How to get out of hand-cuffs

There’s a great thread on the forums regarding escaping handcuffs. Member ’subneural’ tipped us off on an awesome video by Brian Brushwood over at Scam School. Side note: I was actually in an early episode of the show and spent a good amount of time getting drunk with Brian at the shoot and love his stuff. The video is extremely informative showing you the inner workings of the standard Smith & Wesson handcuffs that 80% of the police in the world carry and how to escape from them.

When Sean and I took the Urban Escape and Evasion class handcuffs were an integral part of the class and we spent a lot of time practicing various methods of escape. Sean did a quick video that shows how easy it is to get out of those things. That is if they aren’t very good at cuffing you. A properly trained person can cuff you in a way that’s nearly impossible to get out of. Which is exactly how I was cuffed in the van during our field test and required a little help from my friends to get out. And one very important thing that we learned in class is that even if you can escape from your cuffs the cops don’t think it’s very funny at all when you hand them back to them…

Check out the videos after the jump!
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Some thoughts on CERT

One thing I neglected to mention in my post about networks the other day was that I’m not only thinking about plans when you are away from home, but also developing some kind of network inside your own community can be very helpful. That’s one of the reasons I decided to take CERT classes here in LA in fact. Making sure that you are covered is one thing, but I thought it might be valuable to both know what I could do after an event to help my community, as well as who else in my neighborhood was out there doing the same thing. At the very least I thought it would provide some more valuable skills and info for keeping me and my family safe.

When I first looked into it honestly I was confused by the schedule on the local site but luckily I had some more patient friends who figured out when a class nearby was starting. You can find something near you on the national site and then try to decipher their scheduling on your own. If you aren’t familiar with CERT it’s short for Community Emergency Response Training and is basically a 7 week course that covers a wide range of disasters that might occur in your area and things you can do to help out. The initial set up is that in any given disaster official services are going to be overextended in minutes and most people will be on their own, so if you have a basic level of training and can team up with others in your neighborhood there is a lot of work you can do on your own before real rescue teams ever show up. This seemed like worthwhile info to have. Read more…

Lock pick Friday!

There’s a holiday weekend on the horizon here in the U.S. and everyone is going to be chomping at the bit to GTFOOD and hit the swimming pools and BBQ’s so I’m keeping it light today because I’m one of those people. Below are a bunch of videos on some of the basics on locks you can get into with regular household items. I couldn’t believe how easy some of these are to do. If you’ve never seen anything like this before your illusion of security is about to be shattered. I learned some of these techniques and had them pretty well down inside of an hour and so can you. These are all found on YouTube but we’ll be posting some original videos of more advanced lock picking in the near future.

How to open a Combination Masterlock

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Urban Escape and Evasion

Earlier this year a few of us had the good fortune to take the ‘Urban Escape and Evasion’ class here in LA offered by OnPoint Tactical. It was a fantastic class, my only regret is that I felt like I had an unfair advantage given that I know LA inside and out so I’m actually considering taking it again in a city I’m not so familiar with to put some of what I’ve learned to the test. I wrote up a bit about the class after I took it and published it on Los Angeles Metblogs but some folks have asked about it so thought I’d post it here as well. That write up is after the jump. Read more…