Martial Nonviolence for Law Enforcement

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Law Enforcement professionals are ideally positioned to be Peace Officers in fact as well as in name, but crime in the contemporary urban environment makes true community policing (encouraging freedom and ensuring safety at the same time) very difficult. Much is said about the value of empathy and the need to cultivate habits of nonviolence which lead to Peace, but how to do that when your life is in danger? At the same time, it is very rare to find departments with an adequate budget for the time and money to support ongoing training. Creating a work environment in which the daily practice of peace is a normal activity is the only real way to actually achieve this end under pressure. The Peace Practices curriculum is now being offered to Law Enforcement professionals and their departments to open a door through which even the most over-worked and under pressure officers may walk to learn habits of peaceful interaction at the same time that they learn truly effective and citizen-safe self-defense and disarm tactics.

Your department can have what it lacks: access to high-quality, integrated curricula specifically devoted to practicing peace and protective tactics at the same time. An entire martial system, called aikido, was created for this purpose and is known around the world as The Art of Peace. Actual peace-making requires a strength of purpose and dedication to frequent practice that is characteristic of the best officers you've ever met. World-class law enforcement professionals are martial artists in the best sense, preparing themselves each day to insist on peaceful communities in which deadly force is used only when there is absolutely no alternative.

Using aikido, theater skills, and group facilitation techniques, Brandon WilliamsCraig created Martial Nonviolence (MNv) to be a method of regular practice for those who deal with conflict frequently in the office and in the field. MNv is a way to prepare body, mind, and spirit to respond as one to conflict of all kinds in ways that lead people--both MNv practitioners and those who are not motivated to look for an all-win outcome--to build communities which practice peace.

Peace Practices,  is a series of site-specific, carefully designed variations of the Martial Nonviolence training that is already practiced privately by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, and by students, faculty, and staff at UC Berkeley. Now it is being offered to law enforcement professionals under the direction of Dr. WilliamsCraig. It is the hope of those participating that you will join in this innovation, experience a training and bring their colleagues to do the same, and help us to create a sustainable base from which Martial Nonviolence may grow so that it can be said that Peace Practices may be found wherever our children and families are in need of safe places to grow.

Brandon WilliamsCraig, Ph.D., worked in the professional regional theater for twenty years, and became an aikido apprentice and then teacher. He obtained state certification as a mediator and worked as a process arts (group process design and facilitation) professional. His graduate degrees are in archetypal psychology and cultural mythology. He co-founded and acted as President and Executive Dirctor of Association Building Community (501c3), holds a fourth degree black belt from the Aikido World Headquarters (Aikikai), and is Founder and Chief Instructor at both Golden Bears Aikido at UC Berkeley and Free Aiki, his downtown Berkeley dojo (training community). He is a husband and father, and it has been his pleasure to teach for over twenty years, welcoming those who were his students back to work with him as colleagues.