Real Life Jiu-Jitsu Stories

This will be the first time for me to openly discuss my professional career off the mat. For many, it’s no secret that I’m a police officer. My discussions of this nature are generally reserved for the law enforcement community or my students, but I thought I would share my real life encounter where my Jiu-jitsu training paid off. Luckily, it wasn’t what I would consider to have been a life threatening incident. That’s easy for me to say now, because the truth of the matter is that you can never really evaluate the dangerousness of a situation until it’s over. Given the unpredictable and dynamic nature of a street fight encounter, one can never truly predict the outcome.

I’ve had physical encounters with a lot of intoxicated individuals over the years and learned from experience that anything can happen. For one, they’re not good decision makers. When someone decides they want to duke it out with the police, you know they haven’t really thought it through completely. For some people, they believe they have nothing to lose. In their mind, there are no foreseeable consequences to their actions. This alone makes them a serious threat. Most often pain compliance techniques aren’t viable because they’re not feeling any pain. Many times, they just don’t know when to quit. Even after complete and utter exhaustion, they still think they can fight. The one thing on the other side is that their balance is really bad. Such was the case with my encounter.

I was sent to an area of downtown regarding a report of an intoxicated man with a gun. Reportedly a black-handled pistol was tucked inside one of the two coats he was wearing. I arrived about a minute before the backing officer got there, so wasn’t planning on making contact right away. I had parked behind a building and was able to approach undetected and maneuver into a position where I could put eyes-on the man.

There are a lot of things that go through your mind at this point and not getting killed is at the top of the list.

I could see him with his back to me, sitting on a sidewalk bench. There was, what appeared to be, a toy pistol with an orange tipped barrel lying on the ground in front of him. There were a couple of beer cans in his midst as well. One never wants to assume anything, so I wasn’t dropping my guard just yet.

I recognized the man from previous contacts and knew him to be a handful at times. He was flagged in our computer as having made threats to kill officers and had recently fought with a couple of different officers. I made contact with him as my partner had arrived. We secured him and conducted a search, determining the toy gun was the only “weapon” he had. When he realized we were going to take him to our Detox center to sober up, he began acting out, testing the water as it were. It was some minor verbal non-compliance and name calling, nothing to get worked up over. This was the kind of guy who walks around with a blood alcohol level at about a .300. You and I would probably be close to dead at that level. He was transported and escorted into the intake area without too much trouble, however he was becoming increasingly belligerent and non-compliant. He made it crystal clear that he was planning on assaulting one of us and that he knew he would be going to prison for it.

Everyone was handling the situation professionally, doing their best to ignore his threats and working towards de-escalating him, but he wasn’t having any of that. My partner and I started escorting him into the holding area as he began kicking. He was able to kick the heavy metal door closed before we could get him inside the room. As far as the man was concerned, the fight was on. He had been puffing out his chest for the last twenty minutes and telling us all the bad things he was going to do to us. This was his last ditch effort to make something happen. If we were able to get him in the holding room, he wouldn’t be able to prove himself.

He started pulling away and trying to free his hands to take a swing at one of us. My non-jits trained partner was doing everything he could to control one of the man’s arms. Without even thinking, I slipped in behind him and encircled his neck. True to the adage that most fights go to the ground, I easily off-balanced him and brought him back and down, into a seated position. I held him in this rear neck lock position without compression, attempting to gain compliance with verbal commands. He continued to struggle, so I began the mechanical compression until he consciously said he was done fighting. I waited until he also stopped physically resisting, then released the compression. Although we were prepared for anything at this point, we didn’t have any further problems with him.

When it was all over with, I was thinking about how it all went down. The whole thing probably only lasted about one minute. It got my heart rate up a bit, but not out of control. I remember thinking later that I usually get in a warm-up period and some mental preparation before a match. It was like going from zero to sixty in one second, but I was able to maintain a clear head and stay calm. I probably made it look pretty simple to the uninitiated. For me, it was like I was in automatic mode. It was almost as if it was just another one of the hundreds of matches I’ve had on the mat. The big difference was that this man had every intention of doing some serious harm. The mistakes you make on the mat can get you tapped out. The mistakes you make on the street could get you seriously injured or killed. I have no doubt that my Jiu-Jitsu training afforded me the skill to take control of the situation and end that fight before it ever got started. And the best part was that no one got hurt.