Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A man stabs two Jewish people in central London in broad daylight. Police respond, locate the armed suspect, and use force to disarm him — including a kick to the head to make him release the knife.
And the leader of the Green Party decided the police were the problem.
Zack Polanski's criticism of the arresting officers as unprofessional and heavy handed was not just wrong. It was the kind of comment that comes from a position of such profound sheltered inexperience that it borders on dangerous. It undermines the officers who put themselves between an armed antisemitic attacker and the public. It gives comfort to people who wish to see police neutered in exactly the situations where decisive force is the only responsible option. And it was made without a shred of relevant knowledge or professional credibility to back it up.
I want to address that directly — because I do have that credibility.
Twenty years as a security professional working in high risk environments. Seven years developing less lethal ammunition for police and military applications. I have spent a significant portion of my professional life thinking about exactly this question — how do you stop a violent, armed individual with the minimum force necessary to achieve the objective? And I can tell you with absolute certainty that what those officers did was not heavy handed. It was controlled. It was professional. And it worked.
Here is the reality of a knife situation that people like Polanski simply do not understand. A person holding a knife who does not want to release it will not respond to conversation. They will not respond to requests. Pain compliance techniques that work on an unarmed subject become unreliable when that subject is already in an adrenaline state sufficient to stab two people in a public street. The threat to the officers, to bystanders, and to the suspect himself does not end until the knife is on the ground. And sometimes the fastest and safest route to that outcome involves a decisive application of force that looks shocking to someone watching it on a phone screen.
There is something else worth saying here. The people most likely to be horrified by footage of a police takedown are almost always the people who have never needed one. They have lived their entire lives — comfortably, safely, without violence — in large part because people like those officers stand between them and the reality of what human beings are capable of doing to each other. That protection is invisible until the moment it isn't. And when it becomes visible — when it looks ugly and physical and real — they recoil from it. They film it. They post it. And occasionally they use it to score political points against the very people who kept them safe.
That is the most corrosive kind of ingratitude imaginable.
In this video I cover:
The London stabbing — what happened and the facts of the arrest
Zack Polanski's comments — what he said and why it matters that he said it
What professional credibility actually looks like in this space — and why it matters who is speaking
The physics and psychology of knife disarmament — why force escalation is sometimes the only responsible option
Less lethal force development — what I learned in seven years working on police and military applications
The entitled observer problem — why the people most horrified by police force are the ones most protected by it
What responsible political commentary on police use of force should actually look like
The officers who made that arrest deserve recognition. Not a lecture from a politician who has never faced anything more dangerous than a difficult question at a hustings.
Like, subscribe, and share — this conversation needs more voices with actual experience in it.
A man stabs two Jewish people in central London in broad daylight. Police respond, locate the armed suspect, and use force to disarm him — including a kick to the head to make him release the knife.
And the leader of the Green Party decided the police were the problem.
Zack Polanski's criticism of the arresting officers as unprofessional and heavy handed was not just wrong. It was the kind of comment that comes from a position of such profound sheltered inexperience that it borders on dangerous. It undermines the officers who put themselves between an armed antisemitic attacker and the public. It gives comfort to people who wish to see police neutered in exactly the situations where decisive force is the only responsible option. And it was made without a shred of relevant knowledge or professional credibility to back it up.
I want to address that directly — because I do have that credibility.
Twenty years as a security professional working in high risk environments. Seven years developing less lethal ammunition for police and military applications. I have spent a significant portion of my professional life thinking about exactly this question — how do you stop a violent, armed individual with the minimum force necessary to achieve the objective? And I can tell you with absolute certainty that what those officers did was not heavy handed. It was controlled. It was professional. And it worked.
Here is the reality of a knife situation that people like Polanski simply do not understand. A person holding a knife who does not want to release it will not respond to conversation. They will not respond to requests. Pain compliance techniques that work on an unarmed subject become unreliable when that subject is already in an adrenaline state sufficient to stab two people in a public street. The threat to the officers, to bystanders, and to the suspect himself does not end until the knife is on the ground. And sometimes the fastest and safest route to that outcome involves a decisive application of force that looks shocking to someone watching it on a phone screen.
There is something else worth saying here. The people most likely to be horrified by footage of a police takedown are almost always the people who have never needed one. They have lived their entire lives — comfortably, safely, without violence — in large part because people like those officers stand between them and the reality of what human beings are capable of doing to each other. That protection is invisible until the moment it isn't. And when it becomes visible — when it looks ugly and physical and real — they recoil from it. They film it. They post it. And occasionally they use it to score political points against the very people who kept them safe.
That is the most corrosive kind of ingratitude imaginable.
In this video I cover:
The London stabbing — what happened and the facts of the arrest
Zack Polanski's comments — what he said and why it matters that he said it
What professional credibility actually looks like in this space — and why it matters who is speaking
The physics and psychology of knife disarmament — why force escalation is sometimes the only responsible option
Less lethal force development — what I learned in seven years working on police and military applications
The entitled observer problem — why the people most horrified by police force are the ones most protected by it
What responsible political commentary on police use of force should actually look like
The officers who made that arrest deserve recognition. Not a lecture from a politician who has never faced anything more dangerous than a difficult question at a hustings.
Like, subscribe, and share — this conversation needs more voices with actual experience in it.
