![]() ![]() Another workshop for other cities is being planned for next month. ![]() The officers for the initial workshop came from Fort Worth, Texas Billings, Montana Meridian, Idaho and other small towns scattered around the West. “Sometimes, the departments haven’t spent the money for the training, and in a lot of ways, the training hasn’t caught up to the realities of the technology that’s out there.” “It’s not the officers’ fault that they don’t have the training,” said Lee, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department who also teaches judo for the youth-based Police Athletic League, a sponsor of the training program. ![]() And because so many more interactions are now caught on video, police are being scrutinized in ways previously impossible. Lee says the public would be alarmed at how little training the average police department provides to officers for street confrontations. “This is a matter of keeping you up on your feet and not grinding you into the ground.” “If we can talk to you, if we can keep you up, that’s going to change the whole visual, especially when people have their iPhones recording,” Verdugo said. ![]() The scenarios were acted out as though they were happening in public, with pedestrians shooting the action from every angle on their phone cameras. In an exercise that cut to the core of the judo training, conference planners Taybren Lee and Mike Verdugo played suspects who were impaired, or mentally unstable, and challenged the officers to use judo to deescalate the situations. “And for us, it has potential to get more people on the mat.” “This hits a societal issue,” USA Judo CEO Keith Bryant said. With an emphasis not on hitting, but rather on using leverage and body position to execute holds and takedowns, judo has long been easy to overlook, both in the days when Bruce Lee kicked and nunchucked martial arts into the American conscience, then more recently, when UFC octagons overshadowed boxing rings among a wide, big-spending cross-section of 21st-century sports fans. The national governing body has been losing ground on both fronts, most recently because of the pandemic, and over the years because of the growing popularity of other martial arts, such as jujitsu and taekwondo, that have kept judo in the shadows in America. The USA Judo P3 Program is sponsored by USA Judo, the six-person operation in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that has helped Kayla Harrison and Ronda Rousey, now of Ultimate Fighting Championship fame, bring Olympic medals back home, but that also must constantly nourish its own grassroots system. The workshop also offered a window into the different role an Olympic organization, and maybe the Olympics themselves, can play in society at large. If they have more skills, they might not have to rely on the gadgets on the belt,” he said. judo team who now serves as a police officer in Lafayette, Colorado, says the most damning police-on-suspect encounters - many now caught on police body cameras or by onlookers holding iPhones - have this in common: “The cop resorts to higher levels of force than should’ve been used. Wright was shot and killed by an officer who thought she was reaching for her taser when it was, in fact, her gun. The goal is to avoid situations the likes of which led to Floyd’s death and, just last week, to the death of Daunte Wright, whose funeral was Thursday. ![]()
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