Surviving the Streetfight : Zero BS, High percentage takedowns to put someone on their ass
At some point in every cop’s career, people are going to want to fight you. It’s just part of the reality of the job. Hopefully your people skills (and the threat of getting tazed or shot) takes the fight out of most would-be assaulters, but there’s always the shitheads too dumb, belligerent, or just too piss-drunk to care about the consequences.
In days prior, no one thought twice about cops beating the living shit out of people who got aggro on them, but we live in a kinder world today where The State Monopoly on Violence is held to a higher standard of “don’t brutalize people unless you absolutely have to”. In light of that, the hand-to-hand combat training (known as Defensive Tactics) law enforcement is taught these days in the police academy is mostly a matter of learning how to protect oneself from getting knocked out by a wild punch: All Defense, No Offense. I could probably right a book on why that’s a terrible strategy and ends up doing more harm than good (if a cop can’t wrestle someone into cuffs, that’s when the tazers, choke-holds, batons, and guns start to come out) but that’s not my aim for this article. And in any case there’s plenty of cops on social media screaming for departments to implement Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ) training already.
I wasn’t a very big guy when I was a cop (5’11, 170lbs). I had dropped out of the training pipeline to become a Marine Corps officer, so for the 2 years prior my workouts were almost exclusively long distance running and calisthenics, and I was a skinny runt compared to most other guys on the force. But I wrestled in high school and had some BJJ training, which was very rare in my part of the country a decade ago. While I wasn’t going around putting bad guys into Rear Naked Chokes, I was able to leverage some of those techniques to engage guys bigger and stronger than I was, which came especially useful when breaking up drunken brawls at local bars.
I want to share some of that knowledge with you
Here’s three easy, low-effort, zero-skill wrestling moves every cop should know, and anyone can use to put a Bad Guy on his ass in a fight….