CRDT in the books!!

Well this past week we had CRDT training and expandable Monadnock baton training. I have to say that this was some of the most intense yet fun training I have ever went through. There were so many things we had to learn. It took up the entire second week but I'm sure we could have spent much more time on it.

The first part of CRDT or Control, Restraints and Defensive Techniques, we spent learning the nerve points on the body that we can use most effectively. The nerves that we learned to use were the suprascapular, common peronial, femoral, superficial, brachial plexis, radial nerve, mandibular angle and the jugular notch. A lot to remember right? I personally don't care about learning the names till it's time for me to write a statement about a use of force where I used one of them and I need to know the name. The main thing I wanna know is how to use them. With the training we got in that short week I can control almost any type of inmate or even a person on the street that's being aggressive. There is a little bit of something for everyone. And not only did we learn all those types of techniques, but we learned multiple ways to administer them. That's where the fun part comes in.

For each one of the moves that we learned throughout the week, we had to partner up with another officer to practice on. They wanted us to make sure we understood how to do each technique effectively. Me and one officer worked together for the first couple days. Both of us felt the same way. We wanted to make sure we did the moves hard enough so that the person receiving it felt the pain on a smaller scale than the inmate, but still enough so as to leave a lasting impression. The brachial plexis and the radial nerve are the two that stand out the most on lasting pain. These two regions hurt for several days after we did them just because he and I were doing it at about 50%. When I say it hurt...there were times where we took each other to the knees in pain. Not only did we want to know what it felt like, but we wanted to make sure we were doing it properly. Whats the point of learning something if your just gonna pretend to hit the other person and not know if its effective or not. You haven't learned anything at all.

The femoral nerve and the common peronial nerve one the ones that had a lasting impression as well. Obviously the femoral nerve runs along the inside of your thigh. The common peronial runs along the outside of your leg about 2 inches above the knee. When hit properly, the pain is excruciating. That is not an understatement. One guy managed to get hit in his manhood one good time. What was funny about it was he had just said an hour before how he never wanted kids and that people who had kids were selfish. Well guess what...a couple more shots like that and you won't have to worry about having any kids. For each one of these nerves there were several ways to administer them. We learned and practiced them all...the most effective in my opinion was the knee spear. It hurt like a b*%$@!! Especially when the person hit you harder than they were trying to.

The mandibular angle is one that I couldn't resist trying on my nephew when I got home that day. These are the nerves right behind the ear at the base of it. There is a little indention there and you just have to press your fingertip in there and it will almost make a grown man cry. I know for a fact that it's not something I want someone to do to me again anytime soon.

We learned several blocks and other defensive moves. One of which was the arm bar take down. By the end of the day I felt like I needed a new shoulder. If you have never had it done to you before, try to avoid it. Bouncing off of those mats when you get taken down for an hour was a serious workout and made my entire body hurt. Not to mention the guy I was having to take down was like 6 inches taller than me and 90 more pounds than I am. It was definitely fun to learn though.

One of the last things we learned in CRDT was how to perform the guard in and guard out technique. This was by far my favorite because we performed it to its full potential.I ended up partnering with a 5'3" 200lb officer. We practiced all the different holds and learned them. Each one we had to perform it almost 10 times to make sure we could do it and it be effective. Finally the did role playing and told one officer to be the inmate and have the officer in the guard. I happened to be the officer that was in the guard. We were directed to utilize all the techniques we had learned that week to get out of the guard. We took this task very seriously. He had me locked in and I was literally fighting for my life. To understand the difficulty of this you have to understand the positioning. The person performing the guard is on their back with the other person locked in between there legs in a type of headlock. The guy that had me in the guard was all muscle. He was doing everything in his power to keep me locked in. I was trying all the pressure points and nerves to get loose and nothing was working. I even grabbed skin on the side of him and twisted and pinched trying to break his grip. Nothing worked. He had me so tight that i was within a few breaths of passing out. I actually lost hearing completely because he had cut off the blood flow and oxygen. I was so close to passing out. Finally the instructors came up and hit me and tried to boost my confidence. Out of nowhere my adrenaline kicked in even more. I managed to get an immense amount of strength and pick this guy completely up off the ground and slam him back on the mat to loosen his grip. I did a few more nerve techniques and finally I broke loose of the hold and stumbled away ready to pass out again. By then, we had gotten the attention of the entire class because we were taking it to the highest end of the realism spectrum. We were both completely physically exhausted after that for almost half an hour. Looking back I'm so glad we did that because it showed me just what I was capable of when put under a stressful situation such as do or die. It don't get much closer than that.

The training we got in CRDT is immeasurable. There are so many things that we learned that we can take with us and use every day if the need arose. Im so thankful that I had the chance to do all of those things.