Training Police to Grapple - Post 3

A Starting Point?

A Starting Point?

In the last post, I introduced a basic grappling process and five resistance categories. In this post, I will give an example of how these can be used to start developing a system.  I know I mentioned that I would stop discussing Ecological Dynamics for a while, but if you've been paying attention, you'll realize that I'm using an ecological approach to analyze what's happening. Now, let's take the last step in this direction. The art of police grappling is whatever emerges from officers attempting to execute the takedown, pass, keep down, control, and handcuff processes in the general resistance scenarios discussed in the previous post. There's no need to argue about which techniques should be taught to officers. Instead, the focus should be on enabling officers to control and handcuff suspects in various scenarios. Place officers in situations with clear objectives, and the techniques they use to achieve those objectives—which can vary greatly among individuals—become the system. I suspect that system will have techniques that come from a variety of existing grappling arts.

I know what you're thinking: "So now we just throw the trainee in and tell them to handcuff the suspect?" This is a common strawman argument that I hear when the ecological approach is suggested. That's not what the approach is at all! What I am saying is that we can use the Ecological Dynamics approach (specifically, CLA) to create narrow scenarios that will teach officers how to grapple in order to gain control over and handcuff a resisting suspect. The coach's job is to carefully design these tasks in a way that leads trainees to identify the key affordances, or opportunities for action, in these situations.

Below, I present a set of tasks that could serve as a starting point for developing these skills.

Task 1

I am going to assume that these are new trainees with little or no prior training. This means that we need to start with highly constrained, simple situations and then gradually build from there. Below are some possible starting tasks. I'll begin with a suspect who is passively resisting, lying belly-down with arms at their sides. The video below illustrates a simple progression that could be followed. The students in the video have limited grappling experience.¹

In Task 1, I gave the students the goal of getting to the final handcuffing position and then I constrained the student playing the suspect to passively resist in a specific way. Then, I let the students work. Notice that they came up with different solutions and some of the solutions did not work, but they were both able to successfully complete the task. At the end of the video, I also gave the second student (who has very little experience) a nudge toward a way to deal with the position that he was in. I did this because I realized that he didn’t understand that the movement option I nudged him toward was an option.

Task 2

In Task Two², this concept is extended. The officer must figure out how to move the suspect's arm from beneath their body to behind their back and get into the handcuffing position. Notice there are a few points where we are talking. The first is when I ask the first student about applying leverage. The second happens when the first student gives the second student feedback about his actions. I add suggestion to “look up” to this feedback. Both students are able to complete this task without me giving them a specific technique to do it.

Task 3

In Task 3³, the students begin to learn how to prevent the suspect from building a base to stand up. The first student is more advanced and has no problem with the task. However, the second student has much more trouble. I left a substantial part of his round at regular speed with the audio on so that you could hear me giving calibration comments to the first student. As previously discussed within the ecological approach, the officer's partner (i.e., the "suspect") collaborates in calibrating the level of difficulty. The aim is for officers to succeed about 70% of the time. If they are doing better than that, the suspect should increase resistance; if success is less frequent, the suspect should decrease resistance to aid the officer's learning. For much of the second student’s round, his partner was making the task too difficult.

Across these tasks, we moved from scenarios involving passive resistance to those involving semi-active resistance. We can continue to modify the constraints to increase difficulty and incorporate more complex elements. For example, we could start with the suspect in the referee’s position, requiring the officer to initially break the suspect down. Alternatively, we could have the suspect begin in a semi-standing position to introduce the concept of mat returns, and so on.

I am also not claiming that these students have any of these tasks mastered. We will repeat these tasks many times and add other variations to develop proficiency.

Note that throughout these scenarios, I did not instruct the students in any specific techniques. Instead, I set goals and trusted them to self-organize toward effective solutions. I did use some verbal inputs to nudge students toward other options they were not using. Also if I observed emerging behaviors that were problematic, I could adjust the task's constraints to guide the students toward better outcomes.

I hope this post inspires you to experiment with this style of training. In the next post, I will discuss the idea of technique in the ecological approach.

1. Music in Task 1 video from #Uppbeat : https://uppbeat.io/t/oakvale-of-albion/extreme License code: Y4I8CWIH8DGFVNW5

2. Music in Task 2 video from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/matrika/dark-city License code: QAKQSYDEOWOUJ0ZA

3. Music in Task 3 video from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/matrika/overdrive License code: VBQM9LSJ1MEREWD5