In Brooklyn, New York, when Bobby Louden, NYPD’s Hostage Team Commander, yelled to me while we were on the way to a place occupied by a crazed, barricaded gunman, he didn’t know he was saving my life.
Lt. Louden reminded me, “Hey Al, don’t forget your new blanket!” He was referring to a new kind of ballistic shield that I helped develop in the early 1980’s, called the Ballistic Blanket. I brought it along. The suspect would fire a .45 caliber bullet directly at me from less than 2 feet away - but the slug was caught in the Kevlar - otherwise me.
As the decade labored on in New York City’s drug-war years there’d be more shootings and even more combat applications for ballistic shields for my ESU Team and me. There was the hostage situation in lower Manhattan where the suspect murdered his two young hostages and then turned his shotgun at us and our shields. I took a ricochet to the face but a half dozen of us were saved by our barriers and bunkers.
Time came for me to take my shield experience across the U.S. and I was granted the honor to train with operators from some 500 Teams; I slowly received a new shield orientation - that of a shield messenger for the future. Collectively, and certainly more by proximity than purpose, the masses of shield users educated me on a new and even better way to serve the mission of the protection of life and property. Over the next decade and a half, in a certain and determined fashion, the Baker Batshield® began to emerge from the taped memory banks of my mind, having been unanimously recorded by the students of shields.
- Lt. Al Baker (NYPD - ESU - Retired), Inventor - Baker Batshield®
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