Mental Survival

About the Book

About Mental Survival Why do some police officers lose their lives in battle while others find ways to survive? Why do some police officers go overboard when fighting with a suspect while others show great restraint and professionalism? Mental Survival explores these questions and reaches deep into the history of our psyche to come up with the answers. While most new training philosophies tend to be futuristic in their attempts to answer these questions, Mental Survival goes back to the beginning to find out what we missed. Mental Survival is a must-read book for police academy instructors, managers, and police officers. Mental Survival explores why we react the way we do under high stress, our belief system and its role in our survivability, our basic training of police officers, management’s responsibility in a police officer’s survival, and the impact that society’s perceptions about police has on our ability to win a battle. Mental Survival has been a journey through my life while trying to correlate events around me with my own perceptions about survival. This book is written from my perspective as the author, and how my experiences helped me understand my survivability as well as my weaknesses and failures in attempting to reach a level whereby I could pass the lessons I learned to others so they may not repeat them. As I sat and watched a video clip from CNN showing two police officers wrestling with a man who was passively resisting, I couldn’t help but view the scene as surreal. Here we were in the year 2002, literally hundreds of years of law enforcement experience, and we were still responding to violence the same archaic way. This particular encounter began with a man possessing drugs of abuse and not wanting to relinquish it to the officers. Initially, there is only one officer. He places one handcuff on the man, who in turn begins to tense up and spins around, avoiding handcuffing of the second arm. The officer tried to take the man to the ground by using the arm he had control of to throw him down. Instead, this begins an affair that looks more like children playing than it does a well-trained law enforcement response to a critical incident. The backup officer shows up during this spinning-and-yelling show, and he too begins an archaic form of control—hits him several times with his baton for compliance. Neither officer is displaying any form of self-defense or suspect control, let alone the tactics taught in the academy. Why is this? Don’t we spend hours, days, weeks, and often months training police officers to respond to these situations appropriately? Why then do we see this time and time again? Why didn’t those officers use any joint manipulation or take-down techniques? They were taught plenty to choose from. They must have learned twenty different ways to take a man down to the ground, twenty different joint manipulations, thirteen or more pressure points available to them (depending on your academy), and at least ten different ways to handcuff this individual. So why did they completely ignore the tactics they learned in training? Some say it is because they never trained regularly after the academy. There may be some truth in this. Some say our techniques are archaic and are in constant conflict with the administration’s need for public relations. Therefore, officers do not train for fear of Use of Force investigations. This may seem contradictory to the truth since utilizing the techniques you are trained with will probably be the only thing to keep you out of trouble. Therefore, I believe this excuse is merely that—an excuse. However, what is it an excuse for? Lazy officers? I do not believe this since law enforcement officers are some of the hardest-working professionals in the world. Their jobs almost always spill over into their private lives. You will be hard-pressed to find a police officer who isn’t involved in some extracurricular activity to promote

About the Author

Edward Crispen has more than 17 years experience in the warrior profession as both a soldier and a police officer. He served in two theaters of combat during his military commitment and uses these experiences to explain his theories related to mentally preparing police officers to plan for survival. Edward Crispen as been training new police recruits for several years and is an instructor for Ohio University as well as a full-time police academy instructor. He has conducted many workshops with law enforcement and criminal justice professionals in and outside of the United States and received his education from Ohio University.