The concept of reasonable force

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This article was motivated by a post my friend Trevel Henry posted yesterday if you haven't seen it here's a link

I am very surprised to have arrived here Trevel Henry , to find 40 people have given this a 'LIKE' and 2 find it insightful, and yet there are no comments, must be the weekend!

No such luck with me Trevel, I may have arrived late but have plenty to say on the subject, haha.

Actually, you may have inspired me to write an article, or maybe I will just bomb your post, with 20 comments, let's see ?? ??

Between the post above and the article in the link you provided, you have drawn attention to the problems and proposed solutions to many of them via your excellent training program.

We have spoken about this subject who decides what is reasonable in reasonable force, so you know my views, but for those that don't I think some clarifications and additions to your post could be relevant.

If you have received any pre-contact training from a reputable instructor, note I don't say certified instructor, it's just not the same thing, then whatever force you deem necessary will almost certainly be received in the legal system as reasonable, in the end... That's important because the end could be a long way from the beginning and the journey very costly.

About 60% of my clients generally have no need to 'restrain' their attackers, be they military, close protection, or civilian, although some, on occasion do so, it is more as an afterthought than a defining action. These normally restrain temporarily and pass off to the police or site security, as in the case of CP, Reduce and run, in the civilian scenario and, well the military units I teach, do their thing and move on to let someone else clean up the mess!

The other 40% are Police units of one form or another and they obviously do need to restrain and detain on a regular basis. For this group, excessive force is usually a by-product of an uncooperative arrestee and can usually be easily avoided with the aid of smoke and mirrors. I have commented in the past on failed, (in my opinion), 'police actions' and believe that most police excessive force is a product of uncontrolled ego on the part of the police officer involved which is itself a by-product of fear caused by lack of the correct training. You cannot trust your training if you did not receive said training!

Going into a situation with prior knowledge that your aggressor needs to be 'restrained' and/or 'detained' is different from saving yourself or a loved one from a blind ambush situation, home invasion, or street assault.

Also, you have to assume that a professional will have some prior awareness of the pending assault and therefore not get caught in the glare of the headlights, so to speak, the blind ambush situation is removed completely, and for that reason, we emphasize so much Situational Awareness, (or ambush avoidance as I like to call it). Police are often despatched to the scene of an unravelling situation and should arrive prepared for just about anything, although I teach all mine to be constantly conscious of all movement in their environment as 'nut-jobs' can pop out of all the little crevices like cockroaches!

Here in lays one obvious problem and that is that professionals are expected to be, well, 'professional'.

Hence, not swapping their 'fear' for 'anger' or even 'indignation' as would be advised in so many self-defense courses, mine included. Here in Spain, we have a special course for the police and it translates as Defensive police protection.

Professionals, in the mind of non-professionals, should not experience fear . But indeed they do because, for the greater part, they have not received the levels of training that non-professionals, including the judiciary, believe they have. That is mainly because professional institutions are happy to supply, cookie cutter, box-ticking courses, to portray the image that the correct training has been given and received, without demanding the high standards that should be given to our professionals, to help them to perform better and safer in their daily environments.

When training professionals a different attitude (Mindset) needs to be taken and, I may suggest, even a completely different approach. That is because techniques and tactics alone are not sufficient, and even the most ardent promoters of verbal de-escalation, (who have experience in real-life scenarios), know that you can't stop everyone with words. I may argue that the success rate of tactical conversation is actually much less than advocates would like us to believe, although a valuable tool, it must not be relied upon as a way out of a possibly violent encounter. Aggression and violence are not the same thing!

Injury prevention and avoidance are not included in defence courses habitually, in fact for my students the contrary is true I specifically teach avoidance above all else, but if it gets physical I want injury as the outcome of the confrontation, pain alone does not work for me. Damage needs to be done.

Inoculation training is a must, to remove the probability of fear being the initial and immediate natural reaction. Obviously, fear reduction is possible, however, no one is "fearless" , and this is not a new concept that I just invented. I am sure all will agree to some level of fear when public speaking for the first time for example, the more you do it the easier it gets. It may not take away the fear completely, I personally would not want it to, but it reduces it to a manageable level, and that is exactly what we are looking for.

Responsibility changes from professional to civilian 'defendants' as it is believed that 'professionals' are better trained and equipped to deal with such situations. We and I say this as a professional trainer myself, know that is not the case, and it's time to do something about that!

Stressful, physical, emotional, violent, and vulgar should all be part of any training program designed for those who will confront violent offenders, patients, or good people having a bad day, because as much as is touted "it may just be a good person having a bad day" many of those "good people" have killed innocents, far too many to count. The jails of England, and every other country I have encountered, are a mix of crazed violent killers and "good people who had a bad day", that led to them killing an innocent person, Wake up!

What doesn't change is the 'subjectiveness' of 'reasonable and proportionate' in a court of law.

That is why, in my opinion, every self-defence, and 'defences of self' trial should be heard by a jury of 12 peers. That should be the minimum requirement any lawyer should seek for their client in such a case. .

The subjectiveness of one soul judge, or even three in an appeal, does not allow for a fair legal defence, simply because it is too emotive and of course subjective.

I know not, a single Crown Court judge who has worked the weekend, as a doorman/woman supervising the guests in a south London nightclub, spent a shift alongside a psychiatric orderly, or even worked the late shift in a corner shop in a less affluent part of town, let alone been attacked physically and had to defend their lives or the lives of a loved one in a bloody violent battle, therefore, the reasonableness of his perspective is automatically flawed.

Self-defence cases must be heard in a jury setting, if they are not then the word of the law may be upheld but the meaning behind the word of the law will almost certainly not be.

There are numerous cases and jurisprudence to study when dealing with self-defence defences, in law courts, and studying them clearly shows that regardless of what the law says, how it is represented may be very different. Many cases have shown that;

• Yes, you can pre-emptively attack. You do not have to wait to be assaulted to defend yourself.
• Yes, you can attack someone who has their back turned to you.
• Yes, you can use a weapon, edge, blunt or firearm in your defence or the defence of others, even if the aggressor is not armed, if there is a disparity in size and strength between the defendant and the attacker. Or if indeed the attacker has a proven violent tendency that the defendant knew about in advance.
• Yes, you can claim self-defence even if you initiated the actions that led to the violence that you later had to defend against.
• Yes, you can kill in your own defence or the defence of another.

So there you have it easy right...Wrong

All of the above have been successfully defended in the UK legal system. Still, many that may have appeared to be exactly the same have failed miserably with defendants facing anything from community service to life imprisonment, and here is why. #CONTEXT

For example, you cannot take the back of someone who is escaping your grasp, continue to attack them, and then claim self-defence, unless, that person can be shown to have been turning away to pick up a weapon to use against you whilst you are unarmed then you do have a defence. The problem is, can that be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, were there witnesses, do you have video?

If they are running away with your property you can give chase to reclaim your property, whether or not the ensuing violence can be defended in court does not depend on the fact that you gave chase to a fleeing thief, but instead, on how what happens when you catch them is perceived!

The better your legal team the more money you have to throw at your legal defence, the more likely you are to get a favourable outcome. You see the law is equal for everyone alike, but, justice is not. Justice costs money, lots of it. If you can afford top-quality legal help you will find the jurisprudence to support your case, if you rely on the most basic of defence lawyers you may not find support for your defence. Scary that, isn't it?

Obviously, the best way to avoid excess force is to use no force. For that reason, we teach "Situational Awareness" and "Run Away" and "Situational Control" and "Mindset", and that is fine if you are a civilian 90+% of you can stop reading here.

However, if you work in a profession where it is a large part of your job to say NO, you need other tools of which tactical conversation may be one, de-escalation may be another, and a flanking sidestep that brings all your weight and power to deliver a right cross to the tip of the chin may be another, and that is one that should not immediately be ruled out for fear of using excess force. Don't ever be afraid to use force because it might be interpreted as excessive. If it was needed it was needed. What must be understood is that you must learn to defend the actions you take, before you take action...Your legal defence is as important as your physical defence.

With a little practice, the same technique mentioned above could be adjusted slightly to produce 'shock and awe' with body contact, and the right cross could be converted into a slamming introduction to a naked choke, cordially known as a sleeper, which has proven extremely valuable, to myself and many others, on numerous occasions, (Arm locks and pain compliance seldom work against the drunk, drugged or the highly emotional, but going to sleep works on everyone). It leaves less destruction whilst having the same knock-out effect, so is easier to defend from the 'excessive force' charges, you could later face, it is also less likely to bring revenge. You just have to be proficient enough at applying them, to know when to stop applying them.

In my experience putting nasty people to sleep, steals a little bit of their soul especially if you count them out, on the count of five you will go to sleep and I will own you, whispered in the ear, then, 1,2,3,4,5, and sleep. They seldom come back for revenge. Of course not having a broken jaw, missing teeth and a black face for a month helps take the sting out of it a little too!

If you do not feel comfortable for moral reasons or capable for physical reasons of performing either of the two examples mentioned above, maybe you are in the wrong game. You may have equal rights under the law but equal outcomes are not guaranteed. Trust me if you work in the 'Saying No Industry' physical violence will find you sooner or later.

You can avoid 99.9% I have heard many say, well I say to you two things. 1. What you can avoid won't kill you what you can't avoid might. Train for the worst-case scenarios always, you can perform at lesser levels than your preparation you can not perform at higher levels. Hope for peace, train for war. 2. I don't know why you all keep repeating the same statistic 99.9% because at 60-70-80% maybe; 99.9% is rubbish and you lose all credibility by repeating it.

It is not possible in civilian social aggression situations and definitely not possible in the professions that have to say 'NO'. If it has worked for you, then you have only faced antisocial aggression and not violence.

As for statistics of violence, I will be addressing that in another post coming soon!!! 99.9% of bus drivers who get attacked at work are attacked whilst driving their bus...Perfect!

In the professions that confront violence, in place of the preferred running from it, the rules must change, judges and juries know this as do the CPS and your defending lawyers. There is more than enough jurisprudence available, going way back to the 70s and beyond (please read that bit in the voice of Buzz Lightyear; to the 70s and beyond, made me smile anyway!), and if your lawyer isn't up to speed you have the wrong lawyer. There are laws, amendments, and many examples available to you and your defence team to help you out of those justified uses of force scenarios. JUSTIFIED! You have to have this off the bat prior to engaging.

So, as professionals of violence, we study violence, violent actions, the outcomes of those actions, the following trials, and the laws that lead to the outcomes. We study how to avoid violence, and we study how to inflict violence on others, and then some of that study is shared with our students depending on their specific necessities. To varying degrees, we incorporate the study of psychology, sociology, physiology, neuroscience, anthropology as well as a whole bunch of other 'oligies'!

So reasonable force can always be defended if you can show it was reasonable, that sounds a bit stupid but it's basically the way it is.

A video showing a policeman punching an aggressive male in the face (yes the police are allowed to punch citizens in the face, it's an authorized technique), once, and knocking him clean out, is preferable to a video showing the same policeman hitting the same aggressor twenty times with ineffective punches. So learn to do it right, maybe!

A video showing a nursing orderly using any restraint control, even if it is a sleeper, where the patient can then be easily restrained, is preferable to seeing the orderly bashing a patient into a wall and falling over tables and chairs. So learn to do it properly and learn something for the 'just in case', reserve team that might be frowned upon, but is preferable to continuously attempting ineffective techniques that will almost definitely look abusive and excessive to the non-professional. Repeated ineffective techniques will almost always look like abuse even if they are not. The fact that they are ineffective should also worry you!

Learning the correct authorized technique is essential for legal defence arguments. Applying those techniques correctly is essential for legal defence arguments and the use of unauthorized techniques can be defended if you apply them correctly and take your ego out of the confrontation.

In my humble opinion, based on fifty years of violent confrontation FEAR is the culprit of by far the majority of undefendable 'use of force' cases brought before the courts, closely followed by EGO. Both of those can be easily brought under control when training with the right instructors. Trevel Henry would be a good place to start if you are in the UK.

If you are British or English-speaking and looking for someone in Spain PM me or email me at: [email protected]

Si eres espa?ol o si hablas castellano, bienvenido, pues aquí estoy a sus ordenes. Viajo a todo la peninsula para grupos y hago curso para individuales y grupos aquí por Cádiz.

Here in Cádiz, Spain we teach civilians, individuals, small groups, families or companies, as well as Police and Military units. We can provide online workshops, courses, and educational material specifically designed to guide you through the minefield which is self-defence or personal protection. It is far from all physical, but our CQC courses are also extensive for those whose employment doesn't allow them to avoid physical violence.

Contact us at www.insafehands.net or [email protected] or in feel free to drop me a DM.