Defensive Tactics for LE

[joe yang]

How long does it take, generally to teach an individual officer basic defensive tactics? How much training is required to maintain proficiency? Does it vary from system to system?

[Kit LeBlanc]

I think it depends more on the copper....most could care less, have minimal levels of fitness and increasingly have little previous experience in any kind of contact sport, let alone fighting art in order to draw from.

In looking at specific techniques/systems, the problem is interest level goes down even further when the class, especially after being experienced in the street unless you are teaching at the academy, know what they are seeing will not work because they don't have the skills base and can't remember the sequence in training, with a cooperative opponent, let alone under stress in the field.

Teach them stuff that will work against resistance, let them train it against each other with supervised resistance so they can prove to themselves that they can make it work, and I think it takes a shorter period of time.

I think instructor credibility is a factor in how police DT is learned as well, for a variety of reasons. The people who are actual officers probably have a worse credibility problem than the non-officers that come in from the outside.....why? The people that are actual officers have to go out and prove their stuff under scrutiny and woe to their credibility if they end up looking foolish or the stuff doesn't work for them, the "experts." You won't see much of that retained.

[Todd Prosser]

I think success can be better determined by the individual officer as to how long the training will be retained. Those who have trained in sports or MA will excel at learning and retain the techniques better. Success of the various styles really depends on the person that the technique is being used on. The popular police-aiki works fairly well on passive non-cooperative persons. Beyond that, other styles have to be used.

To learn aiki style police techniques doesn't take that long for the people who have some physical ability in either MA or sports. They may not be executed exactly correct as times passes, but officers can work their way through it. Of course most techniques taught in police aiki are very simple. I think most of the basic stuff was taught in less than 30 hrs of training within my dept. I have never received a refresher course in 6 yrs and still can do the arm bars and joint locks, etc, but rarely do. I quickly found that my wrestling and boxing(very rarely) background was more effective.

[JamesF]

So what is taught in LEO training?

Is it akin to the H2H taught to military et al?

Thanks
:)

[joe yang]

I suspect LE defensive tactics are very different from military training. I will be the first to admit I have no military training, unless you count JDL summer camp, back in the 70's. However there is a fundemental difference in the civilian LE and military mission, as most criminal justice programs teach.

In short, most LE training focuses on arrest and restraint with minimal use of force and or injury to the subject, like we are supposed to be omnicient supermen who know just what to do and when so no one gets hurt and everyone feels good.

Kit is correct in all of his comments. About the ability and willlingness of officers to train. He kind of missed my point, most LE defensive tactic systems kind of imply they have the secret to sucess in X number of easy lessons. They specify how many hours of class time they require to certify, how long certification lasts. My question, can I learn defensive tactics in 16 hours and retain it for 3 years?

I must confess, I'm trolling. I was hoping to hear from some of our expert trainers so ready to weigh in on other posts, when it suites them, makes them sound good. Okay, I'm a first degree black belt, I have all the required time and training, but I can't defend myself "on the street" or "in the world". But you can bring me up to "street survival" in 2 days and quarantee it for 3 years? There does'nt appear to be any need to keep up my skills, just recertify? Why am I bothering with martial arts training?

[Cady Goldfield]

JDL as in the Jewish Defense League?! What the heck were you doing at a JDL "summer camp"? :laugh::laugh:

[joe yang]

Okay, so I wasn't like a regular camper. It was the Summer of Love. There was a girl...

[Onmitsu]

I helped train an officer who was a tactical trainer along with a few of his buddies. For a while they were trying to recruit me for the force so I rode with them on a regular basis. I also visited some of the DT training. I was sad to see that a great deal of what was being taught was woefully ineffective. One day after class my instructor had the DT trainer simulate an arrest on me using JUST what was taught at the academy. I used some redirecting resistance without resorting to strikes or wrestling. Nothing the officer tried worked.
It took 3 officers to simulate the arrest and even then it was a long struggle that turned into a tussle. Again I wasn't trying my best I was just resisiting by getting out of the way and redirecting. The officers admited that they knew the stuff they were being taught didn't work. There after we worked on techniques for the next six months to a year. This was back in 1994. I just heard from this officer a few days ago by phone. He had at least a half dozen stories where he was able to use techniques successfully in making an arrest. In one incident he was confronted with an alleged underground cage fighter who claimed to be undefeated. A shot to the brachial plexus in the arm and a wrist throw followed by an arm lock did the trick when the 'perp' took a swing at the officer.
What I also learned in the process (other than I didn't want to be a human garbage collector) was that officers have a really tough job trying to keep the peace while being severly hampered by what they can and can't do. Most would rather use their pepper spray or gun as opposed to getting physical. With the possibility of contracting AIDS and Lord knows what else I don't blame them. The prevailing attitude among most of the officers isthat MA don't work. From thier point of view they are correct.

[Todd Prosser]

Originally posted by Onmitsu
I used some redirecting resistance without resorting to strikes or wrestling. Nothing the officer tried worked.
It took 3 officers to simulate the arrest and even then it was a long struggle that turned into a tussle. Again I wasn't trying my best I was just resisiting by getting out of the way and redirecting. A shot to the brachial plexus in the arm and a wrist throw followed by an arm lock did the trick

Greg,
These two statements by you hit the proverbial 'nail on the head.'
The current police aiki training works very welll with passive subjects, as it is taught. If any kind of resistance is added, the techniques do not work. But, those techniques can work when applied with other techniques("a shot to the brachial plexus") to redirect or distract the subjects action, attention, energy, etc. :smilejapa
Also, as I said in my first post, the techniques taught are fairly basic so they can be retained for long periods of time.

[Kevin73]

Here in Michigan, to become certified as a police officer it requires a semester course in PPCT (which is also the most used system here in America). It is based on high percentage moves that are easy to use under stress and against resisting opponents as well as passive resisters.

I think the class is 3 or 4 credit hours long in a college. After that I think it is 16 hrs (actual time) a year to keep up your certification.

[Joseph Svinth]

Bernie Lau describes police defensive tactical principles in his article at http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_lau_1101.htm . Says Lau:

"Police defensive tactics are NOT the same as self-defense. The role of defensive tactics in law enforcement and corrections is to assist the officer in performance of arrest and restraint, and to increase the margin of safety for both the officer and the suspect. Defensive tactics charge the officer with protecting others as well as themselves. The definition of "defend" as used here is neither punitive nor passive, but instead "to repel danger or harm while serving and protecting." Meanwhile, self-defense encompasses any and all means of protecting oneself. Self-defense techniques are not meant to apprehend an assailant. Indeed, there is no regard for the safety of the attacker whatsoever. So obviously self-defense and defensive tactics are not synonymous.

"Defensive tactics are not martial arts, either. While martial arts provide a technical basis for defensive tactics, they are generally not suitable for use on the street. That said, martial arts training offers many benefits to officers, including fitness, strength and agility, balance and flexibility, stress reduction, recreation, etc. Indeed, the benefits for self-perfection inherent in long-term practice are enormous. Therefore, without denying that martial arts training can benefit officers, it is not necessary

His advice to police officers is almost entirely tactical, and includes the following:

* Be professional and treat everyone with respect.
* Have an open mind. Breathe. Stay mentally calm.
* Watch fellow officers, and learn from their mistakes.
* Pay attention to body language. Read the suspect or interview subject, and be aware of your own.
* Pay attention to foot placement, both yours and the suspect’s.
* There is a safety zone between you and the suspect. It varies depending on the individual. What’s yours?
* Be aware of the physical surroundings. This includes the people.
* Be decisive – don’t equivocate or bluff.
* Action is faster than reaction, so have a plan. Keep it simple.
* Your strength is in front of you. So is the suspect’s.
* Advantage is on the weak side of the suspect. Generally, this is his left if he’s right-handed, and his right if he’s left-handed.
* Inflict pain for compliance, not for punishment.
* Don’t expect pain to work on everyone.
* Talk to a suspect. If possible, get him to cooperate without force. If force is necessary, then after applying a technique, tell him in very simple terms what you want him to do.
* No matter what your size, think of yourself as big.
* Use your big against their small. For example, even a small hand is larger than a big finger.

As for comparable military H2H programs, Lt. Col. George Bristol, head of the Marine Corps' martial art program, says that military martial arts programs integrate three warrior disciplines, to wit:

1. Mental discipline for the development of the combat mindset and the study of the art of war;
2. Character discipline, which consists of the firm integration of ethics, values, integrity, and leadership;
3. Physical discipline, which comprises fighting techniques with rifle and bayonet, bladed weapons, weapons of opportunity (stick, club, gun), and unarmed combat; combative conditioning, which includes the ability to fight while fatigued in a combat environment; and combat sports, including boxing, wrestling, and wooden trainer bayonet fighting.

(Quote from http://www.militarylifestyle.com/home/1,1210,S:9126:1:972,00.html . For more on MCMA, see the September 2001 "Announcements" at http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncframe.htm . For more on the equivalent Army programs, read Matt Larsen's discussions both here at E-budo and in the CQB forum at BudoSeek!.)

Note the different priorities, hence entirely different methodologies.

[Joseph Svinth]

Joe --

The certification isn't meant to make the individual officer better trained or qualified, it's meant to provide his/her department with greater legal protection in court. (Management could care less about you, they're worried about themselves.)

Meanwhile, to address your original question, Bernie Lau says it takes on the order of 800 repetitions to get a technique down sufficiently that you can probably use it under stress.

[joe yang]

I'll try to say this. If anyone gets my drift, maybe you can put it better. My thanks.

So far, I agree with everyone here. In my school, we say do each technique 1000 times before you even think of showing it to GM. So 800 to 1000 reps sounds like a good ball park fiqure to acquire a technique. That's number 1.

I used to teach PPCT. We use it at work. It still looks like the best def tac training around for LE. Our certification course is 16 hours initially. We do a two hour refresher annually. Yes it is really just to protect management, but the implication is it meets minimum training standards. That's 2. (I know it may not be exactly to PPCT doctrine, we take a few other liberties too.:( )

Occasionaly someone tries to sell us on other LE def tac. Usually the pitch is easier to learn and retain. Point 3.

So what I want to know is... HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO LEARN YOUR SYSTEM? HOW MUCH ONGOING TRAINING DO I NEED TO STAY CURRENT?

Where are the answers from our LE def tac instructors who are so ready to weigh in with all kinds of expert opinions any other time? Or is there some bad budo going on here in CQC? :rolleyes:

[Joseph Svinth]

Joe --

I don't teach defensive tactics and have no idea how long it takes to teach and retain the information presented in the various commercial products, but to better understand the management philosophy, you might find http://virlib.ncjrs.org/lawe.asp?category=48&subcategory=85 a useful read.

As I read these government studies, most officers don't get into that many physically violent encounters each month, and many of those that they do get into involve the officer losing his cool rather than his truly needing to whack the miscreant over the head with his nightstick. Thus, from a management standpoint, less training in H2H and more training in Kuchi Waza is desirable, as this decreases injuries and paperwork all around.

Studies also suggest that new hires are involved in more fights than more experienced officers; that officers, like everybody else, tend to get into fights with people of their own ethnic background more often than with people of other ethnic backgrounds; and that about 1/2 of 1% of a department's officers are involved in about 15% of the complaints about excessive force. See http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/176330.txt .

Anyway, it appears that the current management goal involves identifying and retraining or transferring that 1/2 of 1% rather than worring unduly about the H2H capabilities of the other 99.5% of the uniformed force.

[joe yang]

"Anyway, it appears that the current management goal involves identifying and retraining or transferring that 1/2 of 1% rather than worring unduly about the H2H capabilities of the other 99.5% of the uniformed force." originally posted by Joseph Svinth

And that says a lot about management. But back to my original question. There seems to be some very scientific research on training, in LE. Most officers don't want to train. I've seen that first hand. Management doesn't want to pay for any more training than neccessary. Some trainers suggest they can do it better.

Many MA systems will tell you exactely how much you must train. What are the numbers on LE specific training? Anyone? Or isn't LE specific training really better, just different?

[matt little]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Joseph Svinth
As I read these government studies, most officers don't get into that many physically violent encounters each month, and many of those that they do get into involve the officer losing his cool rather than his truly needing to whack the miscreant over the head with his nightstick. Thus, from a management standpoint, less training in H2H and more training in Kuchi Waza is desirable, as this decreases injuries and paperwork all around. [QUOTE]

The truly violent"fight for your life" is rare, but varying levels of resistance are common, and each of these can turn potentially violent. The reason many officers escalate these resistance situations into physical confrontations is IMHO that they have not received a sufficient level of training. When any fight is potentially one for your life, and you are not confident in the tools available to you and the training you have received, over-escalation is a natural response. Everyone wants to go home at night, and many-especially inexperienced officers-will "turn it on" too quickly out of an emotional response. More extensive and applicable training would, I believe, greatly reduce excessive and/or inappropriate use of force.

Matt Little (Chicago PD)

[mt2k]

The question is this..what exactly is L.E. defensive tactics? I was a NYC Court Officer for 20 years, and spent the first 10 of those 20 years moonlighting various plainclothes security jobs. I have also spent 30 years studying various martial arts--ju jitsu, judo, karate, Hung gar kung Fu & Arnis. I have also studied many short term self defense courses with various military/police vets.
At this moment there is NOT a single, widely accepted system for defensive tactics. Every academy/job has their own take on the subject. PPCT has a good following, as does Tony Blauer, among others.
My first experience with self defense came from my dad, who was a WW2 Ranger/hand to hand combat instructor. For the last 10 years I have adopted the WW2 system as the only ones that I pratice/teach.IMHO it is the system which works best, is simple to learn and does not require endless pratice to maintain.
Some of the methods are a bit brutal for wide spread acceptance with the brass (who are very concerned with liability) but I feel that men/women who carry firearms can be trusted with effective unarmed combat methods and proper judgement when to use them. Like I said, just my humble opinion. I am sure that many MA's think that their system is the answer for LE, but until they have gained some pratical experience they are really swimming on dry land.

[Joseph Svinth]

Matt --

I agree that additional training (specifically, additional force-on-force training) should reduce the risk of serious injury to both officers and suspects. However, that is probably NOT the way that management is going to view this issue.

Why?

Official reasons might include the following:

1. Initial training is expensive, and adding even another day or two costs money that the agency would prefer to spend other ways.
2. Skill maintenance training is expensive, partly because it requires infrastructure, but mostly because it takes time away from "work." (It already takes five people to keep one person on duty 24/7, and so to introduce extra training, either you pay a lot of overtime or you go to a 6:1 ratio, and neither solution is cheap.)

Unofficial reasons might include the following:

1. Skill maintenance training doesn't produce improvements that are quantifiable between now and the manager's next promotion. (Most managers change jobs every 18 months or so, in part because this allows organizational failings to be blamed on somebody else.)
2. You can't show skill maintenance training to the voters. (Well, you can, but then you get into dog'n'pony circus acts, and those are a waste of time.) A multi-million dollar mobile command center, on the other hand, can be driven to all the local gatherings, and then used to show the voters how your local PD has declared War on Crime.

Anyway, while management will probably agree that more training would be nice, they'll explain that they can get a federal grant to get a new command center, just as they already get state grants of $1,000 for every 40 speeding tickets that patrol officers issue in school zones. (At least that was the Washington State grant I saw while surfing the Internet.) Therefore we'll buy that new command center, even though the old one still works just fine, and have you spend your overtime writing tickets in school zones. Moreover, we sure aren't going to reduce the number of assistant chiefs in the department, and without doing that, we don't have the money in our own budget for additional overtime or training. On the other hand, if we put a clerk to work tracking complaints, why, in a week we'll know who the most unpopular seven officers are, and we'll fire them. The clerk's time spent calculating the data is invisible to the public, the status quo is maintained, and management has graphics for its PowerPoint slide show "proving" that it is paying attention to citizen complaints.

On a less cynical note, one way to answer Joe's question would be to establish a longitudinal study in which the researchers take separate classes at the academy and give each class different training. For example, Class 1-02 gets the existing training plus recommended refreshers. Class 2-02 gets gets X-program plus recommended refreshers. Class 3-02 gets Y-program plus recommended refreshers. Etc. We then follow all members of these classes throughout the first five years of their careers. (Remember, we've already agreed that inexperienced officers are most likely to use inappropriate force, e.g., too little on one occasion, too much on another.) At the end of that time, we then calculate the rate of complaints, time-lost injuries, etc., for each group.

To ensure that the results were representative and not skewed by some external variable, I would run the same test simultaneously in half-a-dozen unrelated training academies. (Different states, different size cities, etc.)

Structurally, the proposed study is easily established, reasonably quantifiable, and probably cheaper than a single fancy command van. However, is anyone likely to fund such a study? No. Why? Because an inch-thick sociological report concluding that implementing Z-program should result in a 4% reduction in assaults on officers and a 3% reduction in complaints of excessive force is hardly as impressive to the voters as that big blue and white van out front.

[joe yang]

Mr. Svinth, I haven't replied sooner, but I want to thank you for some real insight, expressed far better than I could ever manage. Logical, articulate discussion isn't my strong suite, hence the delay in responding.

Sometimes I can influence training policy at work. Management doesn't always like what I have to say, I'm a little to pro grayshirt, but they listen to me. I'm a senior officer, with a solid track record, as a martial artist, and formerly as a facility instructor.

Everything you say about management and training is too true. It's all about liability and expense. But management will never admit that. It seems the most succesful managers are the best spin doctors. The talk is all about quality.


The kind of research you suggest hasn't been done yet, to the best of my knowledge, but I keep getting mail, this forum keeps getting posts, from instructors/systems who hint they can train staff faster, with less effort and better retention. Not one has joined this thread.

On the plus side, I've got some really articulate posts I'm sure to plagerize the next time the training budget comes up!:redhot:

[Joseph Svinth]

Joe --

Have you read the _Atlantic Monthly_ article called "The Prison-Industrial Complex" http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/prisons.htm ? It doesn't talk about training, but it does talk about the bottom line of elected officials (looking tough on crime) and the privatized prisons (profit).