A Question of Restraint : Amid Brutality Allegations, Police in San Diego Are Using an Ancient Asian Tool as Weapon in Subduing Suspects

In the modern world of high-tech law-enforcement gadgetry, many police departments in Southern California are turning to an age-old East Asian farm tool to arm their officers in everyday encounters with uncooperative suspects.

The nunchaku, a tool used generations ago by farm peasants to harvest rice by twisting it around stalks, has become the cutting-edge weapon for many police officers, including those wearing the uniform of the San Diego Police Department, the largest force in the nation to have added the weapon to its arsenal.

But even as the nunchaku is gaining support with the San Diego street cop, especially among female officers facing much larger suspects, it also is prompting a new round of police-brutality complaints from the public, mostly resulting from extensive police use of the nunchaku in mass arrests of antiabortion demonstrators. Many law-enforcement observers believe the successes or failures of the nunchaku in San Diego could decide the future of this deceptively simple police weapon made of two 12-inch lengths of hard plastic connected by 4 inches of nylon cord.

An officer carrying the nunchaku need merely wrap the cord around a suspect’s wrist and, without much effort because of the leverage employed, can inflict enough pain to hold the suspect immobile until help arrives. The technique is similar to a number of other police techniques--standard wrist holds, applying pressure to sensitive points--in its use of pain, though perhaps not in the magnitude.

Officer Maria Silveira believes the nunchaku helped her stop a “very intoxicated and hostile” woman from attempting to leap off the 250-foot-high San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge last year.

“I put a control hold on her right wrist and she got in the patrol car,” the officer said.

But those who have felt the nunchaku describe the extraordinary pain it can inflict.

Nancy Scofield, a nurse and antiabortion protester from Poway, said she suffered sprained wrists and hands and nerve damage to her thumbs and fingers. She was arrested with nunchakus at a demonstration in April and today, “I still can’t hardly lift up a coffee cup,” she said.

“It’s outrageous, excessive, brutal force,” said the 41-year-old mother, who has filed a $250,000 claim against the City of San Diego.

“It’s extreme pain. It’s street torture. It’s like if you intensified a bad tooth pain and an earache together.”

While the nunchaku has received its greatest attention in connection with antiabortion protests, the primary purpose of the device is to control and arrest suspects in ordinary street crime. Police say the weapon is particularly useful against people who are under the influence of drugs.

Most situations call for officers to use the weapon as a restraining device by wrapping the nylon cord around a limb. But it is also permitted for San Diego officers to swing the device in the air as an offensive martial-arts weapon. When it is, the nunchaku can extend from 14 inches to 28 inches in a flash, strike around corners and send disabling blows to a thigh or knee.

In Southern California, a region with growing drug and gang problems, the nunchaku is gaining a strong foothold in several police departments. Officers in Costa Mesa and Laguna Beach are wearing the devices on their gun belts, and police officials in Oceanside, Tustin and Hawthorne are studying the tool.

The Los Angeles Police Department used the weapons experimentally in June to break up an antiabortion demonstration of 250 protesters, and now Sgt. Fred Nichols, the department’s supervisor for physical training and self-defense, is preparing a proposal to his commanders for more exhaustive field tests with the hope that the department will eventually make them standard-issue equipment.

“They’re great, just great,” said Nichols. “They’re the best thing that ever happened. . . . We have heard nothing but accolades for this tool.”

Added Bob Burgreen, chief of police in San Diego: “All of our uniformed officers will be outfitted by June or July with these. And I think other police departments will follow shortly.”

As their popularity spreads, so grows the financial fortunes for Kevin Orcutt, a small-town police sergeant in Colorado and part-time bank security guard whose brother and father spend their days assembling nunchakus at home. Thirty-three years old and a police officer for 11 years, Orcutt sells the device for as much as $49.95, a price that includes a leather case.

He said he hit upon the idea for his product--which he calls the Orcutt Police Nunchaku--in the late 1970s. Several officers in the Colorado Springs area sought the advice of Orcutt--a black belt in Jukado karate--on how to defend themselves against young gang members armed with nunchakus in imitation of Bruce Lee and his martial-arts movies. (Police say it is now a misdemeanor to possess nunchakus in Colorado and a felony to do so in California.)

To fight back, Orcutt patented his own slimmed-down version of the nunchaku and produced a 12-ounce weapon that an officer can strap to the waist. Unlike the traditional police baton that can be bulky and clumsy and hard to handle, the nunchaku is a compact weapon that the officer would be less likely to leave behind in the car.

Orcutt said his research has shown that the nunchaku was first fashioned as a farm tool in mainland China, and later turned up in Japan and, eventually, Okinawa. It is on that Japanese island, Orcutt said, that farm peasants 300 and 400 years ago began deploying them as defensive weapons against their enemies. Bruce Lee popularized them in America.

Orcutt said the weapon’s prime advantage in “control holds” can save officers from back sprains and other serious injuries suffered while fighting uncooperative suspects.

In 1983, he sold his product to his own Thornton, Colo., police department. Several other small police forces in Colorado also bought the nunchaku and today, he said, about 45 police agencies in the country are using his nunchakus. He believes their success in Southern California ultimately will determine how far the device spreads across the rest of the nation.

“Southern California agencies, even the whole state, is pretty well known for being progressive in the law enforcement field,” Orcutt said. “And that’s why I got onto a plane and went to California.”

Sgt. Don Fasching was coordinating the instruction of defensive tactics at the San Diego police academy last year when he learned of Orcutt’s nunchaku and asked for a presentation. He then set up a demonstration for the chief and the top command staff. Chief Burgreen liked it, and the San Diego department began a four-month field testing program.

The testing came to a halt even before it was completed. “It was so successful, three months was enough,” Fasching said.

Written evaluations from 40 officers were enough to sell the San Diego police hierarchy on the nunchaku.

“As we began to place the suspect under arrest, he began to fight,” wrote Officer Anne-Marie Hiskes, detailing how she gained control over a man refusing to leave a liquor store.

“I used the chopstick technique to grab the wrist. I then gained control and tightened until he decided to comply with our commands.”

Officer Derek D. Diaz described applying nunchakus on a man during a domestic disturbance. “The subject was 6-foot-3, 200 pounds and went down easily,” he wrote.

Many law-enforcement agencies have not been as quick to embrace the nunchaku. Some police officials believe the tools remain largely untested, that they have the potential for inflicting greater injuries than the traditional police baton, and that legal liabilities may increase.

Also, some police officials are satisfied with already-proven police pain-compliance techniques, such as come-along wrist holds and standard pressure points, for making difficult arrests.

“None of it’s been acceptable to us and none of it’s even been considered,” Sgt. Bob Takeshta, of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, said of the nunchaku.

La Mesa Police Chief Bob Soto, who has supervised mass arrests at several antiabortion demonstrations, also refuses to equip his officers with the nunchaku. “We don’t choose to use nunchakus any more than we would use an electronic stun gun,” Soto said.

Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation in Washington, said his law-enforcement think tank is waiting for more research on the nunchaku before issuing a recommendation on the new weapon. His main concerns are whether they’re used improperly or too often, and whether other new weapons are more suitable for police work.

“The New York Police Department has non-lethal devices including a high-spray water gun used to stun people,” he said. “It’s a quick shoot of this water and it can chill the person long enough to bring him down. It’s almost like a fire extinguisher they carry in some of their car units.

“They also have a shepherd’s hook they use to hook around a person’s foot to bring him down, and they have other restraining devices very similar to a straitjacket.”

“All of these, if they’re misused, can cause significant damage. And the nunchaku would not be significantly different.”

Kevin Parsons, who runs an Appleton, Wis., consulting group for police training, favors a new expandable baton over the nunchaku.

“There are a lot of things that work and we want to find what works the best,” he said. “And nunchakus, if you’re talking about thrashing rice, then that’s when they work the best.”

Orcutt dismisses such criticism of his product, and says that other police weapons, such as the baton, the flashlight and the firearm, can be much more deadly.

“If you’re going to hit someone with my OPN (Orcutt Police Nunchaku), you’re going to hurt them,” he said. “But not as badly as something else.”

San Diego police officials have stood behind the nunchaku even in the face of a series of citizens complaints filed with the local police-community advisory board. The panel studied the weapon too, and it gave the police command staff a vote of confidence in defending the nunchaku.

The group came to that conclusion even after an angry crowd of antiabortion demonstrators, many of them wearing arm slings and wrist bandages, jammed into a board meeting earlier this year and demanded that police stop using the nunchaku against peaceful demonstrators.

Andrea Skorepa, chairwoman of the advisory panel, said she sympathized with the protesters, noting that she engaged in the Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s and ‘70s. But she also worries about potential back sprains and other injuries to police officers forced to drag, lift and carry protesters who go limp in front of abortion clinics.

“That’s why adequate training has to be conducted along with constant monitoring,” she said. “Just like the same thing has to occur with firearms. I mean, police are also issued guns and their orders are to shoot to kill. When they pull their guns, they can kill people.”

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