I Was Never A Forensic Investigator In New York

    I want to talk with you all today about something that's been on my mind for awhile. I kept it close to my vest for months holding it in and it took a good blog rant by a friend of mine to push me over the edge. I'm a police trainer with a long background in private security and personal protection. I take pride in the fact that I help protect the people that protect the people. I have also worked most of my martial arts career on exposing greed and fraud in martial arts by people only in it for the money. Well in way those two things have clashed now. What the public is seeing is an illusion that needs to be exposed. There needs to be a dose of common sense brought into this arguement. There are former police and military people out there misleading the public about the facts and I feel that to protect the public and get the right training out there I must speak on it. If I have to be the person to fall on the grenade then so be it. So here we go.

   Now it's my policy to never name names unless I know the person doesn't mind and the fact is this article isn't about one person so I'm going to use real examples but at the same time stay on point. Now there's this guy from New York that has a pretty popular program out there. What he's doing and saying however is pretty bad. He seems to only want to market to ignorant people who don't know any better. He pushes his big system as the most up to date thing and in every interview what appears under his name? He always puts former NYC forensic investigator. People this is what we call marketing. It's used to mislead the public to believe he knows something that they don't. What he actually teaches looks more like traditional Kempo than anything else. Pretty good Kempo but Kempo nonetheless. I don't know if that's his background or not but he doesn't put that on the screen in his videos. I'm sure you've all seen it. Constantly bashing grappling tactics. He has this one clip where he supposedly proves his arguement by having some guy do a wrestling shoot on a guy with a knife and get stabbed to show that grappling training isn't good for self defense and he should know because he's a former forensic investigator.Then he does another one in an elevator where he has a guy try to grab a knife arm the wrong way without a proper setup to bash grappling again. Well as we all know in any system if you perform a tactic wrong it's probably going to fail. But he knows better because he's a former forensic investigator in New York and he's seen stuff. Then again I'm a 6th Dan in Jujutsu and been doing it 34 years and I've never seen a jujutsu guy do a dumb move like he's saying they do. All it looks to me that he's proven is how ignorant he is about other systems. He doesn't seem to understand body mechanics or how to set up anything. Just because you suck at grappling tactics and can't perform them doesn't mean they are bad. Maybe you just suck. The best way to draw attention away from your flaws is to try to get people to focus on the perceived flaws of others. All throughout WWII capturing the weapon bearing limb was used by tens of thousands of soldiers to save their lives and worked at a huge rate of success. I was once attacked with a knife myself when I walked in on a rape in progress. The first swing nicked the back of my left hand and on the back swing I secured the arm and used grappling tactics for the disarm and to restrain the man until police got there.Then again what do I know I was never a forensic investigator in new york.

   Now as a police trainer I want to give you a little background on how police train. I don't know how it works in other countries I can only speak for the US. In most states you have what is known as a POST( Peace Officer Standards & Training) system. It isn't always called that sometimes it's called something different it may be called  the DCJS( Department of Criminal Justice Services) or something totally off the wall like in Texas with TCLEOSE( Texas Commision on Law Enforcement Standards & Education). The point is almost all states have a version of it. To those that don't know officers have to get so many hours of training credit every year and report it to these state agencies. How many hours can vary from state to state. An instructor can try to get it recognized by the state so officers get their credit or they can get an academy or a department with academy status to host them and they will take care of it. If you can't make arrangements for them to get credit hours departments won't pay for the training and officers most likely will not attend the training.

   Well several months back I was scheduled to teach a public course in New York,NY. I thought well hey I'll call an academy up there and see what the requirements are and do a police seminar while I'm there. Guess wwhat I found out? They do have an accrediting program in New York but depatments are not required to be a part of it. That's right folks they don't have to train at all if they don't want to do it.  Massachusetts along with a few other states is the same way. What that actually means to you is that our awesome forensic investigator may have never had a single ounce of reality based training. It's possible he has less training than your 12 year old child in kid's karate class. On top of that I'd like to add that nationwide unarmed training isn't a priority with most police departments. They tend to focus more on TASER, OC spray, batons,etc. That is slowly starting to change thank God but for right now that's the reality. Now this guy may be a good martial artist. That however doesn't make it ok for him to come on the internet and push a police title to willfully mislead the public into believing he has some knowledge above others. I mean think about what a forensic investigator does. They investigate crime scenes they aren't even on the front lines like the patrolmen. To use his logic the other day I watched a space shuttle launch. I know exactly what happened there's no doubt about it. It even left a trail. I went and looked up propulsion on the internet so I even know how it launched. So that must mean I can get a job with NASA as a rocket scientist tomorrow right? Of course that sounds silly but it's the same logic. Just because you know how a crime happened doesn't mean your an expert on how to stop it from happening to someone else.

   The odd thing is if you look at the training police actually do in defensive tactics it's pretty telling. PPCT and SPEAR are hugely popular programs all over the world. They were founded respectively by Bruce Siddle and Tony Blauer. In a shocker neither of these guys were ever police officers or even security as far as I know. So basically when police want high quality training they pretty much make sure they go to people who were never police officers. Isn't that an odd but true fact? Why would they do that when they could train under a forensic investigator from New York. Maybe they know the same  things your finding out with this article.

   Let's move on to another example and share the fun of sarcasm with others. A few years back I was looking around on the internet because I'm kind of an information junkie I'm always looking for new things. I came across a correspondance course where peope could train in TKD from home. It seemed pretty cool they made people test in person so they wouldn't have some goober in there teaching the public. Back then I was thinking about offering a course that way myself so I wanted to see how they had it set up to get some ideas so I clicked on their link for more info. The crap got neck deep. The whole marketing thing was how they just got back from fighting in Afganistan and how you could learn what they used. Seriously I can't make this stuff up...are you kidding me? If your on the battlefield and you have to fight with your fists all the time the only thing that proves is that your a terrible marksman. You need to requalify with your weapon. Nobody should be able to get  THAT close to you this isn't medieval times. Warfare doesn't really work that way anymore. People stand back and shoot that's how it goes these days it isn't like WWII or Vietnam. I guess these guys were different though. They hopped out of that plane and said," Screw the guns! We're gonna hop through Basra on one leg and kick them all in the head!" The fact is these guys were simply predators preying on an uneducated public. That was their audience people who would see those khakis and be ooooooed and ahhhhed and they could make them some money. I'm sure many people bought into it. I keep waiting on someone to claim they are Spartan and sell a system on how to kick people down a big hole.

  Now the fact is like the other guy they may be great martial artists or not. I'm not even necessarily saying the programs they do aren't good. I haven't seen the entire programs they teach. My problem is they mislead the public for money and that first guy bashes honest people with lies and his own ignorance. Very few people lie about just one thing it's a credibility issue. Some of you may have read my last article Martial Artists vs Black Belts. There was a part in there where I talked about a guy that couldn't get a wrist lock to work so he changed the attack to make a bad lock work instead of changing the lock for a better one. That guy was a former marine and his program sucked. As a matter of fact two of the worst martial arts programs I've ever seen were taught by marines. Now at the same time one of the best MMA coaches I ever had the honor of working with was also a marine. My point is the fact that he's a former marine doesn't make him a great coach. He's great because he goes to Thailand twice a year and he trains really hard with the right people. He did the work and paid the dues to get to where he is and he deserves all of his success. One of my mentors, W Hock Hocheim was in the military and also a police officer. His programs are great because he travelled the world and did years and years of research to make them that way. It isn't because he used to be a cop or in the military.

   Former police and military can be great instructors or really bad ones. People who never done either one can be just as good or better. It's about the individual and the work they put into it. The fact that someone used to be a cop is completely irrelevant and shouldn't matter to you either. If they have a great program then it would've been great regardless because as individuals they made it that way. When someone puts that stuff at the forefront to me they are just looking for prey that doesn't know any better and it's a shame and a disgrace. If you teach Jujutsu, Kempo, Kung Fu, or whatever you teach be honest about it. If you've modified it into a more modern system then that's great too but don't deny where it came from. There is no super secret ninja pressure point. When you take short cuts and your demographic is an unknowing public that doesn't know when your full of crap don't expect your peers to be nice to you. Then again what do I know I was never a forensic investigator in New York.