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ESTABLISH A TACTICAL PLATFORM
“Standard precautions” is a well-known health care concept that defines the minimum safety precautions that you should apply to every patient regardless of appearance, race, gender, or age. In most cases, you cannot tell if a patient is a carrier of an infectious bloodborne disease just by looking at him. Standard precautions ask you to assume every patient is a potential carrier of a bloodborne disease. As a result, you should take minimum isolation precautions with every patient to reduce your vulnerability of exposure to infectious bloodborne agents. You can take this same concept and adapt it to self-defense.
During every initial citizen or patient interaction, take minimum tactical precautions-whether or not indications of violence are present-to reduce your vulnerability to a sudden attack. Understanding how and when you are vulnerable is essential to establishing a tactical platform for an effective response to violence.
Pressure Point Control Tactics (PPCT) Management Systems has developed a “survival reaction time model” that describes the steps involved with responding to a threat. It consists of the following four stages:
- Threat perception.
- Analysis and evaluation.
- Formulation of a response.
- Initiation of the appropriate motor action.
You must allow sufficient reaction time for this process to effectively occur. Also, a set of trained responses must be in place within your short-term memory for the quickest, most effective response. If any stage in this process breaks down, your response is likely to be prolonged and ineffective. If this seems like a fairly lengthy process, it is. As a martial artist, I know that if I am starting at square one during the initial phase of an attack, I will always be slower than my attacker. You cannot wait for an attack to occur and expect to react in sufficient time; it simply will not happen. You must be “primed” for motor initiation. Again, situational awareness, from a martial arts perspective, consists of anticipating an attack before it occurs and having a plan. This means that prior to an attack, if, while performing my duties, I briefly consider the possibility of a sudden attack and decide what my response to that attack will be, based on previous training, I will be “primed” for a motor response.
Ensuring you establish and maintain a substantial “reactionary gap” whenever possible is an essential part of a tactical platform. When an attacker does not have to take a step to reach you, there will not be sufficient time to respond. At a minimum, you should maintain a distance of six feet, when possible. (See the A/CME Minute instructional video “Reactionary Gap” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsKHJwqEhbQ.) Many times, this is not possible, such as when rendering medical care, in which case you must always avoid the inside position-the area between an individual’s shoulders. Ensure that you maintain outside position when taking a blood pressure, starting an IV, or conducting an interview. Outside position gives you a tactical advantage against a sudden attack. (See the A/CME Minute instructional video “Relative Positioning” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbQIFUp8GBs.)
USE OF FORCE
It may be difficult to discern one violent threat from another. To determine a “reasonable” response, understand how to evaluate a violent threat and determine its severity.
In general, you can place violence into one of the following three categories:
- Low-level threats. Includes facial expressions, body postures, hand positioning, gestures, and verbal threats that indicate aggression and possibly an impending attack.
- Moderate-level threats. Includes active aggression such as strikes, kicks, or any assault with “personal weapons” that are intended to harm the firefighter/EMT.
- High-level threats. Includes an attack that places the firefighter/EMT in fear of great bodily harm including an assault that could cause permanent injury, disfigurement, or death.
Remember, threat perceptions are subjective. A moderate-level threat for one firefighter may be perceived as a high-level threat for another. I have been kicked and punched more times than I can remember. For me, it is perfectly natural. For someone else, who may have no experience with self-defense, it may feel like a life-or-death situation.
Whenever evaluating a threat and attempting to determine the appropriate response, always consider common-sense variables such as your attacker’s age, gender, strength, and ability level; the number of attackers; the presence of a weapon; and the number of fire/EMS personnel on scene. For example, imagine you are cornered by a 100-pound, 80-year-old woman wielding a baseball bat; your threat evaluation would obviously be different than if it were a 220-pound, 20-year-old male in the same situation. As your perceived threat level changes, what is considered a reasonable response also changes.
PPCT is an international leader in legally acceptable use force training. It defines reasonable force based on the following four “Use of Force Justifications”:
- Was there a need for the application of force?
- Was the relationship between the resistance and level of force proportional?
- Was the extent of the subject’s injuries proportional to the subject’s level of resistance or threat to the firefighter/EMT or another?
- Was the force used in good faith, based on the perceptions of a reasonably trained person and objectively reasonable based on the facts the firefighter/EMT had at the time?
(See the A/CME Minute instructional video “Defending Self Defense” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG1_84oPA6c.)
CONTROLLED RESPONSES
Everything you do in the fire service is based on a process of evaluation. When following a threat evaluation, you must select the most appropriate response. Just as threat levels are placed into varying levels of severity, so are your responses to violent threats. A response option continuum is a system that helps emergency personnel select the most appropriate response to a perceived threat. It defines various levels of control including low-level responses such as a professional presence and verbal direction, moderate-level responses such as contact controls and compliance techniques, and high-level control techniques in response to active aggression and deadly force assaults.
A professional presence is one that expresses competence, confidence, and empathy verbally and nonverbally. When dealing with a potentially violent individual, it is important to strive to maintain a presence of “neutral authority.” I first learned this concept while working at a wolf rescue in Candy Kitchen, New Mexico. Wolves observe a strict adherence to pack hierarchy. As their caretakers, whether you like it or not, when you entered their pens to care for them, you were thrust into their pack dynamic. As caretakers, we strove to maintain a neutral presence, which meant we did not attempt to dominate them or allow ourselves to be dominated, as either extreme could lead to a dangerous escalation. I believe that same principle applies on an emergency scene. When confronted with an agitated or aggressive person, avoid attempts to dominate when possible, but do not appear submissive or fearful; either could lead to an attack.
During an emergency, ordinary people are often unexpectedly thrust into extraordinary circumstances for which they were not prepared. Whether dealing with a patient, a victim’s family, or a citizen who has just experienced a profound loss, empowering them with a sense of control when their world has been turned upside down may be extremely beneficial. Offering people choices under these circumstances may help to avoid violent escalations. Verbal direction should provide options and express a genuine concern for the people involved. In more extreme cases, it may involve just two options: the easy way or the hard way.
Contact controls and pain compliance techniques are not entirely new to us. It is amazing how an empathetic expression also provides a tactical platform to respond. Speaking with your hands, holding someone’s hand, or guiding them by the arm allows you to parry a blow or initiate a contact control quickly and effectively. Contact controls are also effective options when a single aggressor possesses a high pain threshold or you have sufficient personnel on-hand to initiate a coordinated, team-based response. Pain compliance consists of a series of controlled techniques that target peripheral nerve tissue to produce the desired response with limited to no long-term impact. The use of the stimulus pain is common practice in EMS; when confronted with an apparently unresponsive patient, we are taught to check for a pain response. When dealing with a violent aggressor, we use the stimulus pain to produce a desired response such as releasing his death grip on our partner’s hair.
Higher-level attacks require a higher level of control. When confronted with active aggression, you are justified in using a higher level of control. Targeting peripheral nerve tissue to stun or cause a motor dysfunction will give you sufficient time to escape or subdue your attacker, when appropriate. If confronted with lethal force, you are justified in using any means necessary to escape the encounter. If my partner was cornered by an attacker armed with a knife who, in my estimation, has demonstrated the ability and possessed the apparent intention of causing him serious bodily harm, I would be justified in using any means necessary to save my partner. (See the A/CME Minute Instructional Video “Basic Sidestep Parry” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OjTkE7K4D4.)
TRAINING REQUIRES MORE THAN JUST SHOWING UP
The essence of learning is the integration of new behaviors and perspective. Adaptation of new skills and perspective is only earned through many hours of disciplined training. To effectively execute a patient restraint procedure or a self-defense maneuver with proficiency, an ongoing commitment to training is required. Firefighter self-defense training should be facilitated by someone who is an experienced self-defense instructor and understands the unique challenges that firefighters and EMTs face.
A friend of mine summed up effective training when he said, “Amateurs train until they succeed. Professionals train until they cannot fail.” The essence of that statement was captured by Italian artist Michelangelo: “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our goals too high and falling short but setting them too low and hitting the mark.”
Training should help you to identify your limits and expand your capabilities. If you never traverse outside of your comfort zones, you will never truly realize what you are capable of. This is the essence of martial arts and firefighter training; it is why both traditions are what they are today. Violence is a real problem for the modern firefighter/EMT, and a commitment to comprehensive self-defense training at the hands of a qualified instructor is a big part of the solution.
A comprehensive policy regarding violence is necessary to establish a guide for self-defense training that deals with a full spectrum of threats. Policies that only address known threats or that solely rely on law enforcement are inadequate and are like trying to squash an elephant with a fly swatter. They simply do not prepare us for-or protect us from-the realties we face. Giving your personnel a fundamental understanding of self-defense will ultimately lead to better choices when confronted with violence. As a dear friend of mine says, “Hope is not a strategy.”
The ultimate self-defense goal for any martial artist is to anticipate the danger “waiting around the corner” and avoid it. For every firefighter and EMT, my goal is to do whatever I can to ensure you are “not there” when violence erupts.
Author’s note: Special thanks to Geoff Lassers, American CME, Anthony and Brenda Maltese, Robert Elizondo, “Little” Joe Ferrera, the White Lake Township Fire Department, and Oakland Community College.
REFERENCE
1. Violence Against Firefighters: Angels of Mercy Under Attack, 2006.
DAVID MILLS is a firefighter/paramedic and EMS I/C with the White Lake Township (MI) Fire Department. He is a 2nd Dan Traditional Taekwondo.
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