"Everybody freeze. Everybody down on the ground" - "Well, which is it young feller?"

So I spent 10 hours today either handcuffing or being handcuffed. This was broken up from time to time with drills on delivering knees, punches, and kicks to pressure point/nerve clusters. I was paired up a couple of times with people who struggled with the "touch only" drills and ended up giving me a few dead legs or planting my face pretty vigorously into the ground. All in all though, it was a lot of fun and we learned some pretty cool stuff. It's especially fun to watch one girl, who is probably 5' tall or and 120 lbs or less, take down this guy who is 6'5" and almost 300 lbs using the classic vertical arm bar. As a matter of fact, our main instructor is only about 5'6 and has to use these techniques on much larger people, considering that statistically speaking the average person who resists police is a 6'1", 180 lb, 22 year-old male.

Even after all of this, tomorrow is the real big day. Tomorrow = pepper spray. Apparently the protocol is that you spray one of your classmates in the face, and then they have to fight this guy in a big padded suit until they get him handcuffed. Then you stand there while another classmate sprays you in the face and then you have to handcuff the suit man. Oh, and by the way, if you close your eyes when they spray you, they spray you again. And if you look like it doesn't hurt to you, they spray you again. Then you run over to the hose and you try to rinse as many tiny shreds of burning pepper skin our of your eyes, nose, ears, and hair, being careful, of course, not to let the water carry any of those tiny shreds down to any other part of your body. I'm sure we'll be pretty miserable, and I'll probably still be sweating, squinting, and groaning come Friday morning when we go to sign the closing papers for our house.


Oh yeah, tomorrow is also taser training, but that is "optional." As far as the option goes, I've had different people tell me different things. The last officer that I went on a ride along with told me, "Don't do it. I don't care how much peer pressure there is, or if they call you a wuss, don't do it. It's a terrible experience and you will be happy later that you didn't do it." I still haven't decided what I'm going to do. The longer we work together, the tighter we all get as a group, so it will probably be hard to "Just say 'No!'" if everyone else is taking it like a man. The bottom line is, I'll either have one sad story to tell you all after tomorrow or two. Wish me luck.