take a look at some of the videos that are on there because it's pretty impressive.

And if you want to see something even more interesting, direct your attention toward Chuck right now.

The chicken wing?

As we say goodbye, I'm going to go with the chicken wing here with just a little bit of the, oh, there goes the swarm there.

And what happens if you hit them all at once?

Oh, that's probably the chicken wing.

He'll override everything.

Charlie, are you wearing a diaper?

Strap in, brother.

Hey, thank you for making the time.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for sharing so much.

And congratulations.

You're going to save a bunch of lives.

And I'm glad we had a chance to talk about it.

I certainly appreciate it.

Tim Pierce, everyone.

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