Quote:
Gastón Pezzuchi (Gaston1973) wrote:
Hi there:
Does anybody have the complete rulling of the California Supreme Court regarding the use of Aikido by Police Officers. I have read about it many times, but I have never actually seen it.
Can anyone help me out?
Heiwa
Gaston
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a) Legal Use of Force issues are essentially state matters and vary from state to state
b) even within states there can be quite a bit of variation between departments as to what hey train in and how they teach it. Florida has a de-centralized system for DT traiing so the contents differ from academy to academy. California is much the same. Even a state like Washington state has two academies with differences between what is taught. Also, Seattle off and on decides to have its own academy and its own program
c) no state that I know of approves of any system of martial arts for use by its officers; Defensive Tactics is the term used in most places by US law enforcement. DT is amde up of techniques from various martial arts that are deemed appropriate for use on the law enforcement environment
Pain Compliance techniques was long ago ruled by the courts to be ok for Arrest and Control of a resistant subject, locking techniques are classified under pain compliance techniques; the issue in the larger picture would be whether the technique used had a certain liklihood for causing an injury beyond what was intended. The courts would usually find that in an isolated case like the one mentioned that the benefit of the doubt be given to the officer; however, if that officer had a whole string of broken wrists under his belt then the technique might be deemed excessively dangerous for use on an unaggressive subject, the plaintiffs attorneys would maintain that the department should have caught the "pattern of abuse" and both the officer and the department would be sued.
An officer's ability to verbalize what he did and why becomes important here. If witnesses had heard that the officer was warning the subject that he would hurt himself if he strugelled that would be good. The officer would have to explain in his report that the subject's own resistant actions had caused the injury and that the officer didn't shift to a different and potrentially less injurious technque because he was afraid of losing control of the situation and having to deal with an escalating use of force situation. In other words the wrist injury was showing restraint on the officer's part because it preveted the need to use impact techniques on the subject.