Publication
Huff, J., Zauhar, S., Agniel, D. (2024). From pain compliance to leverage-based control: Evidence of reduced use of force severity and injuries following police training. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 18, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paae037
What Was the Issue?
As we noted a few weeks ago, jiu-jitsu training has spread like wildfire in the policing community; yet there is a lack of research evaluating the effectiveness of the training. We published an evaluation of the training the Marietta, GA Police Department has been conducting for a few years on this substack, but the design of the evaluation was not strong enough for us to send it to a peer-reviewed journal. The study reported here is the first peer-reviewed evaluation of jiu jitsu based training for law enforcement that we are aware of.
The program evaluated is a 120-hour Response to Resistance and Aggression (RRA) program that was developed by the Saint Paul Police Department (SPPD) in Minnesota. This program teaches officers to utilize a variety of jiu jitsu and wrestling techniques in conjunction with de-escalation and procedural justice tactics to control suspects. One of the unique features of this program is that it focuses on using team tactics to control and arrest suspects. SPPD took this approach because their reality is that officers will almost never be alone when trying to arrest a suspect.
Prior to developing this program, SPPD primarily relied on pain compliance techniques (such as pressure points and joint manipulations), and when these techniques were ineffective, the officers would the resort to strikes and less lethal weapons. Arrests often looked like uncoordinated dog plies of officers on top of suspects using a variety of strikes. These arrests may have been lawful, but they certainly looked awful.
How Did They Look at It?
The training program was delivered over the course of a 16-week recruit academy. The 120 hour course included 8 hours of lecture, 88 hours of skills training and drills, and 24 hours of scenario based training. Once the academy program was up and running, SPPD also delivered the material to the rest of their officers through 2-4 hour quarterly training sessions. Existing officers received 12 to 16 hours of training each year.
The evaluation was conducted by looking at 2845 use of force incidents that happened between 2014 and 2020. This data set consisted of a full year of incidents before the new training program was rolled out, and then captured the new officers, who received the 120 hour program, and the existing officers, who were getting 12-16 hours of training each year, for five years after the training was rolled out.
What Did They Find?
The study looked at a wide variety of outcomes and used some very sophisticated statistical analysis to parse the data. Below I present a few summary charts. The first shows the percentage of incidents that involved leverage based (jiu jitsu) tactics and the percentage where pain compliance tactics were used. As you can see, it appears that the leverage based tactics were being used more often and the pain compliance tactics less often as the program rolled out.
Figure 1. Percentage of Incidents Using Either Pain Compliance or Leverage-Based Techniques
The second figure shows the number of injuries to suspects and officers during the the study. Here you can see that the number of suspect and officer injuries decreased over the course of the study. It is important to note that the number of uses of force varied across phases. Therefore the raw counts might be misleading. However, the sophisticated statistical modeling was able to control for this and still showed that the training was associated with reducing suspect and officer injuries.
Figure 2. Number of Suspect and Officer Injuries by Phase
So What?
This is the first peer-reviewed study to examine the impact of training officers to use grappling techniques. The results are similar to what others have reported in non-peer reviewed evaluations. The techniques appear to be effective and they appear to reduce injuries. More research is certainly needed to confirm and expand these findings, but it appears that moving away from pain compliance and striking techniques as the basis for control to grappling is an effective way to go.
This is not to say that officers should not be taught striking techniques. They should. This should be done so that they understand how to defend themselves from strikes, and so that they know how to strike in situations where grappling might not be appropriate.
Finally, I want to emphasize that this grappling program relied on team tactics as its foundation. This makes a lot of sense. Trying to grapple against two people is incredibly difficult if the two people have some idea about how to work together. A coordinated team can control someone who is much larger or more skilled than they are.