Punching Day: Street Survival (Patreon)

Most street survival books have low stakes. They teach blocks that don't work to nerds who will never get jobs as ninjas. It doesn't matter if details are wrong, or if you carry those wrong details with you your whole life. Today's book isn't like that. Today's book is a cop instruction manual written by cops.

Street Survival: TACTICS for ARMED ENCOUNTERS is a partially organized, extremely illustrated 416-page guide to shooting suspects. Often with actual photos of exactly that. And it was published in 1980, so during the editing process no one said, "We shoot a suspiciously black amount of people." Sorry, that's a confusing way to put it. They would have probably said, "I don't wanna sound like Fizketti's wife, but this book needs more limp white dirtbags."

I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Yes, there are a lot of pictures of men being shot, and their chance of blackness is nowhere close to racial census data, but the writing is not fun and conversational. It has the tone of traffic school being taught by a literature professor who just drove his family into a train.

"Luck is a frail reed on which to hang your life," says this police lieutenant during his three page treatise on keeping at bay the violent chaos which so haunts the lives of all God's vermin. It is hauntingly grim, even if you ignore the dozens of pictures of dead and dying men. All the authors have been shot and their perceived readers are rookie cops about to quick-draw their way through a world of cop killers. They are not playing make-believe.

Well, okay, some make-believe. In chapter one, the authors went to a prison to get tips from inmates about how the police they murdered could have killed them instead. And since this is obviously an insane plan, it didn't go their way. And since they're cops, they just lied. Here are some of those interviews.

The first inmate they interviewed explained how he killed a cop because "he was a threat to his greed for the money." Weird, but it's even weirder how they somehow found the one prisoner who freely tells police about his crimes who has also done the emotional work to process his feelings about it. Pretty normal so far, but then the inmate spends the rest of the interview speaking in the distinct language of police procedure. I don't know; I find it hard to believe the man whose day job was amateur money greed would describe his 15th murder like, "On the day in question, the success of my homicide owes much to the responding officer's inadequate threat assessment and ignorance of verbal command protocols. It would have been far better to kill me from an elevated position or perhaps even before I had committed any crimes."

The second man doesn't have the first inmate's command of law enforcement jargon, but he respects their bravery and patience. He understands being a cop requires a feeling for humanity, though feelings are not something he himself will ever know. INMATE 2 is a classic psychopath molded into a cop killing machine by Black Muslims. And also Black Panthers. And also any other black revolutionary groups the cop writing this fake interview assumes probably exist.

So you can see the story being told. Cops are heroes admired by all, even the sociopaths who kill them, and suspects exist only to murder and money greed, staying one step ahead of police procedure through specialized, Black training. You may have figured they would try to build this narrative, but no one could have imagined it would be this ham-fisted. This is maybe the least subtle propaganda possible. How does one get through life with such little guile? When this author's fifth wife said she wanted to be seduced, he held a gun to his temple and said, "Make love to me! Or I'll fucking do it! You know I will."

Speaking of silver tongues, let's hear from one of the cops they often quote, Deputy Chief "Zip" Zbinden.

"Zip" Zbinden rules. He tells the story of a time he tried to talk a maniac out of shooting him by saying random things about the weather and it didn't work. At all! Like, his plan was to small talk a gunman as he walked over to grab his gun! And even now, in the retelling, he mentions several times how he thought his plan was working. "I farted loudly and said g-guh. That's when I knew I had him. I noticed I was hungry so I told him we were pizza brothers always and felt my trap growing tighter. I shouted Zip Action Tactic Alpha: three two one gun snatch go, but only God heard me, for to my surprise, I had been shot."

When the authors wrote the fake interview for the unnamed, yet pictured, INMATE 4, they decided their readers still weren't getting it. So they had this inmate describe a firearms training program designed specifically to gunfight police. "Hello and what it is, my home boys. Welcome to this holding facility for murderers like myself, a real person. At the risk of alarming your readers, our crime methods and firing stances are more sophisticated than yours. Why, some rookie cops even fail to recognize the importance of holster maintenance. Improperly dismounted handguns account for, if I'm not mistaken, 7% of deaths in the line of duty. Now if you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I have a meeting with Black Satan regarding your daughters."

Detective Jim Rowe, do you have anything to add? "You're God damn right I do. I got shot by one of these quickdraw sons of bitches and I was so pissed off I put nine rounds into the closest JCPenney's. Put that story in your fucking book, you son of a bitch. I dare you."

The fear mongering continues, and I have no idea why. I don't think police are a famously uncowed people. If you told a cop 70% of all men have been trained by the Black Panthers to shoot them, they'd growl, "Hh. Try 100%, kid. The world's not all ice cre– aaAAH WAS THAT A GUNSHOT OR A NUT!? Officer taking fire!" But this book just keeps going. There's an entire section about little things that can secretly be guns, and how prisons are nothing more than all-day dojos teaching anti-cop karate. I'm serious, look:

Security cameras caught these men in the act! Kung fu handed! This is what we're up against, fellow officers! Fear them! Fear their anti-cop karate!

I already mentioned there are a lot of photos of real dead bodies in the book. There are. But there are also a lot of adorable crime reenactments like this. Maybe? At least I don't think this is a real cop being shot. If it is, I apologize, but my point is: this book is so profoundly dishonest, it's hard to know how seriously to take it. They never tell you if a picture is from a little photoshoot they set up or if it was the last act of a reporter dutifully documenting the execution of a squad of police officers and himself. With that in mind, let's look at some tactical photos which may or may not be someone's final moments.

Sometimes you'll be gunfighting a suspect around a corner. When this happens, you'll want to use the quick peek technique. It's mostly what it sounds like, but with more peeking than you're thinking. There are six steps to the quick peek technique, and none of them are shooting. Yoo hoo, crime! Yoo hoo! Over here, crime! They learned this technique from INMATE 5 who told them, "If the heroic officers I killed had only been more cute, more impish, it would be me dead lying dead on the sidewalk instead of them, see Figure 75A."

Some of these techniques you pick up by being eight, but they're still worth going over. Knock knock, crime! It's Nobody! Mrs. Nobody Now You-Die!!!!

This photo, which again may or may not have been taken at the scene of a real crime, shows how to perform a three-man roof bash using only two ladders and a window. They won't teach you this in basic training, rookie, but on the streets a knife can't do shit against three hundred sixty degrees of stick.

Sometimes a suspect will appear to have only five guns when he, in fact, has seventeen. That's the entire lesson here. This doesn't come from a section on how to search suspects or where it's most common to hide a firearm. This picture of Sassy Jim Gunsecret appears in the middle of a bunch of probably fake stories about cops getting killed during traffic stops. Street Survival: TACTICS for ARMED ENCOUNTERS doesn't seem to care if you're good at your job, only that you're very afraid of it. Threats can be found anywhere, from races of people to dorks to even hot girls:

"Oh, were my heaving breasts and I going too fast, officer? Too fast to your funeral! DISTRACTION ATTACK!"

This photo is from a section about controlling the suspect. To its credit, it talks a lot about what you're allowed to do as an officer of the law. In most cases, a suspect has the right to not be gunned down just because you're scared of them. So it's weird they added this picture of Officer Fuck You with the caption, "I told 'dis clown in a bulldozer 'dat if he made a fuckin' move I was gonna shoot his fuckin' face off. I do 'dis kind'a thing all the fuckin' time."

Okay, we've been reading for 117 pages. It's time to test your training in some real life scenarios. Rookie, what would you do in this situa– oh, you've already shot him? Let's see if that was right.

Full points. The man was a detective, but in Figure 118, he was holding up nothing to prove this. In Figure 119, he demonstrates the proper procedure of stopping your gunfight and pulling out your badge to prevent any fellow officers from murdering you. This shows an odd thoughtfulness from the authors, as if they really considered, "Would these tactics still work if I were a Black cop?" And then they immediately decided, "Oh my god, we would absolutely shoot ourselves." I think this is them genuinely recognizing their biases and then telling those biases ways they could maybe do a little to help.

"You've got to be believable," says the author describing the time his partner faked a heart attack to get out of a hostage situation. "Here's a real picture we took while it was happening," he adds. "Again: the key is believability, along with my faster-than-gun jujutsu."

While we're talking about martial arts, let's go over some of the moves you can do when a suspect tries to steal your gun.

It couldn't be easier. First, you grab the grab. Then you shove the face. Then you knee the dick. Leave your fallen sidearm where it lies as a warning to others. This is a rare situation, as many criminals will already have their own gun. When that happens, what can you do? Our top trainers have developed a technique for this. They call it "running," and let's see it in action.

I don't know if they staged this photo for the book. On the one hand, I couldn't find a record of this shooting and a sniper attack would be a weird time to be taking pictures, but on the other hand, who would include this much butt crack in a training exercise? Either way, there is no advice more unnecessary than "get the children to cover, remember to hustle." He grabbed a kid and ran, hoping for the best, and leaving his parents to die! Calling that a "tactic" seems dramatic, even from the writer who said "luck is a frail reed on which to hang your life." The term "tactic" should be reserved for something like advanced gutter peeking. Let's learn that now.

If you find yourself in a point blank gunfight with a curb as your only cover, try to make sure it's the part of the curb near a drain or some railroad tracks. This is why they say police tactics are 50% hanging your life on the frail reed of luck and 50% not being the dumbest fucking kid in a Nerf battle. Now, you've turned the page to Chapter 8: SHOOTING TECHNIQUES and see this two page spread. How do you react!?

That's right! You were shot to death by Officer Zip "Sanchez" Coleco! I love this. Just fucking awesome. Another amazing choice made by a group of truly unknowable photographers and editors. And it's the perfect way to start this chapter on shooting techniques, which is goddamn nuts. For instance, let's examine, for whatever reason, how modern criminals still utilize the shooting technique developed by John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

Why is this here? To whom or what would this be useful information? Is this so we can quickly identify criminal shooters by the number of hands they have on their gun? No, that can't be it, because here's a photo of two cops about to one-hand execute an unarmed man:

Lost adrift in a sea of fake anecdotes, paranoia, and Charles Bronson fantasies, the cop authors waffle over whether one-handed or two-handed shooting is best. In the end, they decide the reader needs to shoot with their heart. But whatever number of hands you pick, stick with it. You don't want to spend precious gunfighting seconds wondering what to do with one of your hands. They even show you how to shoot with your cigarette-hand in case crime shoots you in your gun-hand.

"Good luck killing me without your gun-hand, pig! What's this? No! Non-denominational black revolutionaries! We've made a mistake! We've underestimated his training!"

At this point we've learned how to hide, how to peek, how to run, and how to shoot. I'm not being a dick when I say the book is done with all it has to teach us. So you recruits can spend the last 200 pages having free time, unless… does anyone want to learn how to bounce bullets into a suspect!? Yeah? Fuck yeah!? Then everyone grab your shotgun and listen!

This is so goddamn sweet. This is something Mel Gibson would do after saying, "Scumbag in the side pocket." This is something a real cop would pretend they never read after peppering a family with buckshot 45 degrees to the right of a man matching the color of an anti-cop karate master.

The rest of the book is devoted to things cops should not do, which alarmingly did not include "ricochet shooting."

At first glance, everything here seems to be in order. Dom DeLuise and Rudy Ray Moore are making America laugh on the set of Ham Cop Burger Crook 2: Back on the Beef. But what's actually happening is far dumber. This arresting officer has blundered into a suspect's known kick range! On these streets of kick, never poke with your gun what you could shoot with your gun, rookie. Let's see another version of this lesson, only smaller and cuter.

When you have your cocked revolver to the head of a teen boy, what you want to do is retrace the steps leading you here and consider what you could have done to avoid this. Go back as far as you can, past your training, maybe all the way to your childhood. Was it a single terrible incident or repeated trauma that made you into this? Really examine why you have that boner, rookie.

Okay, that should do it! You're as ready as you'll ever be to survive any armed encounter. Actually, hold on. They included a few more advanced tactics.

Here's a cool way two officers can use the concept of "up" to shoot one guy at the same time. Decide with your partner who is going to say, "There's a bullet party in your skull" and who is going to say, "He's bringing a plus one."

This is getting a little too dark. Let me see if I can find a fun one.

Okay, here we go. Here's an effective way to kiss after you've… oh. After you've killed a guy. I guess this one is dark too. Is every single one of the last hundred pages like this?

I guess so. Here the authors show the aftermath of a chili aisle gunfight where an officer died because he was still getting used to his new pistol. "A-are you taking… my goddamn picture?" he might have asked if this really happened. Jesus Christ, who needs this much theater to learn how to work their gun? Photo Credit: Sergeant Fucking Melodrama.

Does this book ever ease up? Let's see if we can go out on an image that isn't a tableau of regret and sadness.

Perfect. Good luck out there, rookie!

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