Cops: Cheating Death: How One Man (So Far) Saved The Lives Of Three Thousand Americans - Hardcover

You've seen it in countless Hollywood movies in recent years: a bad guy shoots a cop and instead of being killed or immobilized, the cop retaliates. What ultimately is revealed is that our hero was wearing soft, concealable body armor.
Huge numbers of cops have been shot, stabbed, impaled on their steering wheels, or have fallen from great heights and survived because of the “vests” they were wearing under their uniforms.
In the thirty-something years that concealable body armor has been around, more than three thousand American lives have been saved, as well as many more throughout the rest of the world.
The event responsible for this remarkable “evolution” in the United States and abroad―and which ultimately had an effect on the way Americans kill each other―took place on July 18, 1969. Entrusted with delivering pizzas in a Detroit suburb, Richard Davis was attacked by a bunch of armed felons. Because his fiancée had been subjected to a similar assault a few months before, Davis was ready for them, a .22 pistol in his hand and hidden from view under one of the pizza boxes. The youthful entrepreneur ended up shooting two of the three criminals in the group, but they still managed to hit him twice with their own firearms.
Lying on a gurney in the hospital thirty minutes later―with one of his attackers alongside and having his wounds dressed under police guard―Richard Davis had time to ruminate that there just had to be another way to counter this menace. Consequently, a few months later, he evolved the concept of possibly wearing protective layers of a new space-age material called Kevlar.
Cops: Cheating Death is a testimony to Richard Davis's brainchild and to the scores of brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day. Al J. Venter spent two years moving about the United States in a 32-foot-long motor home interviewing cops who had been shot and lived to talk about it. The result is this book, which offers graphic and profound details about how some of these men and women survived.
Cops: Cheating Death also touches on a huge community on the periphery of these activities―the wives, mothers, lovers, sons, daughters, grandparents, and colleagues of those who have survived such attacks―with a background to exactly what goes on when their men and womenfolk don their uniforms and step out the door for the next shift.
Richard Davis's remarkable efforts at saving lives have affected each one of them in turn. More salient, as Venter discovered while researching this book, the consequences of putting his invention on the map goes much further than the current tally of three thousand lives saved. The number of children born after one or more parents were saved by concealable body armor is now fast approaching the four-hundred mark.

Al Venter has been an international correspondent for nearly thirty years, most frequently for the Jaane's International Group. Among his previouS works are The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa and The Iraqi War Debrief: Why Saddam Was Toppled. A native of South Africa, he currently lives in Canada.