How Defensive Tactics Instructors Let Departments Down

   I speak with alot of police officers in my line of work. It pays to listen to them. They are the ones out on the street doing the job not me so every time I teach them I learn from them at the same time. I learn how to improve my programs and I learn how to be a better instructor and how to give them what they need. Need and want is a different thing. This article isn't focused so much on the internal defensive tactics instructors as it is the outside training organizations that. Internal instructors can basically only teach what they are offered to certify in. The outside vendors are more of the problem I think.
   I hear complaints all the time from officers that they believe their departments care more about liability than they do protecting officers. I can understand why they would feel that way but at the same time that isn't completely fair either. We all want action we are self motivated people. We see someone doing wrong and want to sock it to them. I want to tell you part of a conversation I had with an older officer with lots of experience once. We were talking about the old SAP gloves(gloves with lead shot loaded into the knuckles). I was just kind of talking out of my butt and said I bet you wished you could still carry those and his answer surprised me. He said really they were better off without them. He said that police brutality was running rampant at one time and it made it harder on everyone. He gave the example of a nerd in high school that had been picked on then becoming a cop and using the badge to sock it to people. Now I've actually seen that happen myself and I know for a fact it still goes on. we had this long conversation about why departments there were better off without them.
  You see what you have here is two sides that are the center of their own universe. On one side you have the officers that want better training to protect themselves. They see this state sponsored stuff and they know it doesn't get the job done. It's like the states are going a little overboard and officers have to go out there with one hand behind their backs.  Then you have the other side. When a police department gets sued and loses that money doesn't just pop up out of nowhere that money comes from somewhere and somewhere someone else is having to suffer because an officer lost it and went overboard on some guy. It causes the public to lose faith in the departments and not trust them. The media doesn't help because they are all too willing to blow it up and make national news for ratings. The admins have to deal with that so that's why certain things are not allowed. So yes I believe that affects decision making and alot of times officers suffer from these decisions.
   The biggest failure however in this is by outside training organizations. They seem to have no understanding of what officers can do and what they need. They sit in a room and come up with some program without taking any of this into account. We can sit and bitch all we want about what we aren't allowed to do but you know what? It's never going to change and there is nothing that you are ever going to do to change it. That is a fact and you better just get used to it. The powers that be have presented us with a challenge. The vendors need to answer that challenge. Vendors for these organizations could've looked at this problem and looked at what  could be done and make it work. I know a coordinator who sent an officer to do a police krav maga program. It cost hundreds of dollars. When he got back he was all excited about the program and loved it. Guess what? He wasn't allowed to use half of what was taught in that program. Therefore what he learned was completely useless that money was just thrown into the toilet and flushed. Now I'm not familiar with the program I'm only repeating what the admin told me so don't be shooting me any weird hate mail over it.
  As DT instructors it is our jobs to teach these guys ways they can protect themselves without getting them fired. Now you know it's fashionable for some people to say I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.  Frankly, that is a lame cop out. The simple fact is people who say that are either ignorant of proper training or they just don't give a damn and would rather do things the sloppy way.  There are ways to stay within use of force protecting the departments from liability as well as protecting the officers on the job I know because I teach them and they work at an incredibly high level with officers and admins both loving it. I'm not going to get into why certain programs are better than others I covered that in the article An Article Every Defensive Tactics Instructor Should Read and I'll put a link to that at the bottom of this article. My point is the vendors have to be more creative and more educated about the issues before they step in front of a police department to teach. They have been failing miserably falling to one side or the other. Either admins love them because they take care of liability and cops hate it because the tactics don't work very well in real combat or the officers love them and the admins hate them because the tactics are overly aggressive. You can't just be some so-called reality based guy and put together a program for cops it's a little more complicated than that. You guys need to get a clue and get it in gear and get these officers something they can actually use without getting someone fired. I know it can be done because I've done it. So drop the mumbo jumbo and get it right.

An Article Every Defensive Tactics Instructor Should Read

http://stonewalltactical.blogspot.com/2011/06/article-every-defensive-tactics.html

The program that gets it done

http://www.stonewalltactical.com/star.html