They’re now proof points that governments can reduce police fatalities by training their police to use more than guns. This hopefully makes it a little easier to sue a city into the ground for failure to adequately train its police force.

Importantly, such training requires more funding, not "defunding the police" as some propose.

In addition to education, as per the article, "They hired more Black and brown officers" ; "required any officer who uses force in any way to report it in detail, and for the supervisor to review it". Resulting in "The bad cops were suddenly outed."

NJ is decent. We had one small issue of police violence during the large BLM protests. Compared to NY...

Sam Harris has a new, very interesting podcast with Rener Gracie about police training and how inadequate it is across the entire United States. Officers in California get one - 4 hour course every two years to learn how to subdue criminals, and of the 4 hours, only one is actually spent training, the other three are instruction.

Rener Gracie is obviously famous for Brazilian jiu-jitsu but he also trains police on how to subdue criminals in a safe way. He has some interesting ideas about how to identify bad cops also.

It was worth the listen.

https://samharris.org/podcasts/246-police-training-police-mi...

My BJJ gym offers deep discount to police. This is a good thing. I’ve rolled with many police fresh to grappling and even with my limited skills they are very easy to subdue. No wonder they resort to weapons (lethal and less than lethal) so quickly. I have been training a few years now.

Judo (the mother of bjj) is seeing a revival in police circles.

It’s good to see grappling arts make a comeback, as there are plenty of non-lethal ways to make someone submit.

Edit: For cases where the police officer already is in control.

I think American wrestling and or BJJ are much more practical than Judo as a martial art for police, but Judo is better than nothing. Judo is good for getting things to the ground, but the ground system of Judo is inadequate for many situations. (I’ve trained Judo and with many judokas, even advanced ones just aren’t very good on the ground without some other ground fighting system). Regardless it’s a big step in the right direction.

As a fellow judoka, I’d agree.

It’s unfortunate because there are some aspects that could make judo a better groundfighting base than BJJ for this type of situation. When a judo match goes to the ground, the competitors must be clearly making progress toward a pin or submission or the referee stands them up. This favors more explosive movements (resolving a situation quickly) over a slow positional game from your back.

Of course, a skilled BJJ practitioner could also make quick work of an untrained opponent. But judo’s focus on quickly establishing a dominant position has some advantages.

Unfortunately this ruleset also enables competitors to “turtle up” in a defensive position on all fours. It’s hard for your opponent to quickly get a submission or a pin from this position, so the fight will quickly be reset by the referee. This has led to a lot of even competitive judoka having very weak ground game, as they can get by for the most part by assuming this position. Obviously that’s not going to be very effective in a real-world situation.

BJJ has its flaws for this sort of thing too. At least in the gyms I’ve trained in, there was very little focus on throwing. So once a fight is on the ground someone with a BJJ background will excel. But against a resisting opponent, they don’t have nearly the tools that a judoka has to bring things there.

In the end I think either one will give you a massive leg up, but it’s important to keep in mind why you’re training in the first place and understand the bad real-world habits that their respective rulesets can encourage when taken too seriously for the sake of competition.

Good points, gyms can vary a lot. My gym and most gyms I have visited focus on wrestling style takedowns, and maybe some Judo stuff too depending on what the instructors know.

Honestly, for the general self defense you only need a few well practiced takedowns. We drill single leg, double leg, and I drill a couple collar based judo trip/throw. It mostly comes down to spending time on the feet. No-Gi at my academy lets you do basically anything from standing. My gym does a lot of MMA and has a strong competitive nature (we train for comps a lot) so we get a lot more focus on the standing game I think.

FWIW I have done Judo some too and find it fun. Except when I get slammed lol.

It seems like a great idea, and that they’ve gathered significant evidence that other police departments can now take advantage of to start their own similar programs. That’s really exciting. The episode did kind of devolve into a commercial for Gracie JJ though. Well, maybe that just keeps it simple for others. One phone number to call for training...

I disagree. The largest factors are likely to be culture (coming from leadership) and higher scrutiny (mentioned in the article as a requirement to report and investigate any use of force).

Couldn’t possibly be a confluence of all the above? Not even in the tiniest degree?

"Largest factor" implies there are others as well.

Ah ok, perhaps I fixated on the curt "I disagree", for a moment too long.

It's more complicated than that.

They disbanded the entire department -- breaking the police union in the process, and then hired far _more_ (but somewhat lower-paid) police than before.

The new, larger, but reformed department has done dramatically better than before. So there's really something for everyone -- breaking the union was important, _increasing_ funding was important, but also increased de-escalation training helped.

As another comment noted, that was Camden. There’s also more to that story - the city significantly stepped up its surveillance of public spaces (https://www.insider.com/inside-camden-new-jerseys-high-tech-...). Personally I think using technology to ensure public safety, with the right safeguards to prevent government abuses, is both acceptable and very possible. However, the anti policing activists are now against the Camden model - they initially held it up as evidence that defunding works but quickly changed opinion when more details came out (that funding simply shifted to the county level). You can find an example of arguments against Camden’s surveillance model at https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/camden-new-jersey-police-refo...

I think that was Camden, not Newark.