One of the disadvantages of being a guy is that we have a couple of, er, rather exposed pain points. A blow to these points can be incapacitating, and another rather effective way of taking the fight out of someone. Usually in a struggle, you want to end the fight quickly, because the longer it goes on the greater the chance that someone will get seriously hurt. This fight had already been going on longer than it should have, and as he continued to fight and try to elude our grasp, and bite at us, I warned him to stop or I would hurt him. When he didn’t stop I punched him, hard, right in his, um, pain points.
No one told me that pain doesn’t always have the desired effect on someone, or any effect for that matter. Herman continued to struggle as if nothing, nothing, had happened. He almost slipped out of my grasp as I paused for a second trying to take in what had just happened. It’s funny how the mind works, I mean I must have missed right, so I again told him to stop or I’d hurt him and then punched him “there” again.
Nothing. Back to plan “A”. Mark and I continued to try and keep control of him, avoiding his teeth as we rode back to the cells. At the cells we held him and sat him down on a metal chair while we booked him in. Some of the standard things that you do when booking someone in is to empty their pockets, remove their shoes and belts and any extra clothing they might have. When we asked him to remove his shoes, he of course refused, and I grabbed his leg and lifted it so someone could take off his shoes. When I lifted his leg it kept going, offering no resistance and I soon had his leg behind his head. The shoe off I repeated it with his other leg, again it went easily behind his head.
All the while, he continued to gnash and scream at us. The look in his eyes was as a wild as any I had ever seen. His pockets empty and extraneous clothing removed it was time to put him in cells. We decided that we would “hog tie” him so he could do no harm to himself in the cells. (Hog tying.. handcuffing someone with their arms behind their back, shackling their legs to their hands and placing them on their stomach, I subsequently learned, is something you should NOT do with this type of prisoner. Studies several years later showed that this exact type of offender, wild, violent, seemingly pain free, usually on something, frequently died after being placed in a hog tied position. It is now called “Sudden Custody Death Syndrome”)
We had a bit of a problem in that he was handcuffed in front and we needed to move the handcuffs behind him in order to hog tie him. The cuffs would have to be shifted around to his back.
Okay, another lesson in pain. On your wrist, right at the base of the thumb, is another pain point. It is rather conveniently located, from a police point of view, because it happens to be located where handcuffs sit. If you were handcuffing someone, and only had one cuff on, and they were struggling trying not to be handcuffed, a simple twist if the cuff, forward towards the thumb, can hit the pain point and frequently take the fight out of someone. When it was done to me in training I was on my knees in a fraction of a section, so I know it can be effective.
It was clear that he was not going to co-operate so we decided to put him down on the floor where we could control him better and move the cuffs. I grabbed his handcuffs and twisted them, fully expecting that he would quickly follow the cuffs to the floor. Wrong again, there was nothing, no reaction at all. So we man handled him down and while I sat on him, another member controlled his kicking legs and two more held his arms we undid one cuff and hand cuffed him behind his back. Then we took a set of shackles and placed them on his legs. But we neglected to loop the shackles through the cuffs to hogtie him. Quick solution: we took another set of handcuffs and cuffed the handcuffs to the shackles. Problem solved we carried him into the drunk tank (which we emptied of its current inhabitants) while he continued to struggle, and set him down on the floor.
Now we could settle down and start the paperwork for there would be no more dealing with him this morning. Wrong yet again.
To be continued…
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This guy is sounding sort of super human and scary – like a cyborg or something.