The New Yorker:

Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, has said that he wants to get mixed-martial-arts fighters to train his field agents. But a version of this is already happening, with law-enforcement agencies embracing Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

By Sam Eagan

Deep inside a municipal building in the Seattle suburbs, Rener Gracie is directing police-academy recruits in an elaborate role-playing scenario. One trainee, who is dressed in all black, like a burglar in a nineties cop show, is “the bad guy”; another, in full patrol uniform, is tasked with arresting him. The bad guy mimes rage, puffing out his chest, while the patrol officer backs away, hands in the air, the very picture of de-escalation. Then Gracie shouts “Action!,” and the uniformed recruit moves to apprehend the suspect, twisting and pretzelling him into an abstract mess before finally cuffing him.

Gracie was commissioned by the Bellevue, Washington, Police Department to coach trainees through different hand-to-hand-combat scenarios. He is six feet four, with a lean, musclebound frame, and a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art that his grandfather and great-uncles developed about a hundred years ago in Rio de Janeiro, by modifying the traditional Japanese martial art of Judo. “Jujitsu” is a Japanese word that translates to “the gentle art.” Strikes are deëmphasized as compared to in other martial arts, and there are few explosive movements: practitioners drape themselves over their opponents like blankets, slowly progressing into more and more advantageous holds, until they can force their adversaries into submission, using a joint lock, say, or a choke hold. This, Gracie argues, makes it perfect for law enforcement. His “Gracie Jiu-Jitsu” system is designed to help individuals take down larger, stronger opponents without having to resort to more violent force. Gracie has been conducting these kinds of trainings since 2008, but he says that interest from law enforcement spiked in the summer of 2020, after public demand for police reform reached new highs, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. “ We’re talking twelve, fifteen courses a year to, like, seventy-five courses a year,” Gracie told me.

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