Here is a conversation I get involved in a lot with police officers and their trainers regarding police training standards and in particular on the subject of police arrest and control tactics/use of force.  Most of these inquiries stem from the USA but also Canadian, UK and German police members have been forthcoming with their opinions and concerns to me.

They usually come to me after they have done a search of the web and/or some friend they know has told them about me and my style of training

For most of them they feel comfortable talking to me about these subjects because I was a police officer with some considerable experience in the field of police use of force training over a 20 plus year career.  The conversation is not unique to Nationality or Police Service but stems from a members concern for their own safety and the training they feel is lacking for them on the street.  Needless to say, for those members who contact me, the vast majority of the training and in some cases the leadership they receive has left them feeling unsafe while performing their duties on a daily basis.

Truly, I have no magic answers for them as I have been down this road many times myself

Especially when I was assigned to train police officers.  Frankly in my day we all had similar beefs regarding training standards, the need for proper tactical based training and the support to use that training when and if justified on the street.  I took part in numerous police use of force studies, carried out in the 80’s, and they clearly yielded what was missing and what needed to be fixed in Academy based training.  At that time I took on the role as ‘the fixer’ for my Department and the Academy and designed training, built courses and so forth.  For a while it seemed, in our little operational world, training was progressing well and helping to ease the tension on patrol.  Then of course at some point, whether it is within the Department or the Academy or both, there is always a changing of the guard at the top.  Often then the new bosses priority flexes away from let’s say ‘the good training’ we created and reverts back to a more let’s say ‘politically correct type of training’ that has little real street value.  The military today came up with a term for this, basically learning from your mistakes, they call it ‘lessons learned’ and in my opinion they are what I call ‘lessons forgotten’.  This is especially true when training, at one point in time, taught members how to handle themselves in those same situations.  But current training seems to be failing the member at the operational level.

In my day, as a police instructor for use of force, I had to always do battle to get the training approved

get the time to train and of course the budget approved, to name a few hurdles.  What often made this seem harder than it had to be was the politically correct concepts back then. Images like the little old Japanese guy easily defeating 14 of his much younger students and no one gets hurt.  In the eyes of many police leaders and the public back then and perhaps now too, why couldn’t every police officer pull that off on the street, after all a little old Japanese guy did.  Of course the concept was laughable back then as it is now because it had nothing to do with reality but a cultural demonstration.  It’s a different level of training focus and of course no one is really trying to kill the little old man.  For instructors today we have a much different and harsher image to contend with, the UFC Ultimate Warrior.  This superbly fit athlete who does battle and carries the day with finely tuned knowledge of Brazilian Jujitsu (BJJ).  For this last image to be associated with a trained police officer in the minds of a Police Manager or Police Board members is utter nonsense and is on par with the little old Japanese man demo. 

Why you ask.  

Ask yourself when, where and how does any Police Academy get the time to train a member to that level of fitness, master complicated fighting skills and/or ring deadly knowledge today.  It never does because the actual amount of time allotted for proper use of force training in any Academy’s curriculum,  let alone the level of fitness training and discipline required in the officer’s training to produce that physical being is never going to happen.  The exception being, unless of course the member came into police service already having mastered it, and of course we know very few are in fact ‘fighting gods.’ Most new recruits have a hard time passing basic fitness testing and generally 98% of the class have never done martial arts period.  But not surprisingly most police use of force training today is based on some sort of UFC model and in particular BJJ, one of the most labour intensive martial art systems to learn being taught today for civilians and that same standard is being taught within police systems.  From the conversations I’ve mentioned it is not street effective training because most members cannot remember the moves outside the Academy training environment vs. the harsh reality of the street.

I still believe today as I did back in my police days,

Police training cannot be based on fads (like the UFC), sports-based or cultural-based martial arts (like BJJ and/or say Aikido).  This training must also not be designed to appease political correctness but fully focus on the tactical correctness aspects required for an operational police officer today and the legal levels of applied force knowledge and skill one can apply to a threat and circumstances of each arrest, especially if the subject is non compliant.  It is also training that must be court defensible, and stand up to every eye of the world when the media gets a hold of all that cell phone footage, that makes yours and the Departments life hell.  It’s training that must produce a member who is fit to fight and assertively confident in their own abilities to first defend themselves and then arrest bad guys.  

Another point of concern that comes up in these conversations,

All too often, so called ‘subject matter experts’ civilians who sell some sort of self defence training  to police departments.  The complaint is that these providers and their programs have no substance of operational fact as their base, other than the guy who created it being able to ‘sell ice to Eskimos’ (in case you missed it Eskimos don’t need to buy ice they live in the Arctic). I believe policing needs to stop giving these providers credit for knowledge they could never have acquired and remove these non-police qualified experts, who sell them a system of nonsense, from being allowed to train police members any more.  Police members need to be trained by veteran police officers who have the proper self defence/martial art credentials and from a validated standard of use of force.  A format based on research into violence against police officers and that research validates a curriculum that is physically, tactically and mentally correct training that addresses realistic training standards and then sticks with it by professionally qualifying instructors who teach it through a formal qualification regardless of their prior martial art background.  In this way everyone works off the same page.

In these numerous conversations it comes down to

Re-mastering the current standard of police training to actually meet the rubber on the road.  This training in general must meet one very basic element and that is, we train the police officer to fight and win first and foremost.  That means the entire basis of any police curriculum is that no matter how big, strong or violent the subject is, their weakest points are their eyes, throat, groin and knees and that the police officers own legs are stronger and longer than the subject’s arms.  They must be taught to attack these vital areas, clinch and take the subject to the ground, including using their kicks to cause ‘pain compliance’.  Any target below the waist should be kicked or stomped on.  The choke must be taught as a means of control and submission.  This is due to the high levels of violence faced by police officers.  That is, drug based violence, where subjects are psychologically out of control due to drug use and at the upper level of physical violence.  Police officers need to be allowed to use every personal tool in their body’s arsenal in order to win, thus build their assertive confidence to deal with a violent attack and/or arrest when they cannot revert to a police weapon.  All police officers carry weapons but more often than not their side arm, baton, OC spray and tasers have secondary position when they are attacked on the street. With effective unarmed combat skills they can handle these attacks that come without clear warning or ‘a tell’ from the bad guy who explodes on them.  These situations are more common than ever according to these conversations.  Therefore in that moment of sheer violence those weapons are useless because the officer cannot get to them.   Yet, in most police training, learning to use those weapons is the main tactic.  But what happens when the main tactic fails, where do you go from there? More than 65% of the use of force training time at the academy prepares the officer for something that is often used less than 4% of the time in these ambush type scenarios.  A lack of realistic training leads to panic which is a ‘black mental state’ and we see, hear and read almost daily what comes of that.

During these conversations with the officer they are often shocked at my suggestion

That in the first level of training I recommend the officer learn some basic boxing/kickboxing skills with limited grappling skills.  Training like BJJ or Judo is far too complicated to learn in the short time allowed the officer within any academy’s training.  BJJ requires several years of training to master and there are rules, a luxury that during police training becomes a huge disadvantage to the police officers street mindset.  Mr. nice guy just isn’t doing BJJ and there are no rules on the street.  If you ever find yourself fighting to make an arrest in a crack house the last place you want to be is on the ground!  Of course, if you’ve never had a street fight where your life is threatened and/or a threat of serious and/or grievous bodily harm, or the possibility of death is present, then I will never be able to explain violence to you in the context of training someone to combat that attack that I have faced as a police officer or members are facing today.  There’s more to it than just rolling around on the ground or learning to throw a punch or kick!

So let me share with you a few key points that generally are not found in most police training systems. 

When you evaluate or test them for street worthiness look for these points.  These training points were as true in my day, more than 30 years ago, as they are today.  These key points are;

• It must be effective and this must be seen by the students taking the training.
• It must be easy to learn and must avoid all complicated techniques that are easily forgotten
• It must be tactically correct before being politically correct and never sports-based
• Use of force should be taught in a reasonably short training period and practiced over and over throughout the course of training without adding more into the text once basics are learned.
• Size and weight are immaterial – speed, force and violence of action are
• This training must be taught in a disciplined polished manner
• It must include physical, tactical and mental components that interlock with each other.  All parts of training must come together as one

I believe that the right training makes us stronger. 

But the wrong training makes us weaker and more psychologically unprepared for the threats on the streets and this is not just from the bad guys. Remember, the news media always has a say as to your professionalism as does those politically correct politicians who try to influence every aspect of our society and our police policy and procedures.   If we lose a police officer it’s reported as a lesson learned.  We need to train officers to manage their safety through tactically correct training in use of force and weapons handling and not leave their safety up to luck or sports-based training because there are no refs on the street and the crowd is never neutral. The stressors associated with this subject are always with the police officer.   In my conversations their mindset always seems to be, do they receive the right training and can they handle themselves; did that member die or get seriously hurt because they were not properly prepared and is that going to be me.  It’s normal to experience fear in any dangerous situation, you’d be a fool not to, but then your training should take over and from my experience it had better be the right training.  We will most likely have to change a lot of dysfunctional training habits if we want police officers to be fully trained to the level the public believes they are.  That would require a lot of discipline on every member’s part to make those changes and get egos out of the training picture. 

 As you can see there is still much to learn about teaching use of force training/arrest and control tactics.  In the last 30 or so years there have been many changes to the police training mindset, some that work, but clearly a lot that does not, especially when it comes to officer self defence.  Police officers continue to examine and experiment with the various forms of martial arts and they continue to hope one of them will be an authentic street-based self protection for them.  And now you can be part of the conversations…Good luck in your search for the ultimate police system. Watch out for the ‘ice salesman’!