Sykes Group LLC Law Enforcement and Protective Services Newsletter

In The News

Train now for the day will come!

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Dangerous cowards and deadly arithmetic in LE

One of the most dangerous scenarios faced by police officers is when they are clearly outnumbered. Officers typically patrol by themselves or with a partner, yet routinely find themselves interviewing, patting down, and detaining groups of four or more subjects. These scenarios usually play out peacefully, and for that reason, become an easy way to develop the potentially bad habits known as... read more

Five ways to blend marksmanship and reality-based training

For the past 20 years or so, something has been bothering me: We are teaching more, people are practicing and qualifying more, but in real life, it appears that our students aren’t necessarily....read more

Critical Combative Concepts

According to Mr. Webster's dictionary, a technique is the procedure, skill or art used in a specific or particular task. In many traditional martial arts, there's a different, specific technique to respond to every possible attack. So if someone grabs your hair, you do technique A. Technique B must be learned to respond to a lapel grab, C counters a wrist grab, and it goes on ad nauseam . Now don't get me wrong, for true martial artists who have and wish to devote the time necessary to train like this (which included me in my younger years), it's great. But technique-based training, IMHO, is the crux of the failure of much of the traditional, martial arts based, police use-of-force training. We don't have sufficient training time to take officers who aren't already proficient in the martial arts and train them to functional levels of proficiency those techniques. The bottom line comes straight from my presentation slide: If your students can't become reasona bly proficient and retain the tactics you're teaching in your allotted training time, the time you're spending is....read more

Stop the Insanity

Take a step back into the 1990s. It’s your night off. Working the vampire shift, you really didn’t get a lot of sleep, and you spent more than a handful of nights with your feet propped up on the coffee table, your favorite beverage in one hand and the TV remote in the other. Invariably, your channel surfing came across the shorthaired blond in the fitness infomercial yelling, “Stop the insanity!”

Now, I have no idea whether her diet training and ideology were valid, but I sure admired her enthusiasm. So I’m going to see if I can borrow her zeal and apply it to the law enforcement use of force. Simultaneously, I'd like to encourage you to assist in crushing a common insanity that continues to permeate society.

The insanity I’m referring to belongs to the general public, the politicians and, in some cases, police administrators, in their unrealistic expectations of antiseptic, injury-free confrontations with violent offenders. Although control without injury remains a noble and worthwhile goal, it’s...read more

The Ground Game

“If you’re on the ground and you’re not handcuffing, you’re losing,” said Gary T. Klugewicz, founder of Active Countermeasures.

There is a current trend in law enforcement training that...read more

Dubai Police Video Account of Hamas Leader’s Assassination

The video was edited by the Dubai police and includes titles that explain their interpretation of the movements of the 11 suspects before, during and after the assassination.

This has instructional value for protective service personnel, shows how intricate surveillance of your client can be!...watch video