Irvine Police Learning Zen of Suspect Control : Law enforcement: Officers are learning the Koga Method, which stresses minimal force during confrontations with uncooperative suspects and draws heavily on the martial art aikido.

Don’t meet force with force.

Maintain self-control and awareness of your surroundings.

If you become distracted, you become vulnerable.

Using these principals, Irvine’s police officers are being trained to control violent or uncooperative suspects.

Irvine has become the first Orange County law-enforcement agency to train all of its officers in the so-called Koga Method, department instructors said. Drawing heavily on the martial art aikido, the method stresses minimal force during confrontations to reduce the likelihood of injury to police officers and suspects.

As a result, Irvine’s 126 officers have switched to a longer baton and will be drilled in ways to gain control of situations using verbal commands and physical balance. The method is named for Robert K. Koga, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer who began teaching his techniques to various police departments in the 1960s.

“In Irvine, we were not spending enough time on arrest and control situations,” Chief Charles S. Brobeck said. “Failure to control a violent confrontation sometimes will lead to a shooting that sometimes could be averted,” he said.

Police and academy instructors said Irvine’s change in training comes at a time when cases of violent confrontations, like the 1991 Rodney G. King beating, have prompted more people to pay closer attention to police officers’ use of force.

“The area of use of force is continually looked at,” said Hugh Foster, director of the Golden West College Criminal Justice Training Center in Huntington Beach. “But with the notoriety with the King incident, it is something that is being examined in greater depth” in Orange County and elsewhere.

Irvine police said the new training, which began this spring and will continue until fall, provides a smarter way to conduct business on the street, which officers say is becoming increasingly dangerous and unpredictable.

“What we have now is the police officers’ new toolbox,” Irvine Police Cmdr. Charles Bozza said. “When I started in law enforcement, they gave you a straight stick and taught you how to use it and how to do the chokehold and that was part of our toolbox. As society changes, you see a new cop. So an officer who is more thinking and feeling would look into the toolbox to solve different problems.”

One of the new tools is a slightly longer baton, replacing a side-handled model. Irvine police switched to the 29-inch baton earlier this year because it is simpler, quicker to use and packs a bigger wallop, officials said.

The straight-handle baton is also better suited for samurai-sword-like swings, which help officers strike suspects fewer times in areas deemed “acceptable targets.” For example, an officer should try to strike a violent suspect just once or twice on the lower legs, arms or midsection to gain control, said Officer Joel Davis, an Irvine instructor.

The Koga Method also offers non-traditional ways to achieve compliance. If someone refuses to get out of a car, for example, an officer might distract that person just long enough to pull them out, Davis said.

An officer’s voice can also be a weapon. Irvine officers have been introduced to “verbal judo,” a technique meant to defuse escalating situations. Using verbal judo, an officer “talks to people without using threats or bluffs and you don’t shut down communication,” Davis said. “If you are talking with someone and they start yelling and you start yelling, then you have two people who are not listening. . . . You want to avoid the argument and be able to open channels of communication.”

Department officials said they hope the training will help maintain what they believe to be good relations with the community. Trying to improve through more training “is a lot easier than having a negative reaction from the public,” Bozza said. “Once a department gets a reputation for something, it never seems to go away.”