POLICE CLASS LEAVES HIM ALL CHOKED UP

Read it in acrobat format

SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A. BY NICHOLAS


A seminar in Gracie jiu-jitsu, a recently popular and extraordinarily painful system of empty hand combat, was offered in the gym at the Miami-Dade Police Department Training Bureau in Doral earlier this week.

To get to the gym you followed the grunting past a mock a street assault scene and the firing range and turned at the racquetball courts.

On the wall there was a man-size poster of vital striking areas and a much bigger chart of Resistance Levels and Response, with Officer Arrival in the bottom left and Deadly Force in the top right.

On the mat there were 50 police officers from various South Florida departments and a handful of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as soldiers from Southern Command.

It was a diverse bunch. They ran the gamut from guys you wouldn't want to mess with to guys you really, really shouldn't mess with Valente, brothers who run the Valente Gracie jiu-jitsu School in North Miami Beach, normally teach the seminar by themselves. But for this one they'd flown in Royce Gracie, scion of the founding family and former mixed-martial arts champion, from Los Angeles.

Gracie stalked the room and finally asked Capt. Warren Wright, one of the SoCom soldiers, to stand up. "We go shadow boxing to grappling, please," Gracie said. They squared off and then he put his hands around Wright's neck and squeezed. "Now I go for the choke - bind my hands!"

Wright, who looked as if he'd done this before, broke the grip and twisted Gracie's arm behind his back, ready to lever the wrist. Gracie didn't resist. "Now turn the hand down," he said, and went for the laugh line: "Don't break the arm, please!"
Everybody paired off. They did wrist holds while Gracie stalked some more, yelling at people to adjust their positioning. There was also a certain amount of choking and arm and shoulder barring going on. Accompanying that was a certain amount of mat slapping, which is what a victim does to signal his submission and stop the pain.

"Japanese jujitsu arrived in Brazil in the early 1900s through a Japanese master" Gui Valente said. "He used his jujitsu as a way to get around and make friends. He taught the Gracie family brothers. And one of them - this was Helio, Royce's father - he was a lot weaker than the others and very frail. He had to adapt the technique to his body. He added leverage to the moves and geared them to self-defense. So you prepare against the most common street attacks - chokes, head locks, sucker punches, attacks from behind."

The testimonials were enthusiastic. "There's something called the rear naked choke - well, call it lateral vascular neck restraint," said Sgt. Mario Knapp of the Miami-Dade Police Survival Unit. "You compress the sides of the neck to restrict blood flow to the brain. If the subject is fighting you, it's a more humane way to put a subject into custody," he said and locked his forearms around Gui's neck to
demonstrate. Gui slapped the mat like a dying fish.

"I've used it in a firearm retention scenario," said Kevin Crawford, a special agent with the FBI who had flown down from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. "I was chasing a bank robber down a hall in a hotel. This was Minneapolis in the '80s." A reporter obligingly grabbed for Crawford's right hip, where his sidearm would have been. Crawford pulled him off balance with his right. He drove his left palm into the reporter's face, blinding him and bending his neck backward.

Everybody agreed it was an effective move, and before long it was time to go outside for a class photograph.

If you have a story idea, e-mail nspangler@MiamiHerald.com.