The Soldotna Police Department in partnership with the Homer Police, Kenai Police and Alaska State Troopers are jointly hosting a free women’s only self-defense course in Soldotna.
The women’s only self-defense course will take place on Saturday, January 21st from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m, and is tentatively scheduled at All-American Training Center on the Kenai Spur Highway.
Soldotna Police Chief Gene Meek explains the interest driven by a simple post on social media;
“Just 24 hours after releasing that we were going to do this, not counting Homer, just in the Soldotna area we have had 75 women reach out to Sgt. Escott. I am so excited, I mean I’m over the top I did expect this type of engagement.”
Chief Meek explains teaming up with Homer Police for the class;
“He’s been doing this, I don’t know how often. When I first got to town a few month ago, and took over being Chief here, they just had one. I started following Homer on Facebook and it was pretty popular. And me and the Lieutenant meet over a school administration, kind of like meet and greet where we talked about drugs and current trends with schools and school shootings. So, we meet there and then he reached out me and wanted to do like a whole peninsula one and we have a couple different facilities in Soldotna that will host it. Well, that just led to alright I’ll post on the Facebook for Soldotna, he’ll post on Facebook from Homer and we’ll see what kind of interest that we get. Probably, four dozen women on Facebook that said interested. So, we followed up with ok we’re starting to make this happen. We’ve picked a date, in January, we’ve picked a time period. Lt. Browning has a curriculum that he has used in the past.”
According to Chief Meek, this will be a basic self defense course. Participants will learn how to break holds;
“If you look statically, when your talking about violence against women, most of it isn’t punches. I mean yeah, punches get thrown, and we’ll address that in the class, but a lot of it is me just grabbing you by the wrist and pulling you around. Or me grabbing ahold of you and dragging you. We’re going to talk about basic techniques on how to break those holds, so you can get away.”
For those that are interested, contact either Lt. Ryan Browning with the Homer Police Department at rbrowning@ci.homer.ak.us / 907-235-3150 or Sgt. Stace Escott with the Soldotna Police Department at sescott@soldotna.org / 907-262-4455.
Chief Meek encourages all that are interested to register and if more classes are needed, those will be added to future dates in 2023.