For those who believe that training is the answer, two Las Vegas cops came upon a guy who was apparently suffering some sort of psychotic episode. It’s hardly unusual for police to be called upon to deal with people suffering from some sort of mental illness, and it’s not as though this is such a wild, new problem that they are utterly clueless as to what to do. So, they handled it.
The incident unfolded about 1 a.m. when the man approached two uniformed officers inside The Venetian, 3355 S. Las Vegas Blvd. South, the Metropolitan Police Department said in a release.
The Metro officers described the man as “acting erratic” and paranoid. The man told the officers that “people were chasing him.” He ran off, and both officers followed, police said in a release.
As the man came to the cops, it would be fair to assume he sought their assistance for whatever delusion he was suffering. Certainly, acting erratic inside the Venetian can’t be all that unusual.
Outside the property, the man tried opening a tailgate on someone’s pickup before approaching the side door of the vehicle. Then officers used a Taser, which police said took “immediate effect.”
Is a Taser the tool best suited to dealing with someone in this condition? Perhaps approaching the side door of someone’s pickup isn’t a good thing, but is it bad enough to take a dip into the use of force continuum? Apparently so.
But Metro said the man still fought, so one officer punched him several times…
Note the word “still” before fought. There is no suggestion that he fought before the police decided that a Taser was the tool of choice. Was it possible that the reason this erratic fellow “still fought” was because they just shot him with the Taser? If the Taser took “immedaiate effect,” why had they not cuffed him while he was incapacitated, if they believed him to be a threat to their safety?
But then came “several” punches, which naturally follow when someone, even a person suffering from a psychotic episode, dares to fight police officers who demand nothing more than rational compliance with their demands from someone whose conduct attracted them for its lack of rationality. After the requisite tune-up, because one does not fight with cops, came the coup de grâce.
…before administering “a department approved control technique called the lateral vascular neck restraint.”
Wow. Doesn’t that sound pretty darned official. A “lateral vascular neck restraint.” And not just any one, but a “department approved” one. What could such a clinical control technique involve?
Information about the technique describes it as a maneuver that restricts blood to and from the brain, making it more difficult for suspects to resist arrest.
It makes something else more difficult as well. Living.
The man, who was unarmed, lost consciousness. Officers performed CPR, police said.
The man was taken to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead at about 1:40 a.m., police said.
The whole restricting blood flow to the brain seems designed to do some serious damage to a human body on its own, which apparently was the case based upon the fact that they killed the guy. But what about the dreaded choke hold? While it lacks the panache of a cool, clinical name, does this not sound remotely similar?
Police said the control technique used is not a choke hold…When applied properly, the technique does not block a suspect’s airway.
The difference, apparently, is that a choke hold asphyxiates a person, while the “lateral vascular neck restraint” merely cuts off blood to the person’s brain. Both kill the guy, but are entirely different things.
The caveat, “when applied properly,” is an obvious issue when employing any highly technical police restraint technique, differentiating whether they kill the guy because they’ve choked him to death versus killed the guy when they denied him blood to the brain. Entirely different, highly technical moves.
It’s unclear when police will identify the officers involved and the man who died, because the incident is different from usual in-custody deaths and involves elements Metro does not classify as “deadly force” — namely the Taser use and neck hold, Rodriguez said.
But there remains a rather troublesome question, when considering the effort and training that went into the unnamed officers’ employment of the Taser and choke hold lateral vascular neck restraint. If they were sufficiently well-trained such that they could employ such a technical-sounding restraint that wasn’t “classified” as deadly force even though it killed the guy, was there a reason that their training was so utterly deficient that the only thing they could do with a person suffering a psychotic episode was tase, punch and choke him to death?
One of the means by which common uses of force are turned into jargon-laden rationalizations, creating the appearance that the police dealt reasonably with a fellow in need, doing no harm to anyone and certainly undeserving of death, is to call otherwise ordinary violence by jargonized words involving some “restraint” or “compliance” that creates the appearance of a sophisticated trained technique.
Of course, if they’re capable of using benign highly-trained techniques, why then are they incapable of coming up with a highly-trained technique that results in the guy surviving the encounter? Why have police yet to figure out how to deal with a person suffering from mental illness without using force and ending the day with another dead body? But at least it wasn’t a choke hold, because those are wrong and will kill someone.
H/T B. McLeod
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“Lateral vascular neck restraint” has to be the worst euphemism since “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
How can you not appreciate that it’s the “lateral” one rather than the medial one?
Oh, well, that changes everything.
The proper application of a chokehold is one of the first things you learn in Jiu Jitsu training. Restricting blood flow is the aim and desired outcome, rendering your opponent unconscious more quickly and effectively than with restricted airflow.
This is a fascinating bit of information. What would we do without you?
Sorry, let me be more specific:
“Police said the control technique used is not a choke hold…When applied properly, the technique does not block a suspect’s airway.”
It’s a chokehold. A child can be taught this.
“The man, who was unarmed, lost consciousness. Officers performed CPR, police said.”
This is not the correct response to an opponent who is syncopic from a chokehold. A child can be taught the correct response when a sparring opponent decides not to tap out before they go night night. It’s not CPR.
“Because Choke Holds Will Kill”
“Chokeholds” is a word. Choke holds is two verbs in a row with different noun/verb plural agreement.
Are you suggesting that any idiot can be trained better than this? That would mean that the training given cops is inadequate to the task, and that more of the same might not be the solution. And yet, so many people keep arguing that if we train cops not to fear blacks who breath, they won’t keep shooting them.
“Are you suggesting that any idiot can be trained better than this?”
Sort of. I’m saying thousands of children (and adults) are taught to apply chokeholds in martial arts academies around the world every day, but none of them are dying. Furthermore, there are countless variations of the chokehold in Jiu Jitsu. Still, either no, or so few, result in a fatality that it is not news.
Perhaps in martial arts, they’re not trying hard enough? Or it’s because they don’t start by tazing the competitors first? Or because everybody in the room knows that you must immediately lay the unconscious person supine and elevate their legs?
The point is, focusing on the technique is a red herring and it’s mentioned so frequently I think it’s what they want us talking about. The real problem is LEO’s lack of honor, compassion, and respect for human life. If we could figure out a technique to restore that…Everything else could be solved with better training.
Ah. The “real problem.”
In the dojo, people are going to be relatively fit, and likely not under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Also, many dojos prohibit practice of shimewaza techniques if no degree holder is present. It isn’t always easy to revive a person from a chokehold, and I have seen some second and third degree blackbelts get pretty excited when the first couple of standard steps don’t do it. Sometimes the problem is simply that the unconscious person’s blood pressure has fallen very low and the arteries in the neck are collapsed. There is a kuatsu technique to address this via direct massage of the carotid triangle. If nobody present knows this, and the arteries aren’t open, CPR is not going to help, it will simply amount to an ignorant failure to assist. Departments that teach their officers to use these strangulation techniques should also be teaching the kuatsu. Failing to do so creates a grave risk that some number of people officers render unconscious (especially those under the influence of alcohol or drugs) will die while the officers are trying to perform CPR.
Perhaps the right kind of “training” might help. Make being handcuffed, pepper sprayed in the face, shot with a Taser in “drivemode” and receiving every standard “restraint” and “compliance” technique a required part of police training and require regular reapplication to retain their badges will make both officers and their agencies less eager to solve everything with high voltage and euphemized strangling
A nice thought, but probably insufficient to make the point. Better their spouse or child, so they remember that the person they’re dealing with had people who love and care about them as well.
I’m game. But, somebody else is gonna have to explain this new “training requirement” to my wife.
“Just sign the release, honey, and we’ll get this over with.”
“This will hurt me more than it will hurt you…”
The “right kind” of training is already done at most departments, and has been for decades. Every officer is handcuffed hundreds of times during training, and then again throughout their career during DT training.
We are pepper-sprayed. Many departments require that officers take a Taser hit. We are the dummies for our partners training on restraint and compliance techniques. We are taken down to the mat, hard, by arm locks and bars, foot sweeps, and so on. At departments that use LNVR (which is a term going back to when I was a rookie), officers use the hold on other officers. Sometimes we lose consciousness, sometimes not.
DT is normally an annual requirement, so we get it every year.
You know, if you ask, most of us are happy to tell you what the training is like. You don’t have to assume that you know what’s going on. It doesn’t help anyone, especially when your conclusion is wrong.
I recall years ago reading that NYPD cops were typically years behind on firearms re-qualification, and that you could tell if the cop cared about his gun by whether he changed out the grip or used the stock grip. This was in the pre-Glock days. Then again, NYPD is not the poster boy for good police training practices.
LOL, the first thing I did when I was issued my S&W .38 K-frame was to change the stock grips for Pachmayr finger groove, covered backstrap grips.
Finally a situation where I get to chime in with experience on a blog filled with laywers instead of just making the odd snarky comment!. Ten year (now retired) experienced mixed martial artist, submission grappling and BJJ competitor, and current instructor here.
So firstly there is a technical difference between a chokehold and a stranglehold, a chokehold closes the airway, causing a lack of oxygen to the brain, causing the recipient to pass out, a stanglehold cuts off the bloodflow to the brain instead, causing the exact same effect. The wording difference may be of importance in a court of law where an officer can state “I never applied a chokehold” and not be lying, I’ll leave that for the experts here to debate, the practical difference is that a stranglehold is less likely to cause ongoing damage, but will also kill someone a lot faster if applied too long.
That seems to be important here, this “lateral vascular neck restraint” (which I’ve never heard of but then googled) is actually just a slight variation on what’s commonly called a rear naked choke (RNC) or a “sleeper”, yes it’s a slight variation on the same hold that police officers have been killing people with forever, the technical difference between it and an RNC being that in the RNC you bring your forearm across his windpipe and in this you scissor your biceps and forearms across the neck, thus making it a strangle instead of a choke.
If properly applied you can knock someone out and they’ll wake up a minute or two later. Here’s the rub, as anyone who’s watched the UFC knows, even martial artists who’ve trained their whole lives in this sort of thing need a referee to separate them from their opponent, because in the heat of the moment it’s nearly impossible to tell when your opponent goes limp, and if you don’t stop the strangle immediately, brain damage occurs less than one minute (as little as 30 seconds) after the brain shuts off if the strangle is not released and death occurs shortly after. I would only use something like this myself in a street fight if I thought my life was in danger. The theory is that if you use it, it has less chance of causing permanent damage than say a nightstick blow to the head, but it requires a hell of a lot more skill to pull off.
I used to do unarmed training with first responders, and I’ve never seen a police department in north america that requires ongoing unarmed training (I offered it to medics, police and firefighters at cost , with no profit to myself for years and still could hardly get any departments willing to pay for it). Most officers aren’t required to practice these holds beyond their initial qualification, which is done by someone who has next to no martial arts training to begin with. Does this mean they should never use it? Not unless they could justify killing the person it’s being used on since in inexpert (and many expert) hands, it probably will. The rest of that debate, I’ll leave to the fine folks here.
That’s unAmerican.
Says the man who puts his car in the garage.
If only there were a First Rule of Citizen Survival.
Maybe some government document that dedicated our nation to Life…maybe Liberty. Hell, let’s even throw in the purfuit of Happiness.
P.S. You need a font that lets the lowercase “f” descend below the line.