St. Paul police credit jiu-jitsu training for reducing injuries, excessive force settlements

In developing the new training, the department looked into research of what works and sought to incorporate de-escalation at every step

ST PAUL, Minn. — Told by a police officer that he’s under arrest, a man clenches his arms in front of his body, refusing to put them in position to be handcuffed.

One officer wraps his arms around the man’s waist from behind while a second officer grabs his legs. Working together, they lower him to the ground and handcuff him.

The encounter isn’t real. It’s a training exercise that a room full of Saint Paul police recruits are watching. But the techniques they learn by practicing on each other are what they’ll be expected to use on people resisting arrest once they begin their patrols next year.

The training, which the department calls “response to resistance and aggression,” represents a major shift from what Saint Paul was teaching its officers before 2015.

Inspired by Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it teaches officers working in pairs to use leverage instead of strength, enabling smaller officers to take larger people into custody. The techniques are intended for encounters that don’t involve a suspect carrying a gun or other weapon.

The training has resulted in lower levels of force, fewer injuries among suspects and officers, and historically low settlements in police misconduct cases, said Saint Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell.

As police departments here and around the country are re-examining their use-of-force practices, particularly since a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on and killed George Floyd last year, Axtell says the study of the training changes Saint Paul already put in place show they’ve “been good for our community and our officers.”

The Saint Paul training is “a step in the right direction,” though it can’t stand on its own, said Maria Haberfeld, chair of John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration.

Departments must be diligent in who they hire as officers because “no matter how much you invest in education and training, if you’re going to offer this training to people who are not emotionally mature, who cannot control themselves well enough in stressful situations, you’re not going to achieve the desired goal,” Haberfeld said.

NEW TRAINING AFTER RE-EVALUATION

The Saint Paul Police Department (SPPD) reevaluated its training program in 2014 following high profile incidents where officers appeared to use more force than necessary to gain control of resistive subjects. The SPPD Training Unit took on the task of updating the department’s use-of-force training and studied the outcomes. It became apparent that officers’ actions, which caused concern during administrative review, were actually in line with the SPPD’s current training and practice.

This effort toward new training also came at a time when widely shared bystander videos of police encounters were becoming more common. Those videos of police and subject interactions did not generally represent law enforcement in a positive light.

The police department didn’t name specific cases that led to the changes, but one incident from the time that garnered attention was the 2012 arrest of Eric Hightower, which was captured on video posted on YouTube. An officer who pulled Hightower’s hair and sprayed him in the ear with pepper spray initially was fired, but an arbitrator overturned that decision, finding the officer did not use excessive force.

TEAM APPROACH

In developing the new training the SPPD studied research on communication and police use of force. They made great efforts to incorporate de-escalation whenever possible.

Despite the fact that officers in Saint Paul often respond to calls in pairs, previous use of force training didn’t provide a concept or system of working together when officers encountered people resisting arrest.

Now, the training is team-focused. Officers are instructed to not rush into situations unless there is an imminent danger.

In the past, officers were taught to target pressure points for “pain compliance,” but that only spurred some to fight harder. Officers often found the techniques to be ineffective when a person was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, experiencing a mental health crisis, or when the subject had a strength advantage over the officer.

If lower levels of force didn’t immediately work, officers tended to escalate the situation by punching, kicking, using knee strikes, spraying a chemical irritant or using an impact tool like a Taser.

BASICS OF JIU-JITSU

Officers Tom Menton, Chad Malmberg and Sean Zauhar took the lead in building the new training program. These officers have backgrounds in various combat sports, including Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and other martial arts. Their collective experiences on the street and in training made it clear to them that positive changes could be made.

The foundation of the revised training comes from the basics of jiu-jitsu, known as the “gentle art”. Although many police training systems are based in jiu-jitsu, it seemed that the application of universal principles and concepts, combined with innovative teaching strategies, was the key to their success.

For example, jiu-jitsu uses armbars and neck restraints, the Saint Paul police curriculum teaches neither. Rather, the new training program focuses on the fundamentals of positioning your body to control and pin a person to the ground.
Officers are instructed to put pressure on subjects shoulder joints, legs and hips when they are on the ground, but to limit compression on the upper torso and back to ensure that the subject is able to breathe. If someone continues to struggle with officers after they’re handcuffed, police are instructed to sit them up or roll them onto their side into what is known as the “recovery position.”

Saint Paul was already teaching those principles of control before George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, but the case caused the department to further emphasize the value of this new training curriculum to officers.

VARYING TRAINING SCENARIOS

The revised training takes recruits through more scenarios that aren’t predetermined to result in use of force, focusing on de-escalation, “rather than having the mentality after your training approach that everything is going to go bad,” Axtell said.

The training is now 120 hours for response to resistance and aggression, which had been 80 hours before. There are another 80 hours of scenario-based training focused on the work of patrol officers and 40 hours of Crisis Intervention Team training.

Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said she’s viewed Saint Paul as innovative when it comes to adopting training about leverage for use of force, and adding nuance to defining the type of resistance they encounter in updating the department’s use-of-force policy in 2018 while trying to match officers’ level of force to a person’s conduct.

“A lot of departments have really stuck to the old-fashioned way of doing things — that officers always had to have one level higher force than resistance of that person,” said Gross, who noted that Saint Paul previously had concerning numbers of officers fatally shooting people and those numbers have declined.

STRIKES, USE OF CHEMICAL IRRITANT DECLINE

Recruits in the 2015 Saint Paul police academy were the first to go through the new training program. Veteran officers began learning it during quarterly training the following year.

In order to measure the results of this training overhaul, the SPPD gathered data from 2,845 incidents of Saint Paul officers using force between 2014 and 2020. (Officers use force in less than 1 percent of incidents they respond to, according to department statistics.)

On average, since the training began, the data showed reductions of:

  • 37 percent in the use of force.
  • 68 percent in officers using strikes.
  • 51 percent in the use of chemical irritants.
  • 39 percent in Taser deployment.
  • 44 percent in injuries to people being arrested.
  • 25 percent in injuries to officers.

Over that same period of time, there was a 29 percent increase in people who “demonstrated aggressive and assaultive behavior” toward officers and a 15 percent increase of subjects carrying a weapon. The data indicates that officers used less force against subjects who “displayed passive and active resistance.”

There still have been high-profile use-of-force cases, including a series of incidents of police K-9s biting people who weren’t suspects, which led to Saint Paul tightening its policy for using dogs in 2019.

Saint Paul approved a $2 million settlement in 2017, the largest on record in the city, to a 53-year-old man, Frank Baker, who was hospitalized for two weeks after he was bit by a police dog and kicked by an officer.

Since then, police misconduct settlements have fallen to their lowest amount in at least a decade — a total of $24,000 in 2019, $5,000 in 2020 and $70,000 in 2021, according to the city attorney’s office.

HARD TIME TO FIND OFFICERS

The first academy of 2022 began with over 60 people, the most in the city’s history, after city budget pressures prevented the department from bringing new officers onboard since 2019.

Recruiting new officers continues to be difficult, not just in Saint Paul but throughout the country, said Axtell, who estimated applications were down 75 percent compared to five years ago. Axtell said he’s focused on “hiring the heart and training the mind.”

“Our academy instructors can train you on how to stop a car, how to write a police report, how to make a safe and effective arrest, but we simply can’t teach you how to be nice if you aren’t naturally nice,” he said.

Richard Pittman Sr., Saint Paul NAACP president, said the changes Saint Paul Police made to its use-of-force policy reflect “more of a community-based mindset.”

“No police department is without issues,” Pittman said, pointing to Joseph Javonte Washington, who was wounded a year ago when a Saint Paul officer shot him.

Pittman said he regarded that shooting as an “overuse of force and authority” because officers also used a Pepperball and a K-9 against Washington, who was naked and unarmed. No charges were brought against the officer after the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office found that Washington “abruptly jumped” out of a dumpster where he was hiding and the officer reported he couldn’t tell if Washington had a weapon in his hand.

Axtell terminated the officer, pending the grievance process. Pittman said he has trust in Axtell holding officers accountable.

Pittman said he’s also seen Axtell bringing on more diverse officers. Including the current recruits, 31 percent of the department’s officers are people of color, compared with 23 percent when Axtell became chief in 2016. Axtell recently announced he’ll step down when his term ends in June.

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