How would you feel if someone wrapped your hands with three wraps of duct tape? For most people the thought alone is enough to send a chill through your system.
Put your wrists together in front of you, palms facing, the way you would if you were about to be handcuffed. Now imagine three fast wraps of duct tape cinching them tight.
Chilling, eh? Even if it’s only a thought exercise. It’s your body telling you that someone else will be in control of your next course of action.
Spent two days in a classroom off Fremont Street in Las Vegas with former CIA officer Jason Hanson and a parade of other instructors, learning such diverse skills as how to pick locks, spot liars, wield a knife and defend your home. But the theme that echoed throughout the two-day, spy and survival skills course was counter-custody: how to escape if you end up in custody. It’s the art of not staying caught.
It’s a weird thing to want to learn how to do, escape custody. Yet if you work in law enforcement, it’s a scary reality: someone is going to try to grab you.
Why Duct Tape
This is the magic angle for breaking free of duct tape, and it works for people of all sizes.
Duct tape is the most commonly used restraint by criminals around the world. (Not handcuffs. Not rope. Not even zip ties.) It’s readily available, only weighs a few ounces, costs just a few dollars at any hardware store, and can restrain someone’s hands in about 4 seconds. And because criminals are almost always working against time and, as Hanson emphasized to us again and again, are looking for the laziest option, that’s almost always how they’ll use it.
The lazy option, in this case, means wrapping your hands in front of you. (Contrary to popular belief, criminals rarely restrain your hands behind your back, as it’s just too time-consuming and difficult. In front allows them to more easily drag you somewhere, like into a car.) It also means using just a few wraps, typically two to four, which instructors call an “express kidnapping.”
So let’s say you’ve been kidnapped, and the kidnapper has restrained your hands in front of you with just a few wraps of duct tape. You’re trapped, right?
Wrong. The key here is to use angle and geometry, not brute strength. Start by raising your hands in front of you, above your head (kind of like you’re making a steeple). From there, swing your hands down and away from each other, and let your elbows jut out. (Think of it like you’re trying to smack somebody with both of your elbows at the same time, except that person is standing behind you instead of in front of you.)
See that video above? That’s how you break the tape. The angle really does make all the difference. I tried this move for the first time by starting with my hands at chest-level and pulling outwards, and I couldn’t break the tape at all. But when I raised my hands above my head and started the swinging motion from there? The tape came apart like it was nothing.
And hey, if you’re ever in a situation where you need to restrain somebody else, now you’ve got a new trick up your sleeve.
The Clock Starts Immediately
The two days include grim nuggets of advice, like bleed if you can, so you leave a trail. Leave your DNA everywhere. In the car, in the rooms. Your hair, your saliva. Give investigators something to go on.
And, of course, the admonition heard most often, repeated in one form or another by every speaker: Try to escape within the first 24 hours. This is when you’re closest to where you were taken and in the strongest physical condition you’ll be in going forward (spoiler alert: Your captors won’t be exactly heaping you with food and rest opportunities).
It’s bleak stuff to absorb while perched on a folding chair in Las Vegas. But there’s a strange solace in having something to do, even, or especially, in the most dire of circumstances. Helplessness is the enemy here, and these trainings are, in many ways, a rallying cry against it.
A Cord, a Chair, a Way Out
Speed and angle rather than strength or power are the keys to many of the self release moves that we learnt.
Another great example was learning to escape from a kitchen chair (bound with tape) – the stereotypical home invasion restraint position. Using what is known as the magic angle (explained above) but this time in relation to the restraints on our wrists rather than our ankles, we learnt to escape from the chair by yanking our heads forwards and downwards towards our knees, causing our wrists to jerk forwards and upwards, thereby changing the angle of the tape around our wrists and thus hopefully breaking it.
On our ankles we learnt to rotate our knees and feet outwards into a big ‘V’ position before dropping down quickly to hopefully break free.
These two techniques were practiced over and over but there was one important caveat that the instructors stressed – have someone hold onto the chair!
The deeper we got into the course the more we were drilled on one mantra – preparation beats improvisation! The people that get out of a situation are usually the ones that prepared to get out before it happened!
A great example of this was the friction saw technique that we learnt – a quick and easy way to saw yourself free of rope or tape.
Using a length (around 7 feet) of real (American made!) 550 paracord with the ends singed with a lighter to prevent unravelling (and conveniently pre-looped) the escapee passes the cord through their bound wrists (making sure it’s against the tape and not their wrists!) and places a loop over each foot. They then fall backwards whilst pedalling their legs in a bicycling motion. Voila! They should now be free in 10-20 seconds!
Except that you need to have the cord on you in the first place! The instructors had it as their shoelaces or kept it in their travel pouches!
This is a great technique and I’m sure will come in very handy one day but it’s not one that’s going to help you escape if you’re at home tied up with your friction saw in a drawer!
Important note – practice this technique (like all the above moves!) with someone spotting you and make sure you’re not doing it on top of anything you can fall off! I’d hate for you to crack open your helmet on the kerb!
Tales from the Field
Hanson told us about an operation in a small South American town in which his team needed to capture a cartel member that was well-liked enough that the town itself served as his protection. When the target stepped out of his car, Hanson’s team staged a car accident and all eyes, even the target’s own protection, turned to the accident.
That story, like so many of those Hanson told us over the two days, hinged on the theme of distraction and misdirection. He told us about a time when a woman came up to him in a grocery store parking lot and asked for $5 for gas, and how his first instinct was to check behind him, as professionals rely on distraction and misdirection and never, almost never, use force.
Even his advice for staying off a tracker’s radar hinged on misdirection, which is to give up anything you can that defines you, he said. Your daily cup of coffee, the yoga class you take every Thursday morning, the gun store you like to patronize, give it all up. People get caught because they revert back to what they’re comfortable doing. And while most of us aren’t trying to avoid being found by professionals, it’s a useful reminder that your habits and routines can telegraph a lot of information about you, just know who your audience is before you start revealing too much.
Walking Out
I teach a lot of survival skills, living off the land, surviving a flood, long term emergencies, etc. But after spending two days in Las Vegas recently I’ve added another, surviving counter-custody.
There’s a good chance you won’t ever need this skill. But the cost of learning it is an afternoon and a roll of duct tape. The cost of not knowing it?
Ask a friend to wrap your hands in front of you with about three wraps. Then practice getting out of them. Once you’ve raised your arms up over your head and brought them down, feeling the tape give, your anxiety of being restrained will be lower.
It’s a good feeling to know you can get free.
Read More
Don’t miss essential survival insights—sign up for Recoil Offgrid’s free newsletter today!
- Lock Picking 101
- Survive, Evade, Resist & Escape
- Survival Through SERE Principles
- Escape Zip Tie Handcuffs
Check out our other publications on the web: Recoil | Gun Digest | Blade | RecoilTV | RECOILtv (YouTube)
