Popular trainer Bob Hindi, a 20-year veteran cop in Nevada, always stresses the traditional triad when he teaches officer survival:
• Mental preparation
• Physical preparation
• Tactical preparation.
Yet when he headed out of his house on a late-night family errand awhile back, his readiness with these critical fundamentals was dangerously flawed.
The result, he says, not only embarrassed him as an instructor but could have cost him his life.
Hindi, an internationally known expandable baton expert and designer of a groundbreaking duty belt equipment deployment system, had fallen asleep on his couch in khakis and a t-shirt that fateful Saturday. At about 2230 hours, his 17-year-old daughter Hillary shook him awake and pleaded with him to run out to the neighborhood drugstore and buy her some cosmetics.
Along with her sister Hannah, Hillary hosts and performs on “The Hillywood Show,” a revue of spoofs and impersonations that’s broadcast on the Internet, and she was “desperate” for makeup for her next program.
“I was tired, annoyed and in a hurry to get this done,” Hindi told Police1. “We live in a very nice area of town, and the store is only about a mile away. I’d been there a number of times, no problem.”
In his haste, he left home without a firearm or a knife.
Approaching the checkout counter with Hillary’s items in hand, he continued in what he now describes as “Condition White.”
Ahead of him at the cash register off was a black male with an oversized jacket and “extremely baggy, saggy jeans—a gangbanger look.”
In retrospect, Hindi realizes “he didn’t fit the area,” and when Hindi stopped about 8 feet away to wait his turn, the man, who was engaged in conversation with the 60ish female clerk, turned and looked him over, “up and down, sizing me up.”
Turning back to the clerk, evidently unimpressed, the man began asking about various items shelved behind the register, then in the next breath complaining that he didn’t know where his money was—“acting really stupid,” in Hindi’s estimation.
“It was weird,” Hindi says. “As a trainer, I tell officers to always be cautious and aware, and yet for some reason I can’t explain that concept was not going through my mind at that time. I was irritated, tired, just wanting to get home, and here I had to listen to this bonehead acting like a fool.”
Hindi glanced down for a moment and in that instant the clerk emitted a terrified shriek: “No! No! No!”
“Everything went into slow motion when I looked up,” Hindi recalls. “It seemed like an eternity.” The cash register drawer was open. The gangbanger was trying to pull a bag away from the clerk and she was struggling to hold onto it. Then Hindi heard the woman cry, “Oh!,” as if the man “had whacked her across the face.”
Just like any cop would have done, Hindi says, he instinctively grabbed hold of the man’s jacket.
“He tried to pull away and run to the door,” Hindi says, “but I held onto his shoulder and coat and dragged him down. We went to the floor near the front entrance and money scattered out of the bag. As we were flying through the air, I very clearly thought in my mind, Oh my God, I hope this guy doesn’t have a gun or knife.”
Statistically, a “tale of the tape” would give the edge to the suspect. He was mid-20s, 5 foot 9, 185 lbs.; Hindi was 47 years old, 5 foot 6, 150 lbs. But as anyone who’s met him knows, Hindi is hard-packed muscle. In high school he was a wrestling champ with a 47-0 win record his senior year and he attended UNLV on a wrestling scholarship. The ground to him could be court advantage.
“When we hit the floor,” Hindi recalls, “a glimpse of myself lying in a puddle of blood flashed clearly in my mind. I thought, Either you’re going to live or you’re going to die… and I don’t want to die here. A whole new adrenalin dump—a surge of survival power—exploded through my entire body. I’d never felt anything like it before.”
The suspect had landed belly-down, his thighs across Hindi’s right leg. Hindi was on his back. To him, his adversary seemed “huge, very strong. I’d been in fights before, of course, but the feeling of being on my back with this guy was terrifying.”
The flooring was hard tile and slippery. Hindi struggled against the adverse surface and his opponent’s bulk, calling up his long-ago grappling techniques in an effort to gain a mount as a position of advantage. After what “seemed like extremely long minutes” of exertion and maneuvering, Hindi was able to gain a perch straddling the suspect’s hips. From there, he delivered a forearm strike across the man’s face which “got too close to the suspect’s mouth. I felt his teeth clamp down on my wrist and hand.
He managed to painfully yank his hand free, losing some skin in the process. “I was going to punch him in the temple, but then I thought, If I bust my wrist or my knuckles on this guy’s head this early in the fight I’m gonna have serious problems. This fight is just starting.”
His challenge, against an antagonist who outsized and outweighed him, was to keep the man’s hips pinned so he couldn’t roll or rise up and also to control his hands.
“I still didn’t know if he might have a weapon in his waistband or a pocket.” At one point he saw the suspect “grab a little object by his head with his left hand.” Hindi couldn’t tell for sure what it was—“it looked like a wire of some kind, but it seemed very important to him.”
Hindi snatched the hand and forced it under the suspect’s body, between his chest and the floor “where he couldn’t do anything with it.”
Meanwhile, a communications “cluster” was developing with the store personnel.
The frenzied female clerk ran over, squatted by the suspect’s head and began lecturing him. “You’re in big trouble now,” she declared. “You’re going to jail!”
“Shut the hell up!” Hindi told her. “Call the police!”
She screamed instead to her manager that she’d been robbed.
“Ma’am, I need some help! Get me some help!” Hindi shouted, realizing how quickly a tenuous edge can be lost in a fight. She ran around behind him and stepped on the suspect’s ankle. “That was the help I got,” Hindi says.
The manager, peeking out around a corner, ordered Hindi to let the suspect up. “It’s the policy of this store,” he insisted. “Let him up!”
Initially Hindi didn’t want to identify himself as a cop for fear that would spark an adrenalin surge in the suspect, but after several fruitless back-and-forths with the persistent manager he did announce his office.
Amid the chaos, Hindi glanced up at the glass front doors and saw a young white male about 6 foot 2, 260 lbs., peering in from outside. The man then entered the store, both hands in his pockets, looking first at the cash register, then at Hindi and the suspect.
“Sir, you need to get out of the store,” Hindi barked.
The man just stared at him, hands still in his pockets.
“Sir, you need to get out now.”
The man looked at the money on the floor and slowly responded: “It looks like a fuckin’ public store to me.”
Oh my God, Hindi thought, you’ve gotta be kidding me! If he’s got a weapon, what’ll I do next?
He put everything he had into his voice one last time. “Sir, I’m a police officer. Get out of the store.”
This time, slowly, the man turned and left. The clerk locked the door behind him.
“A few seconds later, it was all over,” Hindi says. Someone had gotten around to calling 911, and the cavalry arrived.
The suspect Hindi had captured, with priors for larceny from a person and probation violations, was booked for robbery. The “wire” he’d grabbed during the fight turned out to be a sharpened, 7-in. piece of coat hanger; no other weapons were found on him.
The second subject was detained, but the robber denied knowing him; a search turned up no weapons in his clothing. He was never charged.
Hindi was earmarked by his department for a Meritorious Service Award.
And Hillary did get her makeup for her next Internet show.
What lessons from his harrowing experience would Hindi like to share with other officers and trainers?
1. “It’s said that you should always expect the unexpected, but you can’t really do that; logically, if you expected something it wouldn’t be unexpected. But you can always be prepared for the unexpected, and I wasn’t prepared mentally. I allowed myself to leave home without being fully alert and focused on my surroundings. That was evidenced by the fact that I did not take with me my usual off-duty weapons, and I didn’t immediately read the red flags I saw in the drugstore.”
2. “I will never ever, ever, ever leave home again without a knife or a gun. And wherever I place my weapon or weapons I will be sure I can get to them with either hand. One hand may be tied up in a fight or wounded and you can’t know in advance which one that will be.”
3. “Fitness pays off. I work out at least five days a week, running, lifting weights. And your fitness needs to be well-rounded. If I’d been out of shape or hadn’t known anything about ground fighting, that offender could easily have out-classed me.”
4. “Never have a cocky attitude, however well-trained you are. No matter how big or how good you are, if a suspect knows where to strike you you can go down like anybody else. If you’re not willing to test or challenge your survivability as part of your training, the next suspect on the street may do it for you. Hope is not a tactic.”
5. “Any trainer who says he always performs perfectly is a liar. We all fall into lax moments. I gladly share this experience with my students. It’s humbling, but it takes me off a pedestal and puts me in a seat right next to them. I tell them, ‘See, I’m just like you. We’re all still learning, still evolving in our determination to be the best that we can be.’ ”
6. “Be grateful for your mistakes. If you make a big one and you survive, look at it as a gift. God has given you another opportunity.” [For more on Bob Hindi’s baton cap accessory and belt system training, visit www.batoncap.com or contact him at batoncap@aol.com or at (702) 279-8133. His daughters’ web production can be accessed at www.thehillywoodshow.com]
