A Question For LEO's

sensei8 · KF Sensei

I understand that KF has some members that are LEO's (Law Enforcement Officer). In that, I've a few question(s)...

1) In the academy, how is the Self-Defense taught to LEO candidates?

2) Is the Uke ALWAYS a "willing" attacker in order for the LEO candidates to learn the movements?

3) After a LEO candidate learns any said set of self-defense techniques, does the Uke then begin to resist him/her with every fiber in their being?

Thank you and I look forward to any and all comments.

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tallgeese · Black Belt

The answers to your questions will vary widely between different agencies, academies, and states.

1) Usually it's progressively in 4 to 8 hour block thru an academy run. It starts with basic movements and increases in complexity. Included is baton work, weapons retention, cuffing, ground work and transitions between them.

2) At the outset, of course. It get progressively less compliant as you go. Our final included low light, high levels of contact and resistance in regards to striking and ground work with all sorts of distracting things going on (ie. squad lights in a darkened environment) while the aggressor tried to beat you up and/ or take your weapon.

There's always control; however, putting cops out on injury before they even get to the street is not good. Additionally, very little resistance is given for joint manipulation due to the high likelihood of injury.

3) High level of resistance, specifically to the edge of their capability is hardly, if ever done. That's how officers get hurt. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about realistic training. However, there's a line and cops hurt equals cops off the street. That means that when I really need someone to help me out in a fight, they're at home sipping a mixed drink with their knee on ice while I"m rolling in a ditch with a coked up offender wishing I'd been the one to go out IOD for a vacation.

For a couple of off comments, here's my take on some things we've taken steps to address lately.

First up, we've about always trained cops on individual hand to hand skills. This is obviously important. Individual skill is the foundation that we build team skill on. But cops fight in packs often. Unfortunately, we don't train that way enough. This trend is changing, but it needs to change quicker. It's been left to guys to work together to just get used to each other and make things happen. And they do, but we could do it better with less injury to everyone if we spent more time training like we fight.

Next, we need to step away or at least get more options other than a reliance on the straight arm bar to take down. In almost every CT system I've seen, they teach this. I can't tell you how many fights I've seen turn into dance contests do to the nature of applying this live. I come out of a system heavy on this sort of thing, and I've move almost all but away from it.

What works at speed, without a reliance on pain compliance or attaining small joint position, is body lock take downs. Part of the reason they work well is back to the pack mentality. I've seen this work as many times as I've seen arm bars fail.

We need work on clearing weapons DURING hand to hand incidents to account for the fact that most cops don't train enough. There's plenty of talk about using tools to defeat younger, better trained individual, but little actual practice about making it happen from the melee.

Another factor we need to look at is a total UNDER reliance on striking. I was tasked with a review of all of our use of force incidents last year and what we found was that there was a significant number of incidents that rose high enough in threat to allow an officer to strike the suspect. However, only a handful did. We're just conditioned to grapple for control. Part of the problem with this is that the joint manipulation taught to many officers (usually JJJ derived) really relies on strikes to make effective. And we're not doing it, not enough. We've taken steps to alleviate this; however, we're still behind the curve. It's also easy to say "strike more" but the use of force issues can get fuzzier here. Throw in public perception of officer action and you do have an amount of discussion over their use.

Let me know if you've got any follow up.
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Kuma · Black Belt

From my own experiences, we would learn one or two new things that day and constantly drill on those and the ones we knew before. However, these were usually compliant and when resistance was involved it was very minimal. Overall we only received 44 hours of defensive tactics over a 23 week period, or less than 2 hours a week. Of that a large part was dedicated to handcuffing and baton work, with control holds, takedowns, strikes, and pressure points making up the rest. Too many departments nowadays, like everyone it seems, are concerned of liability thus it doesn't get much more extreme than that in many places in my experience.

tallgeese · Black Belt

The total hours hour count sounds about the same for us Kuma. I think we end up with around 40 hours total in basic.
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tallgeese · Black Belt

It's also worth noting, now that you've got me worked up about it

, that I can safeetly say that 100% of the fights I've been involved with on the job have ended on the ground. This is not a cut on any standing tactics that anyone here, or even myself have used. Nor is it a plea to train excusively for ground fighting for cops. It is merely a statement of fact. Every on the job fight I've been in, either alone or with multiple officers, has ended on the ground.

It goes to the need to control a suspect and take them into custody. To do this, when people fight, we take them to the ground to cuff. It affords ontrol and limits the potential for them to escape.

Now, we're not always talking about a wrestling match, although it can look like that. It can be as simple as we put someone down and control them to cuff them while they are face down. If you think about how to train for this, think about positional control. Gaining and maintaining superior body position that allows for the retention of your weapons. I've been party to alot of this. Take down (usually body lock of some dsort these days for me, although I've used others), follwoed by a scramble to mount or a variation, then maintain this while sorting out hand control for cuffing. This is the kind of grappling training cops need to focus on (training at work) if they aren't doing it on their own outside of work.

Again, if we look aross the country, it would seem departments are starting to realize this a bit. Others are still lagging behind. After four years of convincing admin, we finally got some inserted into our program two years ago.

Sounds good, right? Until you look at the nubers. First up, we take an eight hour training day for all our unarmed tactics. Now, we've determined that, in my experience, 100% of my fights have ended on the ground. And we spend 1 hour working control on the ground. We then prioritize other things that don't get used nearly as much (for us, a look at our use of force reporting would indicate that we rarely use a baton and at that level of force required we are more likely to use chemical agents of fight suspects manually- it's just the treand at our deaprtment). Our baton block is an hour of training that no one used last year. Tell me how our resourse allocation is.... We're in negotiations to change this next time around.

As you can see, there is another factor here, that being what the individual department is doing. What are the trends for a given department? You can see by my stated statistics, we have certain tactics that we favor. This might not hold true for Kuma's department, or bushido man's, or anyone elses.

When you start looking at developing control tactics programs for this sort of thing, it's important to see what the culture is at a given deaprtment in regard to such matters to see where the most can be achieved.
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Liver Punch · Green Belt

I work in corrections and have a great deal of offender contact. The amount of time an average employee receives defensive training is about 2-4 hours. Our correctional officers receive less than 2 weeks of self defense and actual offender control. Our ground work is almost non-existent and everyone refuses to teach the weapons material because it's so dangerously wrong. Security, as a whole is much, much too relaxed - it should be better managed and overhauled.
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JusticeZero · Black Belt

Sounds more like a list of needs than anything else.. :p
Someone probably could make a career out of researching all the team control techniques and such, building a framework out of it, then teaching it to departments.
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Liver Punch · Green Belt

^^I vote for Tallgeese.^^
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Lrtucker · White Belt

TallGeese's training seems very similiar to what I have been through.

In a month certifcation course we were given 24 hours of training- not including baton or retraints. It starts very simple and then progressed to some resistance. You don't want to hurt officers before they ever graduate. You also have to realize that LEO's are not clones and have different strengths and weaknesses- not all have enough coordination to learn more complicated moves we use in martial arts. We use mostly nerve strikes, some take down- most emphasis on bent wrist with an arm bar. Almost no groundwork. We are required to do 8 hours per year as inservice- this is

In a second certification I received we did 44 hours across 6 weeks. The first 24 hours were the same as the prior course. The second portion of the course was much more intense. Weapon defense, better tech's, more resistance. The group i trained with made it even better training because we were already assigned to high risk duties so we went hard. At least one person in our group had to have their uniform replaced a day after having sleeves ripped off, pants torn, etc.

Now I work in swat and we do not typically train new tech's. We are expected to already know the basics. We train self defense once per year and we go full contact during this training. Sometimes even with the redman suit. To make it better out of the total 60 members of the team half are state instructors, and about another quarter are mma, bjj instructors, blackbelts, etc. If we train anything new, its not fundamentals, its picking a bad place to be- beign chokes, back control, on the ground and surrounded, and then having to use problem solving to get out of it. We may even discuss and come up with a best case scenario response and train it as a group.
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