“There is no “nice” way to arrest a potentially dangerous, combative suspect. The police are our bodyguards…our hired guns. We pay them to do the dirty work of protecting us; the things we’re too afraid, to unskilled or too civilized to do ourselves.
We expect them to keep the bad guys out of our businesses, our cars and houses and out of our face. We want them to “take care of the problem.”
We just don’t want to see how it’s done.”
Charles Webb, Ph.D.
CSU, Long Beach
This quote has long been around in LE circles. With the increasing ubiquity of cameras in our world, folks finally are getting to see “how its done.” Even relatively minor uses of force can look pretty bad to the general public, tutored as they are in fanciful notions of violence by martial arts and various entertainment media, and by talking heads and self-anointed experts who sell their opinions and expertise – however confused they in fact are – to a public not hungry for information, but for confirmation; that what they think is what is really happening.
The flip side of this is when real experts are called in, with science, with assessments of where officers are actually at in their training, and the like, and the court cases get dismissed or officers are given immunity because they acted in the scope of their training.
Don’t get me wrong, I see some things that make it public and I wince. I wonder why officers did what they did. What their decision making was. Why they needed to use repeated, ineffective striking techniques, or repeated uses of the Taser (LESS injurious than the striking techniques, but a political hot potato and thus must needs used with discretion) when they actually had positional control of a subject…
But I know its because of how little regular training our officers get, and what they are trained in is generally not effective against active resistance. I also know that officer safety and survival training – appropriately – puts a very different mindset in that little-practiced officer’s head than what is in the public’s head: that if they can’t see his hands, if he is tensing his arms and pulling his hands underneath him, he could well be accessing a weapon and could seriously injure or kill the officers standing there. What the public sees as a mentally ill man, the officers experience as a mentally ill man who may have a weapon, that the officer cannot effectively control or who has actually defeated their rudimentary ability to control him, and requiring an instant escalation of force before an officer gets seriously hurt.
If this offends people, if people want more from their officers, THEN THEY HAD BETTER START DEMANDING MUCH HIGHER LEVELS OF REGULAR TRAINING.
THAT is a question for society, because police agencies will get by with as little as they are comfortable with, essentially just a check box indicating “training has occurred.” Many agencies do almost no training AT ALL after the academy, though this is increasingly not a workable strategy when a high profile use of force pops up.
Many others – those that train “frequently” – have a few sessions a year amounting to what most high school wrestlers or Mixed Martial Arts practitioners get in a week. Even the instructors of these officers for the most part train a few hours a month.
It is a common sense question: in what skill set, across the entire spectrum of human performance, can you be considered functionally skilled, if not actually an “expert” or a “master instructor,” with a few hours a month or a year of training??
Well, police arrest and control and defensive tactics…..
People write books, testify in court as experts, and are considered leaders in the industry at a skill that they literally barely practice. Most get more time on the golf course, fishing, or on the treadmill off duty than they get time training for what is the highest liability aspect of the job.
Instead officers are left to rely on brute force, on numbers, or on a rapid escalation of force to avoid getting behind the curve. In no way can physical confidence be developed with the levels of practice described, and so if you have size, strength, age, fitness, drug-assisted, whatever mismatches the level of confidence naturally drops, escalation happens much sooner, and is in fact justified based on the level of training and experience the officer has and their reasonable perception of the threat that the suspect presents.
So, you are officer, perhaps approaching 40 – you are a bit overweight because, well you are approaching 40 and you have worked graveyard much of your career and have difficulty getting to the gym in between family time, overtime, and the like. You are trained by your agency twice a year, three hours at a time, which essentially consists of reminding you how to do those “wrist twistys” and “arm bars” and some work against an instructor in a big padded suit or with a kick pad. MOST of that three hours is actually spent standing there talking with other officers while the rest of the class cycles through the kick pad drill….
And then you come face to face with a guy bigger than you, highly agitated and resistive, and seemingly freakishly strong because of some drug on board or mental illness or both…. you think he might have a knife. You grab his arm and he goes down, diving his arms underneath his body…y0u can’t get them out because his muscular tension is actively – and effectively- resisting your efforts at control.
Where do you think your mind will be at?
You begin striking, knee drops, Tasing, etc. and nothing seems to be working. You are highly adrenalized, and a few minutes of what for you is very intense physical work in that adrenalized state has left you near exhaustion….
And you have nothing left but to escalate further…what you were doing wasn’t working when you were fresh, what will happen when you gas?
Where is your mind at now?
Of the training that officers get, much is based in those same fanciful martial arts techniques that are not developed or practiced against active resistance or countermeasures on the part of a training instructor. Increasing this kind of training will have minimal effect on the ability to manage physical confrontations the higher the resistance level goes – you simply must train “at the speed of the fight” with realistic resistance dynamics.
Likewise, simply doing an MMA or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu curriculum in addition to defensive tactics is not always the wisest course of action. Some methodologies within those practices are poor tactical choices for confrontations in which one person – the officer – is always armed. Then again what may seem to make little sense tactically actually makes MORE sense the worse off the officer becomes in the confrontation: for example “pulling guard” is absolutely foolish for a police officer to do in many confrontation, yet the guard is EXACTLY what an officer wants to use if a suspect is about to get on top of him during a struggle on the ground. Knowing the difference and being able to train this appropriately demands a grounding (pardon the pun) in BOTH methodologies so that the officer can appropriately avoid situations where he or she may end up going down in a bad place, or flow between them as necessary if that is unavoidable.
The reality is that the ability of many hand to hand tactics instructors to do this, let alone teach it, is extremely limited within law enforcement circles.
This is by no means meant to excuse excessive force. However, true excessive force incidents are not that common. And some are on the bubble- by that I mean that an officer’s lack of regular training combined with the self-perceived inability to make that training “work” in a situation can be a recipe for potential or apparent excessive force.
Use of force must ALWAYS be viewed from the perspective of the totality of the situation, to include the characteristics of that particular officer (training, experience, capability, and level of control over the suspect) and that particular suspect’s attributes and resistance – this is why “force continuums” and the concept of “minimal force” are unworkable – as so confirmed by our Courts.
When you look at that totality, some uses of force that don’t look so nice might actually make more sense and would in fact be lawful based on the level of training of the officers.
Consider it this way – look at the officers using force in most situations as white belts in a martial arts school. White belts that show up for training about ten or twelve hours a year….though they have a much more honed sense of situational dynamics and (some of them) tactics through years of street experience, they have about the same level of physical skill as the average, occasionally attending white belt.
When things do “go bad,” they aren’t much more prepared than the average citizen.
