PSDI

You may have heard the phrase, “P S D I.” This stands for Police Self-Defense Instructor and sometimes for Police Self-Defense Institute. Here is some background on understanding PSDI. What it was and why it was created.


Police officers and martial arts have gone hand in hand for many years. But in the past, in the United States, the oriental martial arts were looked down upon as not applicable to police work. With the legal climate, it is understandable that systems using punches, kicks, and strikes to the body would be largely discarded. This fact and the fact that the police disagreed on the acceptability of various techniques due to inter-style rivalry soured the image of martial arts in police work. In the mid to late 1970s, the PSDI began as a demand for more standardization in police methodology as it pertained to martial arts.


Believing that the martial arts could assist police officers, Robert A Trias, director of the USKA and former Lieutenant with the Arizona state patrol, developed in 1974 an organization of police officers training instructors who believed that the martial arts have definite value in police work. He called this PSDI. These experienced training officers, many with martial arts backgrounds, held a number of seminars, and using principles and techniques that can be applied to police work standardized skills from the martial arts and targeted the training of these skills to those most likely responsible for training police officers in the street. Through these seminars, police instructors have combined various karate, judo, jujitsu, and aikido techniques. In doing so, certain principles have been identified that are primary for training police officers in what techniques can be used in the field. These professionals have agreed that techniques for police instruction be such that they can work for all officers, young and old, male and female, must be easily learned and retainable, and must be able to be used intuitively.


There is a need for skills that build upon one another and a pattern of defense so that different techniques do not conflict. This requires coherent and interchangeable techniques, reinforcing each other—for example, techniques taught for gun removal should not conflict with those for gun retention. If not, the officer will have two dissimilar techniques and no appropriate conditioned reflex for unexpected situations. An essential PSDI concept is that of body position and awareness. Tactics and techniques must allow the officer to maintain positional superiority through instinctive response. For a police officer, a pattern of survival tactics must begin when a situation is observed, keeping the officer as safe as possible to the end of the confrontation. Tactics must also allow the officer to move easily as the situation escalates from the verbal, to the appropriate laying of the hands, possible assault, handcuffing, and transportation, and to dealing with the psychological and physiological effects after a violent encounter. Throughout all this, the officer must maintain mental and physical control. To avoid complaints by citizens for the use of excessive force, officers need to be trained in what is called the art of police survival, which is staying alive with decorum, and this has become a part of law enforcement.


As confrontation escalates through the stages of police encounters, the officer, through his directed instinctive awareness, must be able to prevent or evade a possible counter by the suspect and, if necessary, escape or attack to control the confrontation. Couple this with the demand that techniques utilized must be socially and legally acceptable and a lack of adequate time and monies for proper physical training, and all serve to make the officer’s duties formidable.


In the history of the PSDI, three Kwanmukan shihan served as directors of the organization for the USKA. T.R. McClanahan, Patrick Hickey, and Joseph Bonacci. Today, PSDI is in legacy mode and no longer certifies instructors. Some original PSDI members still teach law enforcement using the PSDI acronym.