TRANSCRIPT
I’ve been contacted by a viewer who is a police officer in the USA.
His department practices methods like wrist locks and armbar takedowns, the kind of stuff I’ve talked about here quite a bit. My opinion is that these techniques are legitimate but they have a fringe use case, to the point that they are rarely seen in combat sports, and are certainly not a foundation from which to learn grappling. It’s the kind of thing I would teach as a low priority, as an option for very specific situations. And yet, for many years they’ve been at the core of police training for many academies around the world.
You might have heard it’s the hands that kill, and yes, it’s true, you need to control the hands, stop them from reaching for weapons and so on, yes. But if you don’t have overall positional control, and you just grab at the wrists and don’t do much else you might end up with control over nothing.
This police officer who contacted me, tells me that he attended a domestic violence situation where he had to arrest someone. He started by grabbing the wrist, and the offender quickly pulled away and punched the officer.
He said this:
In that moment I remembered your video critiquing police training. Further, I had a trainee with me who was about to experience their first use of force, so I was essentially on my own. I told myself I should control the person entirely before I try to control their appendages. With that I grabbed their body and hip tossed them to the ground. Once gaining control of them fully, which they understood as well, the arms were easier to manipulate and the arrest was successful.
I have no formal martial arts training. But just remembering that notion made the arrest much smoother, much faster, with less damage to me or the arrestee. Without having recently watched your content, I definitely would have tried to drag them to the ground with just their arm alone.
This officer did not receive any additional training or retraining to do this. All he did was reverse his priorities. Instead of working from the extremities to control the body, he established control of the body to work on the extremities.
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu they talk about position before submission, but in a policing context it’s more like position before handcuffing. Cops can probably come up with a more snazzy, tactical sounding phrase, they’re good at that. But anyway it’s all essentially the same idea.
Of course, I’d prefer that police underwent training starting back at the academy where they would be wrestling each other and working toward restraining holds and handcuffing positions with experienced supervision for safety.
You really don’t need to sign up for the Gracie Combatives program or commit to something similar. We just need really basic skills and clear tactical objectives.
I’m starting to wonder if there is a way to develop a kind of broad open source template that people can adopt and run with on their own and use local expertise to plug in their own skills, instead of creating a by-the-numbers curriculum and trying to get contracts. I have no idea where to start with something like that.
Anyway, in this case, simply suggesting a different general approach lead to a better result, and it’s quite gratifying for me, to get a message like this. It reminds me of how I felt years ago when I was teaching martial arts, and a student would occasionally tell me that something I taught them helped in a real situation. This is the reason I started the channel in the first place.
