Why I Won't Train Cops and You Shouldn't Either
I recently had the opportunity to travel to Memphis, Tennessee to join in on the protests against police brutality for the murder of Tyre Nichols. While I did not get to participate in the kind of direct actions that I was able to as part of the Good Trouble 65 or the Filibuster 42, but I was able to meet local activists and organizers and see how they worked and what they were doing to push the work forward.
There is nothing I can say about the murder of Tyre Nichols that has not already been said by so many amazing, thoughtful, and intelligent individuals; especially writers and activists like Olayemi Olurin who penned this amazing piece, or Derecka Purnell who wrote this incredible essay.
The only unique view I bring is through the lens of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And while it may seem completely unrelated, there has been a strong push from police within the BJJ community, politicians, and well-known hacks pushing their latest fear-based instructionals, to make Jiu-Jitsu training mandatory for police officers. It’s gone so far that there now exists a non-profit to train police officers for free based on the incredibly faulty assumption that police somehow require more funding/training. They hold this belief despite the fact that law enforcement in the United States has never been defunded, but has only continued to receive larger budgets despite already having the most bloated budgets in the history of policing anywhere ever. Not only did their budgets raise, most major cities also gifted a large portion of their Federal Covid relief funds to their police departments instead of using them to assist those directly impacted by Covid: the unhoused, the impoverished, those on the verge of eviction, single-parent families, the underemployed, the unemployed, etc.
The logic behind this misguided idea that police need more training is based on the idea that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a “safe” martial art. It focuses on grappling instead of striking; controlling a physical altercation in a manner that subdues an opponent without serious risk of injury to anyone involved. In other words, if police could subdue suspects with this level of control, everyone would be more safe. And while that does sound nice on the surface, it falls dramatically short of anything remotely resembling reality.
Violence isn’t a flaw in our policing system, it is a feature.
When police brutalize, murder, and incarcerate individuals, it isn’t on accident. That’s the entire purpose behind policing. All US police departments were founded to violently repress citizens; whether it be slave-catching (1, 2, 3), labor union busting (1, 2, 3, 4) anti desegregation (1, 2, 3), anti LGBT+ rights (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), anti suffrage (1, 2, 3), etc. Literally, every single social movement within the United States that promoted greater equality has been met with violence from police, and this is because police are there to uphold the law, no matter how unethical or abhorrent the law is.
This idea that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu will somehow make police less violent is founded on the false belief that police violence is perpetrated by individual police officers, not the system of policing. However, we know that police misconduct is never an isolated incident, nor do police accept reforms that would supposedly curtail their violence (1, 2, 3, 4).
Memphis police are especially proud of the numerous police reforms they have implemented in order to reduce police violence, such as the 8 Can’t Wait reforms which includes requiring officers to intervene when a colleague abuses a civilian, and demands officers use de-escalation tactics before any force. In fact, Memphis police, including the officers who murdered Tyre, have all of the supposed reforms and tools to make sure police are not going to escalate things to the point of murder. As pointed out by Derecka Purnell,
Diversity was not an issue: the five cops who killed him are all Black. The body cameras strapped to their chests did not deter their fists from delivering blow after blow. Memphis has about 2,000 cops, and if this were a “few bad apples” in the department issue, then maybe they all happened to be working on the same shift. Cops did not shoot Tyre; they opted for a less deadlier force: they beat him for three minutes, shocked him and pepper-sprayed him.
And this is not just about Tyre, but about all lives destroyed via police murder. George Floyd was murdered by having police kneel on his neck and press his body into the ground, taking his ability to breathe away. Eric Garner died due to a choke hold (a major staple of Jiu-Jitsu) and officers pinning him to the ground, again taking away his ability to breathe.
Anyone who practices BJJ knows that pinning someone to the ground while restricting their air, and applying choke holds are the most major components of grappling outside of joint locks, which serve to maim an opponent.
It is the epitome of foolishness to believe that teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to police officers will make the public less likely to die at their hands. Why would teaching cops to be more effective killers reduce the number of people they kill?
If we truly wanted to reduce the number of people who die at the hands of state-sponsored violence, we would defund the police (most major cities spend between 20-40% of their budgets on policing) and invest in schools, mental health care, physical health care, affordable housing, sheltering the unhoused, etc. The policing system is violent, and adding the ability to be more violent will not fix it. It is tantamount to throwing gasoline on a fire in an attempt to extinguish the flames.
It is well-documented that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. It is also well documented that we already know how to reduce the incarceration rate.
We know that decreasing enforcement of minor offenses (which make up 80% of all incarcerations) reduces major crimes. We know that we should stop over-enforcing poverty because crime rates have steadily declined since the 1990s, but the arrest rate has risen dramatically, primarily due to arresting low-level drug offenders and adding jail sentences to poverty-related social issues. We know that access to housing, healthcare, food, education and other basic necessities drastically reduces crime. We know that law enforcement tends to over-police poor minority neighborhoods and sentences them more harshly than white or affluent neighborhoods (1, 2, 3, 4) and will create false data to justify their actions, which in turn leads to more incarcerations; we could halt this by drastically reducing our police force.
You’ll notice that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is nowhere to be found when it comes to serious solutions to our societal ills.
Because we have criminalized so many things, and because we have ballooning police budgets and a greater police presence than ever before, it is only natural that the public will have increasing interactions with police, and thus, higher rates of individuals being murdered by police.
To believe that Jiu-Jitsu will somehow fix this problem is genuinely stupid. It is foolish. It is a child’s idea that was formulated with no concept of the human cost of our police system or how destructive said system is. Anyone who believes BJJ can create softer, kinder policing is not a serious person and should be laughed out of the discussion at hand.
Training police to better fight will only train them to better brutalize and kill, therefore I will not train police in my gym. And I firmly believe that no one else should either. It directly contributes to the injury, maiming, and killing of individuals.
If we wish to absolve ourselves of police murder, we must abolish the police, and in order to do this, we must re-invest into safe, sustainable communities in which we care for one another and work to make certain everyone’s needs are met.
If you want extra reading, you can find more resources HERE