My Hate Crime, Chokeholds, and the Police

Why chokeholds need to be taught to the police, not prohibited from them — except in one situation

The tragic and unnecessary murders of George Floyd and before him Eric Garner and the stories of others whose names have gone unheralded — and which weren’t video recorded — have shocked the American conscience and put a focus on police violence and bias against minorities. A Pandora’s box of police reforms has been opened, many of which are long overdue, but one focus has been on regulations to preclude police from using asphyxiation or diaphragm compression techniques, such as chokeholds, during arrests. It seems an obvious solution to an outrageous problem, especially as we watch and hear the victims’ agonizing pleas just to be let to breathe only to fall silent. Equally hard to hear may be the fact that prohibiting police from using chokeholds may have the exact opposite of its intended effect. In fact, it may result in more officers using their firearms during arrests that turn physical, which can hardly be the result we want. Instead of prohibiting chokeholds, we need to teach the police how to properly use them. My journey to this understanding was inadvertently precipitated by a hate crime.

The Hate Crime

In the fall of 1997, I was walking around a neighborhood street fair in Chicago with my then-girlfriend. I had graduated from Northwestern Law School the year before. She had long dark hair and was part Filipina. I may have looked pale at the time, Chicago not being a place known for its year-round sun. I probably looked more typically “white” than the Mexican and Jewish ethnic mix that I actually am.

She began to pull me to cross the street, and I did not know why. Suddenly, I was lying face down on the asphalt with an incredible pain in my face and muffled voices were yelling at me. Initially, I thought I had been hit by a car because I was laying right next to one. But the gathering crowd was telling us that I had just been attacked by a 20-something-year-old white male who had taken off his t-shirt, put a brick or object in it, and from behind swung it around like a medieval mace to hit me, which by luck ended up only hitting me in the front of the face and not the back of the head, or maybe I wouldn’t be here today. Half incoherent but with encouragement and help from the crowd, we gave chase and the shirtless man, who sort of was sauntering away was arrested by a Chicago police officer just around the corner, fortunately.

The man who attacked me — his street name was Joe Chicago — was a self-declared Nazi. I later learned he had done this twice before. As he sat in the back of the police car, I came up to him and asked him why he had attacked me. He said that I, as a white man, should not have been with a Mexican girl. I told him that she was not Mexican, and I was not white. I wanted to tell him that I was the Mexican — my mom was born near Guadalajara and I am a dual citizen — but then he might have thought, “Close enough.” Joe Chicago went to jail for several years, and I’m the only person I know who has actually been a victim of a hate crime by a “Nazi,” a club whose members I hope remain few in number.

My injuries were minor in comparison to what could have happened. I had a concussion, some chipped front teeth which every few years need to be refilled, scars on my chin, a scratched cornea and the shock and bewilderment of it all. I knew then and know now there is little I could have done to prevent the surprise attack. But when I moved back home to Phoenix a few years later, I decided that I needed to learn how to defend myself in the event I was in a situation where I could do something. I started out in self-defense classes, and then joined a kickboxing gym.

Rude Awakening

One day at the kickboxing gym, this thin and quiet guy who looked nothing like a “fighter” invited several us to try something called jiujitsu. Jiujitsu has its origins as a Japanese martial art that was popularized in Brazil and has since made its way around the world. Jiujitsu is a sport like wrestling, except that the match sort of begins when you hit the ground. Most fights end up on the ground either intentionally or simply because someone loses their balance or trips. In jiujitsu, you use joint locks and various chokes — often generically called chokeholds — to submit an opponent. A submission is when someone either shouts the word “tap” or physically taps their hand on the mat or on your body to tell you that they give up. And you must tap, because you do not want to be choked unconscious or have your ligaments torn or your arm broken.

At the time, initially, it seemed a little weird to roll on the ground with another grown man, but I was game. Having been training in kickboxing for a few years by then, I was confident in my abilities and just assumed they would somehow transfer. It was a false confidence. I found myself struggling from the first seconds to prevent smaller and weaker opponents from pinning me down and making me tap, repeatedly. I was exhausted.

You never forget your first class, because until then you never knew how easy it was for someone to kill you. And really, that is what a tap is. It is saying “I give up” because I do not want to get hurt or die. If that person does not let go of a choke, well, you would die. But no one ever actually dies in class because you learn the rules, and you learn what it is like to be choked repeatedly. You realize that you do not want to have that done to you improperly, so you learn how to use chokes so that you do not accidentally hurt someone and vice versa.

Jiujitsu takes a fair amount of time to master. Part of it is learning all the techniques, which tests your physical skills. But it is just as important to learn to control your emotions. For at least the first year, each match (or what is called a “roll” because you are rolling around on the ground) brings a big rush of adrenaline, triggered by your fear of being physically controlled, choked, and forced to submit. All that fear affects your breathing, which affects your ability to fight on effectively and make good decisions. So, there is the physical side to jiujitsu, but the mental or emotional experience of jiujitsu is just as important, which is all about overcoming fear, controlling adrenaline, and learning to breath. It is interesting that some people who are better at jiujitsu technically or have some physical advantage can easily lose to someone who is calmer and more in control of their emotions, adrenaline, and breathing.

There is also a spiritual side to jiujitsu. The first year of jiujitsu will generally put you on the losing end of rolls with more experienced students. You will have to tap repeatedly. You will have to corral your ego and accept losing. It is a humbling experience. It builds what some might call character, which develops best not under the thrill of victory, but after the agony of defeat.

Helpless Police

After a couple of years of doing jiujitsu, some members of a SWAT team and other regular police officers came into the gym. I’m a small guy, 5’7 and 145 pounds. And these were very powerful, strong looking men who had 30 to 100 pounds on me. They had heard about jiujitsu and were curious.

For some reason, I assumed they would have been experienced in jiujitsu as a part of their police training. After all, if you do not have a gun or cannot use it, all anyone has is their hand-to-hand skills. I was never particularly good at jiujitsu. I have won no medals, and I am not a natural athlete or simply big, but I was able to quickly overcome all those SWAT and police officers — making them tap, repeatedly. And for the most part, I used choke holds to make them tap. And I suddenly realized something. These police officers were just about helpless without their weapons. And these were the elite of the police in a big metropolitan city.

Chokeholds

For the uninitiated, all chokeholds — or other compression techniques — may appear the same. The media certainly makes few distinctions while dissecting police incident videos to help explain any differences. But there are several different kinds of chokeholds, including the rear naked choke, the guillotine choke, and a variety of arm-triangle chokes, and there are key differences in how to use them safely. These distinctions illustrate the important of training the police, which might make a significant impact on their propensity to use force and the outcomes of when force is used both to the officers and suspects involved and our civil society, too.

The rear naked choke is the one we have often seen misused by untrained police officers, where the person being arrested is prone on their stomach or sort of seated and the officer is seen on the person’s back and the blade of the officer’s forearm is across the throat of the person being subdued. Specifically, the officer’s forearm is immediately under the chin of the person at what we might call the 12 o’clock position pressing against their trachea. Depending on which arm is doing the choking, notice that the crook of the officer’s elbow is either at the 9 AM or 3 PM position orthogonal to the choke.

Officers who use rear naked chokes across the trachea clearly have no idea what they are doing. A proper rear naked choke is not across the trachea. That is not only potentially very dangerous, it is not the most effective way to choke someone. A trachea choke is ineffective and unreasonably dangerous because, although it will eventually cut off oxygen to the brain, there is still plenty of oxygen in the person’s bloodstream from before when the choke was applied. Remember, the lungs put oxygen into the blood, which then must work its way up to the brain via the carotid arteries on the sides of the neck. The oxygen your brain is using at this moment is not the oxygen you just breathed in. Like a swimmer holding his or her breath, you can still move around for quite a while without breathing in air. Your brain has plenty of oxygen to signal to the body to resist or carry on, even while the trachea choke is being applied.

In the context of an arrest, the oxygen that was already in the person’s bloodstream before the trachea choke was applied will allow him or her to put up resistance for quite a while. By the time the arrestee appears to be compliant, their blood has been starved of oxygen for a long time, and even if the choke is released, the reservoir of oxygen in their bodies is and will be in a deficit possibly for minutes depending on how long the choke was applied. This can cause brain damage and even death.

It is also actually hard to maintain a trachea choke unless the person is already incapacitated. The person being choked will instinctively tuck in their chin to block the forearm, they will use their hands if they are free to remove the forearm, which is easier to grip when it’s placed directly in front of them, and they will simply thrash about in a panic, which will further give the appearance they are resisting arrest. A trachea or windpipe choke is painful and potentially very dangerous, and what is worse is that it is often not going to work at subduing someone quickly and safely. It is an ineffective choke for subduing someone, while being deadly.

The more effective chokehold is a rear naked choke, in which you wrap your arm completely around the person’s neck and put pressure on either or both sides of the neck where the carotid arteries are. In this choke, the crook of the elbow is now at 12 PM or pointed down, and the forearm is on one side of the neck and the bicep is opposite to that. Note that the forearm is not across the trachea, but instead on either side of the neck. It is a carotid choke, not a trachea choke.

A proper rear naked choke — a carotid choke — takes only seconds to work because it turns off the oxygen reaching the brain quickly by compressing the carotid arteries. Once it is secured, the person goes from 100% to unconscious in just a few seconds. It is not quite a light switch but imagine someone turning a dimmer switch off quickly. Of course, getting to that position is a task in and of itself and requires a lot of training. But the point is, you do not have to choke someone for minutes to make it work, it works right away. Thus, a difference in the position of the elbow of just a few inches means the difference between an effective choke that almost never causes long-term damage and a brutal and often ineffective choke that convinces the police officer the person is conscious and resisting arrest. It is a terrible misapprehension. It is tragic ignorance.

Training helps you understand how to choke people, because training means being choked and choking others in every class, week after week. You learn what it is like to be choked and how devastating it can be and why you cannot do that willy-nilly. It gives you a true perspective about the proper and ethical use of that sort of force. The most dangerous students in a jiujitsu class are the white belts, because they are just learning how to choke someone and do not know the boundaries between a good choke and one that is potentially dangerous or merely ineffective. They learn it, but it takes time.

Now, imagine that you are a police officer, and you find yourself in a hand-to-hand situation where you can’t use your gun, or you don’t want to, but someone is trying to grab you or punch you or even take your gun from you. And because you have never trained in how to use chokeholds, this may be the first time you have ever been faced with someone really trying to hurt you, where your life is possibly on the line. You have no confidence in your hand-to-hand skills because you have never been trained to use them. And you now find yourself confronting someone who may be extremely violent and has decided to attack you, a police officer. You have a binary choice: use lethal force by drawing your weapon or gamble on your untested skills.

The Solution

Instead of prohibiting chokeholds, we need to retrain the police in how to use them better, unless we want our police to rely only on lethal force in physical encounters. If you suggest using tasers or mace, you need to watch YouTube videos of police encounters where officers try to use those less lethal weapons but fail to prevent a hand-to-hand encounter.

That training in jiujitsu cannot be cursory or merely instructional. Six hours of classroom training and even 60 hours’ of jiujitsu class just will not do it. It takes two to three years to become proficient at these techniques and familiar with the culture of controlled violence that is part of every jiujitsu school. I believe that training officers in jiujitsu would make them less likely to draw a gun in the first place. Once you know you have the skills to handle most people in a fight, you learn not to fear people as much in general. Yes, jiujitsu is not going to make you invulnerable to a person with a gun or knife — for that, you need your gun — but it may make you more likely to talk calmly to the person and not escalate things due to your fear and the adrenaline that comes with the threat or reality of a physical confrontation.

Worse, if we prohibit such techniques and do not train officers in their use, they will still happen, anyway. If you ever watch young boys get into schoolyard fights or have seen a fight amongst adults, you will often see them instinctively put the other person in a headlock. Now, a headlock is a kind of a choke. I do not think chokes will go away, even if prohibited, because under stress, that is what any person is going to do in a fight.

The Exception

There is one situation where I believe chokeholds are very seldom necessary. That is when the person is in handcuffs. There is no reason to use a chokehold for more than a couple of seconds on someone who is already incapable of resisting arrest. Yes, a person can resist arrest while in handcuffs, but you do not need to implement a choke for more than a moment to gain the compliance of a person who is cuffed. They will immediately see the writing on the wall as their horizon of consciousness dims.

That officer who murdered George Floyd clearly has never been choked himself. He is a typical, untrained person who happens to be a police officer, unfortunately. His fellow officers also must not have known anything about chokes, or they would have pushed him away immediately, because they would know you cannot put a knee on someone’s throat for eight minutes or even eighteen seconds. I promise you that if any of those officers had taken six months of jiujitsu, they would never have let that happen.

Racism and Jiujitsu

Some may make the point that jiujitsu is not going to make a racist police officer less racist. In fact, they worry that it may make racist officers more dangerous, although it is doubtful how much more dangerous than that officer is with a gun. But I propose that, as much as anything, training in jiujitsu does make people less likely to act on their biases and certainly helps reduce racial and ethnic prejudices better than some didactic racial bias training workshop. But you must know something about the culture of jiujitsu instruction — that culture of controlled violence I mentioned earlier — to understand this.

Jiujitsu schools attract people of all colors, backgrounds, ages, and belief systems. You will roll with someone who is not your skin color, ethnic background, age, sexual orientation, class, or gender — all the time. While there is diversity in other sports, jiujitsu forces a degree of physical proximity and emotional intimacy that is not present in those other sports. You will learn what it is like to have someone who does not look like you release you from what would otherwise be an impending death; they didn’t just score a point on you, they gave you back your life. You will learn to let go of a choke on someone of a different skin color. And you will do this every time you go to class, several times each class. You will see the struggle in a person’s body and emotion, and you will connect with people because of your mutual struggle, whether you are giving or receiving the choke. Through this form of mutual controlled combat, you build relationships with people very different than you in other respects. You realize you have a lot in common because of your experiences in training. You may not fully overcome your prejudices, but I believe you are far more likely to see the individual you are struggling with as a fellow human being. Although it is certainly possible to be a racist with “a black friend” from jiujitsu class, it is hard to continue to be racist if you add one friend and then another and then another.

Without sounding too hokey, jiujitsu trains and reveals character and the mats are not a safe space for hate. The physical and emotional stress of class often reveals those people who are too rough or lose their tempers or cannot control themselves when confronted with someone who challenges them physically or emotionally. Jiujitsu schools tend to self-police and those sorts of people often are shown the door after, almost inevitably, a higher belt shows them the value in civility on the mat. Although there are counterexamples surely to be found, it would be almost a rule that the longer one has trained in jiujitsu, the more controlled and calm the person is under stress. Training the police in jiujitsu may help reveal those of intemperate or biased character, a kind of informal screening if you will. Though Bruce Lee was not a known jiujitsu practitioner, he was known for his humility and if he were alive today, no doubt he would have embraced jiujitsu both for its efficacy and development of the self.

Conclusion

One of the founders of modern jiujitsu, Rickson Gracie said that knowing jiujitsu is like being a shark in an ocean of fish, and the ground, which is where most fights end up, is your ocean. Our police are undertrained in fighting and, as a result, they are not much better off than an average person in a physical encounter and having lethal weapons on them makes such confrontations far more perilous. Lacking training, the threat or actual use lethal force is the predictable, if not the only, choice. And if they do end up choking someone, they will do so only by instinct and not know when to let go, because they have not experienced it themselves except in a panic.

Training police in jiujitsu doesn’t mean we can’t reform the police department, create new kinds of civil servants to do jobs the police aren’t well positioned to handle, implement community policing, reform probation rules, reduce inequitable civil penalties, decriminalize marijuana, reinstitute voting rights for non-violent felons, or what have you. We can still do all those things. But we should teach the police how to ethically and effectively subdue people using chokeholds to protect themselves better and the communities they serve.