Gold-medal project: Judo seeks solutions in police training

The stakes were clear to both dozen police officers who gathered for a workshop with an ambitious and increasingly urgent mission - recalibrating the way police interact with the general public in America.

The class occurred the same week as jury selection for the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis officer who was simply convicted Tuesday of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd.

No-one attending the conference would deny that the profession failed your day Floyd died with Chauvin's knee on his neck. They found the classes with the theory that judo, the style with a deep global history and an imprint at the Olympics, but nonetheless shallow roots in america, might be able to help fix it.

“The social contract between police officers and the general public is degrading a bit," said Joe Yungwirth, a trainer at the workshop who built his career doing counterterrorism work for the FBI and now runs a judo academy in NEW YORK. "All law-enforcement officers I understand, we feel we must bring that back line somehow.”

Which has been a common refrain over a year's worth of police shootings and protests, which have already been underscored by calls for police reform.

The judo project is, by any account, an outside-the-box idea. Because the sport, known by insiders as “the gentle way” of fighting techinques, has little emphasis on striking and is known as less violent than a few of its brethren, some leaders in judo, and in policing, saw an opportunity to utilize the discipline to rethink officer training. Last summer’s headlines pushed these courses, which have been in development since 2018, to the very best of the priority list.

The main concept over the week of classes held at the Wyoming POLICE Academy devoted to teaching cops how to engage suspects verbally, then employ physical judo techniques if needed, to deescalate confrontations without needing deadly force.

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. Wright was shot and killed by an officer who thought she was reaching on her behalf taser when it had been, in fact, her gun.

Jim Bacon, a former athlete on the U.S. 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 keeping: “The cop resorts to raised degrees of force than should’ve been used. If indeed they have more skills, they could not have to depend on the gizmos on the belt,” he said.

The workshop also offered a window into different role an Olympic organization, and perhaps the Olympics themselves, can play in society most importantly. The USA Judo P3 Program is sponsored by USA Judo, the six-person procedure in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that has helped Kayla Harrison and Ronda Rousey, now of Ultimate Fighting Championship fame, bring Olympic medals back, but that also must constantly nourish its grassroots system.

The national governing body has been losing ground on both fronts, most recently because of the pandemic, and over the years as a result of the growing popularity of other fighting techinques, such as jujitsu and taekwondo, that contain kept judo in the shadows in the us.

With an emphasis not on hitting, but instead on using leverage and body position to execute holds and takedowns, judo is definitely simple to overlook, both in the times when Bruce Lee kicked and nunchucked fighting techinques in to the American conscience, then more recently, when UFC octagons overshadowed boxing rings among a broad, big-spending cross-section of 21st-century sports fans.

“This hits a societal issue,” USA Judo CEO Keith Bryant said. “And for all of us, it has potential to obtain additional persons on the mat.”

Within 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. The scenarios were acted out as if they were happening in public areas, with pedestrians shooting the action out of every angle on the phone cameras.

“If we can speak to you, if we can keep you up, that will change the whole visual, especially when persons have their iPhones recording," Verdugo said. "This is a matter of keeping you through to your feet rather than grinding you into the ground.”

Lee says the general public will be alarmed at how little training the common police department provides to officers for street confrontations. And because so much more interactions are actually caught on video, police are being scrutinized in ways previously impossible.

“It's not the officers' fault that they don't have working out," said Lee, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department who also teaches judo for the youth-based Police Athletic League, a sponsor of working out program. “Sometimes, the departments haven't spent the money for working out, and in a whole lot of ways, working out hasn't swept up to the realities of the technology that's out there.”

The officers for the original workshop originated from Fort Worth, Texas; Billings, Montana; Meridian, Idaho; and other small towns scattered around the West. Another workshop for other cities has been planned for the following month.

Spearheading this sort of endeavor is hardly the original role for leaders at an organization such as USA Judo, whose most high-profile mission is to greatly help Americans buying Olympic medals. But, as days gone by 13 months have shown, this could be an excellent time for the nonprofits that define the backbone of the U.S. Olympic system to reinvent themselves.

USA Judo was among the 70% of U.S. national governing bodies that asked the federal government for loans beneath the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program during COVID-19. It cut two of its eight-person staff. It currently has one Olympic medal contender, Angelica Delgado, in a sport that fans will have to scour the listings to find among the 7,000 of hours of NBC coverage come early july.

During the period of the pandemic, the majority of the 400 clubs that USA Judo sanctions in the united states were forced to close or severely curtail operations. Without sanctioned events to provide - the NGB will hold its first national competition in 17 months this weekend in Salt Lake City - its membership has dropped by half, to about 5,000. By comparison, there are between 600,000 and 800,000 judoka in France, host of the 2024 Olympics, and between 150,000 and 200,000 in this year's Olympic country, Japan.

“Folks have always said, as soon as we get yourself a gold medalist, then judo will grow” Bryant said. “But persons thought that before. We had a gold medalist who won two gold medals (in Harrison). It didn't really move the needle.”

The unheralded and unglamorous art of police training may not, either. But Bryant sees judo as you of these rare sports - unlike, say, gymnastics or basketball - which has a spot both in a competitive venue and in real-world situations.

Among the program's task force members are 2004 Olympic judoka Nikki Kubes Andrews, now a detective for the Fort Worth Police Department. And Bacon, the former U.S. national team member who is now an officer in Colorado.

“The public wants cops to be better trained,” Bacon said. “That is why we're trying to integrate judo, so we are able to become more effective in these conditions without hurting your partner.”

USA Judo offers free memberships to officers who take part in working out, and has hopes the police initiative could spark new interest in the activity. But Bryant readily concedes that growing the activity in America will need time - and that none of this is designed to buying gold medals from Tokyo come early july.

He is also acutely aware that we now have other ways to measure success throughout a difficult amount of time in America.

“We sat down and started talking,” Bryant said, “and we agreed that whenever you look at George Floyd, and each one of these situations, we felt like if these officers had been trained in judo appropriately, it wouldn't have happened.”