In 1993, I produced a couple of films dealing with crime prevention.

Blueprint for Home Security teaches people how to make their home burglar resistant. I remember one of the officers from the Crime Prevention Unit of the LAPD told me he hated the film. He said he hated it because it did in 15 minutes what it took him an hour to do. He highly recommended the film.

Blueprint for a Safe Community was my first effort to promote Community Policing. It is a statistical piece that presented how much safer a community was when the citizens take responsibility for their own safety and work with law enforcement to keep their communities a better place to live and be.

These two films launched me into the crime prevention community of law enforcement. I was invited to all the shows and conferences and was given a heavy referral business and 1993 turned out to be a productive year.

In 1993 I was contacted by Bob Richards, Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. He was using the Shoplifting Employee Theft, Check Fraud and Shoplifting Refund Theft in his high school business project but he couldn't find anything that dealt with what to do in the event of an armed robbery. After some discussion, I decided to produce the film. It turned out to be my first big hit.

Armed Robbery Survival Techniques was a joint venture with Virginia Tech. Bob and I wrote it and he directed and filmed it in Virginia. He found a bunch of Ph.D. candidate students, police officer s, staff and o ther volunteers to act out the different scenarios in the film. I edited it here in Oregon with Mike Karpinski. The end result was a 10 minute film that taught people how to act and what to do during an armed robbery to reduce the chances of them being hurt or killed during an armed robbery. This film was huge.

Radio Shack bought hundreds of copies for their education centers, most of the major retail chains also utilized the film in their employee training. The Commonwealth (state) of Virginia bought hundreds of copies to be included in their business courses for all the high school students. Hundreds of police agencies used it as part of their business community outreach programs.

One day when I opened the mail I found a letter from a high school student from Virginia . The letter thanked her teacher for showing her Armed Robbery Survival Techniques. It turned out this girl was involved in an armed robbery and since she had seen our film, she was mentally prepared to deal with the robber and didn't panic as she said she would have certainly done had she not seen the film. So to have someone actually believe that your work saved their life is big. That doesn't happen very often in the film business.  Since then I have received dozens of letters and calls about how the film has been helpful to people.

The film went on to sell thousands of copies and it was so successful that in 2006, I produced a remake of the original film. I updated it and released the new film as How to Survive an Armed Robbery.

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