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Policing & The Problem of Physical Restraint

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The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable “seizures” and thus renders unlawful police use of excessive force. Steven Koh discusses the role of police putting “hands on” a civilian and its potential to escalate toward lethal physical encounters.

Image courtesy of interviewee. August 29, 2024

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This video is a transcript of a discussion focused on policing, particularly the issue of physical restraint. The speaker, Steven, shares insights from his background as an Asian American and a law professor. He explains how his personal experiences with martial arts, specifically judo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, inform his understanding of physical restraint in policing. Steven highlights the dangers associated with police physical restraint, noting that improper restraint can lead to escalation and even deadly outcomes, as seen in cases like the killings of unarmed Black men.

He articulates the concept of "body mechanics gaps," which includes the physical distance between police and civilians, societal misunderstandings about police restraint, and gaps in the training and confidence of individual police officers. Steven argues that the problem of physical restraint is inevitable in any society where individuals may pose threats to others and that proper training in techniques for safe restraint is essential.

The discussion emphasizes the need for improved police training to handle physical restraint situations effectively, advocating for hand-to-hand training curricula like Gracie Survival Tactics. He acknowledges potential objections to further training, such as the risk of police overusing restraint. Despite these concerns, he believes it's vital to address the issue given the frequency of police interactions involving physical restraint.

In conclusion, Steven argues that the challenge of physical restraint requires serious consideration in current discussions about criminal justice reform and acknowledges its persistent presence in any envisaged future structure. He calls for a cultural shift in understanding and training around restraint techniques to ensure safety for all parties involved.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Background of the Author**: The author, who identifies as Asian American and has a background in martial arts (specifically judo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), discusses how their personal experiences influence their understanding of body movement and physical restraint in the convideo of policing.

2. **The Problem of Physical Restraint**: The author highlights issues surrounding police use of physical restraint, particularly in incidents involving the killing of unarmed Black men. The author argues that police often lack the necessary skills to effectively and safely restrain individuals, leading to escalations that can result in deadly force.

3. **Conceptual Gaps**: The video identifies three gaps related to physical restraint: (a) a physical gap in space between officers and civilians, (b) a lack of societal understanding and terminology regarding police restraint methods, and (c) a knowledge gap among police officers about proper restraint techniques due to insufficient training.

4. **Legal and Training Framework**: The author discusses the inadequacies of current legal frameworks (such as the Fourth Amendment and its interpretation) in protecting against unreasonable seizures or excessive force during police restraint. Additionally, the video emphasizes the need for enhanced training programs focusing on safe restraint methods, such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu techniques, to improve police responses.

5. **Cultural Blind Spots**: The author argues that societal perceptions of martial arts and physical restraint techniques are often limited, leading to a misunderstanding of their effectiveness. They assert the importance of addressing these cultural gaps in order to cultivate better methods for handling situations that necessitate physical restraint while ensuring safety for all parties involved.

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Here are some key quotes from the video you :

1. **Personal Background and Observations**:
- "I'm Asian American, and my grandfather had a black belt in judo."
- "And recently I've been training in Brazilian Juujitsu."

2. **Focus on Physical Restraint and Police Violence**:
- "A lot of times in these situations, there was some sort of moment where the police were putting hands on the body to restrain these individuals."
- "They were incompetent in doing so, and that led to this escalation and ultimately to them using their firearms."

3. **Body Mechanics and Police Training**:
- "The problem of physical restraint itself."
- "This body mechanics gap is a physical distance between two people."
- "Most of us don't have a clear understanding of what happens when police lay hands on."

4. **Analysis of Police Uses of Force**:
- "The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizures."
- "What constitutes an unreasonable seizure will vary a lot depending on the circumstance."

5. **Cultural Convideo and Mindset**:
- "I think as a cultural matter, we don't have a lot of collective conceptualization of techniques to physically restrain someone without throwing a punch or a kick."
- "These techniques actually do work in the real world."

6. **Call for Better Training**:
- "We will have to be attentive to the problem of physical restraint."
- "One possibility here to address this problem is to invest further in training for police departments."

7. **Inevitability of Physical Restraint**:
- "Physical restraint will appear sometimes, and I want those people to be able to do it as safely as possible."
- "We need to recognize the inevitability of this problem of physical restraint in a reformist future."

These quotes reflect the key themes of the video: the author's personal background in martial arts, the critique of police practices in restraint, the importance of understanding body mechanics, the cultural perceptions of physical restraint techniques, and the necessity for police training to improve safety and effectiveness.

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I'm Asian American, and my grandfather had a

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black belt in judo.

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And recently I've been training in Brazilian Juujitsu.

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Both of these are grappling, martial arts,

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grappling martial arts involve holding the body

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and, restraining the body as opposed

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to striking martial arts, which

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involve kicking and punching.

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And because of that background, I became very attentive

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to how individuals move their body and,

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and the way in which our culture does

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or does not, kind of emphasize those

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particular sorts of skills.

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Uh, so separately, I was, a law professor.

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I am a law professor who is observing our national discourse

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on policing and observing that in a lot of these

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viral videos of police officers, killing,

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disproportionately, killing unarmed black men.

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A lot of times in these situations, there was some sort

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of moment where the police were putting hands on the body

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to restrain these individuals.

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They were incompetent in doing so.

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Uh, and that led to this escalation

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and ultimately to them using their firearms.

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So the combination of my personal background

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and what was happening in the world

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and my legal background led me to start to think about

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what are the ways in which law, culture

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and policy recognize

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or fail to recognize this problem

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of physical restraint when police use their own bodies

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to try to restrain a civilian's movement, so

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that can be using their hands, their feet, their,

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their general body weight, et cetera, right?

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And this is, a problem

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because police are literally laying hands on people's

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bodies, and sometimes they do this, in a way with

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high stakes because this can lead

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to the escalation ultimately using deadly force.

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But even that restraint itself can lead to harm.

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Uh, and we've seen that in the cases,

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prominent child chokehold cases.

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For example, the Eric Gardner case,

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I write in the article about the case of Shar Brooks.

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This was a killing that occurred, in Georgia wherein

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there were several problems with the arrest.

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But one of them was that in this moment of resisting arrest,

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the police tried to restrain Mr. Brooks.

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Uh, they were unable to. He was able to escape.

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And that led to this escalation where he reached

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for the taser, they reached for their guns,

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and they shot and killed him.

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So this is the problem of physical restraint itself.

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And what do I mean by body mechanic?

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Sc body mechanic scam is the police failure

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to address the problem of physical restraint.

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Uh, and there's three different dimensions to that.

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The first one is the body mechanics gap is a

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physical distance between two people.

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So there's some sort of space

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between a police officer and a civilian.

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And at some point that space closes when police

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officers lay hands on.

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The second way in which this is a gap is in the collective

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conceptualization in our society.

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So most of us don't have a clear understanding of

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what happens, when police lay hands on,

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or what happens when police close that gap.

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What do we even call that?

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We don't even have a clear word for it. Is it hand to hand?

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Is it, laying hands on, what do we call this space?

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It's a kind of a cultural gap in our

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collective conceptualization.

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And finally, I say that that gap is a gap in the mind

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of individual police officers.

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I've had conversations with police officers,

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in doing interviews for this.

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Many of them told me, you know,

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we only did a little bit of training in the academy.

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We, we never had to do it again.

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I'm not even sure what I'm doing sometimes when I'm,

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trying to restrain someone that, so that's a,

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a gap in the minds of individual police officers as well.

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I'm very mindful and,

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and very open right now as, as a young criminal law scholar

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to the conversation we're having in criminal law

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and in criminal justice and nationally more

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generally about criminal law.

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And to what degree do we reform the system

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and to what degree do we involve in more radical

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reimaginings, even the kind of abolitionist critique.

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Now, both of those conversations are happening concurrently.

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Uh, it seems to me, in in any scenario in which we imagine a

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future in criminal justice, we will have to be attentive

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to the problem of physical restraint.

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And here's why. If we imagine a reformed system, many

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of us hope for a system in which the 18,000 police

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departments around the world are, for example,

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less militarized, for example,

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or in which funding is, is reshaped.

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Uh, there's more emphasis on progressive initiatives.

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Uh, we imagine, i, i, I personally would, would advocate

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for future in which there is more attention to this problem

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of fiscal restraint because it is such a critical space

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with such high stakes.

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But even in a more ambitious reconceptualization

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of criminal justice of society,

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as some scholars are very want to do, there are still going

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to be scenarios in which there are individuals

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who are engaging in certain behaviors that are violent, that

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that endanger others,

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and they will need to be restrained by someone.

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Now that may not be a orthodox police officer in the way we

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think of it today in 2024,

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but someone will be enforcing some sort of community norms,

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and there will have to be some moment

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where some people sometimes are physically restrained

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because they're posing a danger to others.

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So that's why I see the problem

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of physical restraint is inevitable in any community,

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in any society in which there are individuals,

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who are enforcing some sort

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of community norms or some sort of rules.

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Physical restraint will appear sometimes,

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and I want those people to be able

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to do it as safely as possible.

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The problem with physical restraint is,

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is under conceptualized in part

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because of the legal regime that's currently in place.

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What is that legal regime?

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Well, it starts with the fourth Amendment.

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The fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizures.

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A seizure can be a variety of things, a shooting,

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an arrest, stop and frisk.

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It can also include physical restraint situations.

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There's a line of cases starting

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with a case called Tennessee Be Garner,

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that talked about balancing the intrusion

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of the individual's Fourth Amendment interests against the

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importance of the governmental interests, alleged

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to justify the intrusion.

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Justice Scalia famously called this a fact

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Bound morass of reasonableness, balancing the totality

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of the circumstances analysis.

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So in other words, the court has given a lot

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of flexibility in the way in which we treat these cases when

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we're thinking about police use of excessive force,

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police may not engage in unreasonable seizure,

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but what constitutes an unreasonable seizure will vary a lot

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depending on the circumstance.

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What this means is that this is a very undefined space,

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and it allows something like physical restraint to be kind

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of loosely regulated or kind of under defined.

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This is not a clear situation

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in which police are using deadly force pulling

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out a gun and shooting.

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This is a seizure clearly

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because police are putting hands on,

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but it's not clear exactly

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what police obligations are, what they're not.

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One of the things I mentioned in the article is there's an

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alternative world in which Fourth Amendment case law evolved

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differently, and then there was some sort of differentiation

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between a gun scenario or a deadly force scenario

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and a non-deadly force scenario.

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That's not the way the court has decided the cases.

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That's not the way in which the case law has played out

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as a result, as a constitutional criminal procedural matter.

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Uh, the problem of physical restraint is kind

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of under specified and under defined.

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Furthermore, when you, you go down a level deeper

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and look at state regulation, state statutes

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and state regulations, there's also not a lot

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of concrete guidance given to police

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and not a lot of prohibitions, that that criminalize or

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otherwise regulate physical restraint either.

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So there's a lot more guidance when it comes

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to deadly force use of firearms, et cetera.

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But most of the time, states and, and counties and,

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and police departments in their training manuals are not

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very attentive to the space.

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Again, owing in part to the fact that at the,

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the most macroscopic constitutional level,

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this is a fact bound morass.

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It's a, it's a totality of the circumstances balancing test.

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One possibility here to address this problem is

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to invest further in training for police departments

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to make them more confident

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and more safe when they are

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physically restraining individuals.

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So I'll, I'll talk first about what that looks like

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and then what some possible objections to this is.

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The most common, curriculum

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for this is called Gracie Survival Tactics.

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This is a Brazilian jiujitsu, curriculum

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that's been developed online.

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Police departments are being trained all around the country

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in some basic techniques in order to, restrain someone

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to escape being restrained oneself, to,

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retain one's weapons when being, attacked by,

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by someone on the street.

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And again, to do it all safely in order to restrain someone

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and to avoid throwing a punch or a kick.

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Now, there's a kind of intuitive objection to this that many

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of us have, and frankly, like I have sometimes as well

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as people have said, do we really want to train police

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to be better fighters?

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Uh, that's of course a very natural, response.

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My initial response anyway is to think, well,

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we're not necessarily training them to be better fighters.

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Police are on the street at all times.

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They are putting hands on someone in this country, you know,

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every few seconds when you think about all the police

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officers on the street and all the police departments.

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We've already crossed that Rubicon police are physically

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restraining people every day, many, many people.

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So this is already happening. We're already in this world.

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So do we want this to be done as safely

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as possible or do we not?

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Do we want to be inattentive to the problem

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of physical restraint and allow for this to proliferate?

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Now, there are all these potential problems with training,

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and I'm very mindful of them.

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The training could be overused.

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If police know more about how to control people's bodies,

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they may use it too much.

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The techniques could be too dangerous.

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Um, but,

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but all of these are, are worth exploring, I think at,

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at least at this point, because this problem is so grave.

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The other thing I would add to this is I think there's a

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reason why people have been inattentive to this,

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and I say this as again, someone who's Asian American

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and who is trained in this is, I think as a cultural matter,

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we don't have a lot of collective conceptualization

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of techniques to physically restrain someone

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without throwing a punch or a kick.

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So one of the things I say in the article is imagine a boxer

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and then imagine a martial artist.

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When you imagine a boxer, you think of Muhammad Ali

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or Mike Tyson, someone who's strong, powerful,

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and of course there are a variety of, racial, and,

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and gender conceptualizations that come up with that.

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Then when you say imagine a martial artist,

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I think most people would think of a slender Asian man,

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maybe in a kung fu movie in the seventies,

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Bruce Lee in a temple, you know,

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and there's a kind of third conceptualization here of,

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martial arts and of, of, of, of the combat sports tradition,

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which is of what's called MMA

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or mixed martial Arts or the UFC.

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So when most people think about this space,

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and when they think about physical restraint,

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and when they think about training

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or training in the space, they think, okay,

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the options are either punch or kick like a boxer

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or a kickboxer or two, this universe of martial arts,

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which is not really effective

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because it's mostly just Bruce Lee

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or Jackie Chan waving around

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and making funny noises, funny Asian noises.

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But the reality of it is

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that these techniques actually do work in the real world.

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Someone who is trained in judo

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or jiujitsu actually does have some ability

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to defend themselves in the real world, on the street.

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Uh, these are not just rarefied, or,

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or, you know, overly stylized,

11:33.475 --> 11:36.405
foreign Asian exotic principles.

11:36.415 --> 11:37.845
These are actual principles

11:37.845 --> 11:40.165
for understanding body mechanics, how the body moves.

11:40.985 --> 11:44.885
And so I think there's a kind of cultural gap

11:44.885 --> 11:46.205
that we have in our minds, as I said,

11:46.205 --> 11:47.205
and I think we can close

11:47.205 --> 11:48.765
that potentially with the hand to hand training.

11:48.905 --> 11:50.765
We have a problem with physical restraint in this country.

11:50.765 --> 11:52.365
Police are laying hands on all the time,

11:52.825 --> 11:55.405
And there's a body mechanics gap, a gap in space,

11:55.865 --> 11:57.045
and a gap in culture

11:57.225 --> 12:00.485
and in our minds in how the body moves,

12:00.505 --> 12:03.485
and how the body reacts when police are laying hands on.

12:04.135 --> 12:05.185
This is, this is something

12:05.185 --> 12:07.145
that hand-to-hand training in the style

12:07.145 --> 12:10.185
of the Gracie survival tactics may redress,

12:10.285 --> 12:12.985
but we still have to see how the data comes in.

12:13.405 --> 12:15.065
At a minimum. We need to explore this

12:15.065 --> 12:18.105
because of the cultural blind spot that we have with regard

12:18.105 --> 12:19.745
to this style of training.

12:20.325 --> 12:22.945
And we need to recognize the inevitability of this problem

12:22.945 --> 12:24.865
of physical restraint in a reformist future,

12:24.965 --> 12:27.705
or even in a radically reimagined abolitionist future.

12:28.075 --> 12:30.825
There will always be situations where we have to safely

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restrain someone, given their danger

12:34.125 --> 12:35.585
to others in a given moment.

"Examining the Cultural and Legal Gaps in Physical Restraint Practices in Policing"

00:00:00 - I'm Asian American, and my grandfather had a black belt in judo. And recently I've been training in Brazilian Juujitsu. Both of these are grappling, martial arts, grappling martial arts involve holding the body and, restraining the body as opposed to striking martial arts, which involve kicking and punching. And because of that background, I became very attentive to how individuals move their body and, and the way in which our culture does or does not, kind of emphasize those particular sorts of skills. so separately, I was, a law professor. I am a law professor who is observing our national discourse on policing and observing that in a lot of these
00:00:48 - disproportionately, killing unarmed black men. A lot of times in these situations, there was some sort of moment where the police were putting hands on the body to restrain these individuals. They were incompetent in doing so. and that led to this escalation and ultimately to them using their firearms. So the combination of my personal background and what was happening in the world and my legal background led me to start to think about what are the ways in which law, culture and policy recognize or fail to recognize this problem of physical restraint when police use their own bodies to try to restrain a civilian's movement, so
00:01:27 - their general body weight, et cetera, right? And this is, a problem because police are literally laying hands on people's bodies, and sometimes they do this, in a way with high stakes because this can lead to the escalation ultimately using deadly force. But even that restraint itself can lead to harm. and we've seen that in the cases, prominent child chokehold cases. For example, the Eric Gardner case, I write in the article about the case of Shar Brooks. This was a killing that occurred, in Georgia wherein there were several problems with the arrest. But one of them was that in this moment of resisting arrest,
00:02:11 - they were unable to. He was able to escape. And that led to this escalation where he reached for the taser, they reached for their guns, and they shot and killed him. So this is the problem of physical restraint itself. And what do I mean by body mechanic? Sc body mechanic scam is the police failure to address the problem of physical restraint. and there's three different dimensions to that. The first one is the body mechanics gap is a physical distance between two people. So there's some sort of space between a police officer and a civilian. And at some point that space closes when police officers lay hands on. The second way in which this is a gap is in the collective conceptualization in our society.
00:02:52 - what happens, when police lay hands on, or what happens when police close that gap. What do we even call that? We don't even have a clear word for it. Is it hand to hand? Is it, laying hands on, what do we call this space? It's a kind of a cultural gap in our collective conceptualization. And finally, I say that that gap is a gap in the mind of individual police officers. I've had conversations with police officers, in doing interviews for this. Many of them told me, you know, we only did a little bit of training in the academy. We, we never had to do it again. I'm not even sure what I'm doing sometimes when I'm, trying to restrain someone that, so that's a,
00:03:34 - I'm very mindful and, and very open right now as, as a young criminal law scholar to the conversation we're having in criminal law and in criminal justice and nationally more generally about criminal law. And to what degree do we reform the system and to what degree do we involve in more radical reimaginings, even the kind of abolitionist critique. Now, both of those conversations are happening concurrently. it seems to me, in in any scenario in which we imagine a future in criminal justice, we will have to be attentive to the problem of physical restraint. And here's why. If we imagine a reformed system, many of us hope for a system in which the 18,000 police

"Redefining Physical Restraint: The Legal and Cultural Implications in Law Enforcement"

00:04:15 - less militarized, for example, or in which funding is, is reshaped. there's more emphasis on progressive initiatives. we imagine, i, i, I personally would, would advocate for future in which there is more attention to this problem of fiscal restraint because it is such a critical space with such high stakes. But even in a more ambitious reconceptualization of criminal justice of society, as some scholars are very want to do, there are still going to be scenarios in which there are individuals who are engaging in certain behaviors that are violent, that that endanger others, and they will need to be restrained by someone. Now that may not be a orthodox police officer in the way we
00:04:56 - but someone will be enforcing some sort of community norms, and there will have to be some moment where some people sometimes are physically restrained because they're posing a danger to others. So that's why I see the problem of physical restraint is inevitable in any community, in any society in which there are individuals, who are enforcing some sort of community norms or some sort of rules. Physical restraint will appear sometimes, and I want those people to be able to do it as safely as possible. The problem with physical restraint is, is under conceptualized in part because of the legal regime that's currently in place. What is that legal regime? Well, it starts with the fourth Amendment. The fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizures.
00:05:37 - an arrest, stop and frisk. It can also include physical restraint situations. There's a line of cases starting with a case called Tennessee Be Garner, that talked about balancing the intrusion of the individual's Fourth Amendment interests against the importance of the governmental interests, alleged to justify the intrusion. Justice Scalia famously called this a fact Bound morass of reasonableness, balancing the totality of the circumstances analysis. So in other words, the court has given a lot of flexibility in the way in which we treat these cases when we're thinking about police use of excessive force, police may not engage in unreasonable seizure, but what constitutes an unreasonable seizure will vary a lot
00:06:19 - What this means is that this is a very undefined space, and it allows something like physical restraint to be kind of loosely regulated or kind of under defined. This is not a clear situation in which police are using deadly force pulling out a gun and shooting. This is a seizure clearly because police are putting hands on, but it's not clear exactly what police obligations are, what they're not. One of the things I mentioned in the article is there's an alternative world in which Fourth Amendment case law evolved differently, and then there was some sort of differentiation between a gun scenario or a deadly force scenario and a non-deadly force scenario. That's not the way the court has decided the cases.
00:07:01 - as a result, as a constitutional criminal procedural matter. the problem of physical restraint is kind of under specified and under defined. Furthermore, when you, you go down a level deeper and look at state regulation, state statutes and state regulations, there's also not a lot of concrete guidance given to police and not a lot of prohibitions, that that criminalize or otherwise regulate physical restraint either. So there's a lot more guidance when it comes to deadly force use of firearms, et cetera. But most of the time, states and, and counties and, and police departments in their training manuals are not very attentive to the space. Again, owing in part to the fact that at the,
00:07:44 - this is a fact bound morass. It's a, it's a totality of the circumstances balancing test. One possibility here to address this problem is to invest further in training for police departments to make them more confident and more safe when they are physically restraining individuals. So I'll, I'll talk first about what that looks like and then what some possible objections to this is. The most common, curriculum for this is called Gracie Survival Tactics. This is a Brazilian jiujitsu, curriculum that's been developed online. Police departments are being trained all around the country in some basic techniques in order to, restrain someone

"Navigating the Complexities of Police Physical Restraint: The Need for Effective Training and Cultural Awareness"

00:08:27 - retain one's weapons when being, attacked by, by someone on the street. And again, to do it all safely in order to restrain someone and to avoid throwing a punch or a kick. Now, there's a kind of intuitive objection to this that many of us have, and frankly, like I have sometimes as well as people have said, do we really want to train police to be better fighters? that's of course a very natural, response. My initial response anyway is to think, well, we're not necessarily training them to be better fighters. Police are on the street at all times. They are putting hands on someone in this country, you know,
00:09:07 - officers on the street and all the police departments. We've already crossed that Rubicon police are physically restraining people every day, many, many people. So this is already happening. We're already in this world. So do we want this to be done as safely as possible or do we not? Do we want to be inattentive to the problem of physical restraint and allow for this to proliferate? Now, there are all these potential problems with training, and I'm very mindful of them. The training could be overused. If police know more about how to control people's bodies, they may use it too much. The techniques could be too dangerous. but, but all of these are, are worth exploring, I think at, at least at this point, because this problem is so grave.
00:09:48 - reason why people have been inattentive to this, and I say this as again, someone who's Asian American and who is trained in this is, I think as a cultural matter, we don't have a lot of collective conceptualization of techniques to physically restrain someone without throwing a punch or a kick. So one of the things I say in the article is imagine a boxer and then imagine a martial artist. When you imagine a boxer, you think of Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson, someone who's strong, powerful, and of course there are a variety of, racial, and, and gender conceptualizations that come up with that. Then when you say imagine a martial artist,
00:10:31 - maybe in a kung fu movie in the seventies, Bruce Lee in a temple, you know, and there's a kind of third conceptualization here of, martial arts and of, of, of, of the combat sports tradition, which is of what's called MMA or mixed martial Arts or the UFC. So when most people think about this space, and when they think about physical restraint, and when they think about training or training in the space, they think, okay, the options are either punch or kick like a boxer or a kickboxer or two, this universe of martial arts, which is not really effective because it's mostly just Bruce Lee
00:11:09 - and making funny noises, funny Asian noises. But the reality of it is that these techniques actually do work in the real world. Someone who is trained in judo or jiujitsu actually does have some ability to defend themselves in the real world, on the street. these are not just rarefied, or, or, you know, overly stylized, foreign Asian exotic principles. These are actual principles for understanding body mechanics, how the body moves. And so I think there's a kind of cultural gap that we have in our minds, as I said, and I think we can close that potentially with the hand to hand training.
00:11:50 - Police are laying hands on all the time, And there's a body mechanics gap, a gap in space, and a gap in culture and in our minds in how the body moves, and how the body reacts when police are laying hands on. This is, this is something that hand-to-hand training in the style of the Gracie survival tactics may redress, but we still have to see how the data comes in. At a minimum. We need to explore this because of the cultural blind spot that we have with regard to this style of training. And we need to recognize the inevitability of this problem of physical restraint in a reformist future, or even in a radically reimagined abolitionist future. There will always be situations where we have to safely