NYC To Ban Chokeholds

link

   I'm sure there's a lot of medical information I don't know about. But a zillion people are put in chokeholds in dojos all around the world every day to no ill effect I know of. I've been choked to tapping out more times that I could ever hope to count, and choked completely out once. (You wake up groggy, but that's about it.) 

   Anyway, my guess would be that banning chokes is a mistake. I don't know any faster, safer, or just generally better way to subdue somebody.

   In fact, it kinda seemed to me that one of the cops in the recent Rayshard Brooks incident passed up an opportunity for a choke. It looked to me like he had the chance, started to go for it, hesitated, and decided not to. And I read one other comment on the web in which someone said the same thing. It's just one case--but it certainly would have been better to take the 1-in-a-gazillion chance of death to choke him out. But the counter-argument would be: Eric Garner.

   I don't know what's going on, but I have a guess. We know that the media lies and spins and generally cheats semi-constantly. And we know that it's always in the same direction and to the same end: to promote leftist views and causes. (Eh...well there was that little Iraq war thing...) My guess is that, if any of us knew anything about police work, or heard from anybody who did, it would go a little something like this: Look, there's a criminal and semi-criminal element in society, and they simply cannot be controlled without force. And they can't be controlled without applications of force when, to the layperson's eye, it might not seem strictly speaking necessary. And without the application of force, we'd be living in chaos. And if you think that the degree of force can always be perfectly calibrated to be exactly where it needs to be to do the job and exactly no more that that, then you know so little about force and fights and violence and police work that you really have no business being in this discussion. The authorization to use force simply is the authorization to accidentally use too much force sometimes. The cops--and the state--in the Rayshard Brooks incident made two different kinds of non-perfectly-optimal decisions: they opted to use less force initially, which resulted in there being a second phase of the engagement, during which they were more-or-less forced to use more force.

   As for the first part: the cops could have done a couple of different things, some weren't real options, but some were. They could have jumped him without warning to put the cuffs on. We probably wouldn't have been ok with that. They could have--it seems--used a chokehold. But that has a small associated risk that we're apparently no longer willing to accept. They could have brained him with a baton, but didn't. They could have deployed the tasers immediately, but didn't--after all, the same DA that's leveled the loony murder charge at one of the cops recently declared tasers deadly weapons. The cops having--perhaps reasonably--foregone all those options, Brooks was able to take a taser, flee, and fire it at a cop. At that point it became reasonable for the cop to employ deadly force. And this is just the sort of thing that sometimes happens when you try to get by on a minimum of force: first attempt at minimum force didn't work; second attempt didn't work; third attempt didn't work; shit...now things have escalated through the roof...

   Incidentally: can cops punch people? Probably in self-defense...but I'll bet not as a method to subdue someone. I ask because: if you can't punch and you can't choke, you are at a pretty serious disadvantage. [Also because: conventional wisdom in chop socky is: punching is a shitload more dangerous than choking.]