or forego pain and opt for a technique that incapacitates his ability to attack you.
Before we examine these people who might be tolerant to pain, let’s look at three objectives to keep in mind when dealing with such formidable attackers. In short, your task is to control the violent person, control the situation and control yourself. All three are interrelated because without any one of them, there is no control of the other two.
CONTROL OF THE ATTACKER
Control is established by a strong, confident presence, the application of calming words, control holds, punches, kicks, strikes with environmental objects, or any other technique that incapacitates the person’s physical ability to attack.
CONTROL OF THE SITUATION
You control a situation by your confident presence, calming words, use of your surroundings, strategic positioning in relation to the threat, help from a friend, and an understanding of your own physical vulnerability.
CONTROL OF YOUR ACTIONS
Sometimes a defender, out of fear, anger or lack of confidence, will overreact and use more force than a situation requires. So this doesn’t happen to you, know that when you’re in command of both the situation and the attacker, you’re more likely to control yourself, even when you discover that the threat has a high tolerance to pain.
A martial arts friend says, “Fighting is about chaos and your objective is to bring order [control] to it.” This objective and mindset must guide your actions so that you do what needs to be done for your safety and with minimum injury to the attacker.
Note: Although many of the techniques in this book are designed to debilitate an assailant who hasn’t responded to other control measures, you must always strive to affect minimum injury. It’s the legal thing to do and it’s the honorable thing to do.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and that’s okay. We all need to be reminded from time to time of these three control factors since they are never more important than when dealing with a violent person who doesn’t react to pain.
It’s easy to become conditioned to the way training partners respond to our techniques: their frantic slapping on the mat, the way they cry out in agony, how they clutch desperately to whatever hurts, and their comments about your mother. Your training can so condition you to this that when a street attacker doesn’t respond similarly—he only mildly reacts or he doesn’t react at all—it can cause that aforementioned physical and mental freeze. It’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to others.
Here are the categories of attackers in which there are always a few who can tolerate pain to some degree.
Attackers who have large fat or muscle bulk.Attackers who are intoxicated on alcohol.Attackers who are under the influence of drugs.Attackers who are out of control with rage.Attackers who are mentally deranged.Attackers who feel pain but like it.
People carrying excessive fat or muscle bulk are often tolerant of certain pain techniques simply because their mass prevents proper application, or it literally pads the pain receptors.
On one occasion, several officers and I were dispatched to help an ambulance crew control a 400-pound former Olympic weight lifting competitor they had gotten onto a gurney. The giant man was normally a pleasant fellow but he had run out of pain medication that he was taking for a crushed nerve in his neck. He had dropped a monstrous barbell on his top vertebrae a couple of years earlier.
Our entire encounter lasted about 45 minutes, in which every four or five minutes he would go stark raving mad. One moment he would be chatting pleasantly with us, and the next his face would abruptly scrunch, and he would groan, “Here it comes, boys” a warning that some violent thrashing was about to commence. The situation didn’t call for us to hit him with a baton, Taser him, or apply a pain constraint hold, which he wouldn’t have felt anyway. Nonetheless, when the pain hit, we had to control him for his safety, his mother’s, ours, and so he wouldn’t damage his house any further.
So we dogpiled him, draping ourselves over his arms, legs and torso (handcuffs were too small for him as were the gurney straps), and then hung on for dear life. Some officers were launched into the air by his massive flailing limbs, while others held on fast to their assigned stations, enjoying a sort of carnival ride until the poor man’s 60-second pain surge subsided and he was once again his affable self. During one of the breaks, we secured his arms, legs and huge torso with twisted bed sheets. That enabled us to get him to ER where he received four times the normal dosage of tranquilizers.
This is an example of improvising. We started with a six-man dog pile, which worked for a while, though I don’t how much longer we would have tolerated being tossed about. Then we made rope-sheets, which held him fast until we got him to ER.
This big man was lying down the entire time of our contact. What about one who is standing? The hardest part of taking a well-padded and pain-resistant standing person to the ground is unbalancing his large mass and weight. Once that is done, big people usually go down easily because their weight works against them.
Remember the axiom: Where the head goes the body follows. With that fighting concept in mind, practice techniques that:
push the big attacker’s chin up and back.push the back of his head forward and down.take advantage of any weight shift to force the big person down in whatever direction he’s leaning.
These concepts are also applicable when dealing with normal sized people who are impervious to pain. You will see these in action throughout this book.
One six-foot four, 230-pound officer told me that he was the lightest of four others who dogpiled a huge man who was violent on PCP. The combined weight of all the officers was well over half a ton, and although at first the big subject could easily move the pile around, they quickly wore him down to a point where they could apply restraints. The officers were aware that the tremendous weight on the man could suffocate him, so once the cuffs and hobbles were on, they got off.
The dogpile is an effective technique as long as you know where the threat’s hands are and as long as you don’t stay on top of him too long.
Note: Be careful tripping and sweeping big people because it really hurts when they fall on your leg.
PEOPLE INTOXICATED, HIGH, ENRAGED AND MENTALLY ILL
I’m placing these four types into the same group, since the common thread among them is that some people in all four function with a dulled consciousness.
There is a wide-range of responses to pain within this general category. Some feel a little and others feel nothing. Here is an example of someone in the latter group.
A fellow officer got a call on a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach, the suspect last seen somewhere in the blocks between houses. The officer eventually found the man in a backyard, and ordered him at gunpoint to drop his knife and lie down. Glassy-eyed and either mentally deranged or high on something, the man began slashing the air
