Stab Vest Ratings: What Do They Mean?

stand proof vests art but of course it's not that simple all right take a seat look look we're nearly starting with the orientation in the car here but we got calls from Berlin and we got to get to them so we're rolling we're gonna have to learn on the way today so I've received a lot of requests lately to talk about body armor well there's a lot of information out there about body armor that's designed to protect you from firearm threats there isn't a whole lot explaining the different threat levels and what they're capable of for stabbed us and there's a whole lot of people in the United States that rely on stabbed best for their safety and result even more of them throughout the world that rely on stab bus for their safety so I'd like to point out right from the onset that I'm not a correctional officer nor do I play one on TV nor am ia expert on stab armor however I do know a little bit about it and I'd be happy to share what I know with you if you happen to know more or you have source material that I don't have access to or you have personal experience with stab protective armor let's say you've been stabbed with armor if you've seen somebody been stabbed when they're wearing the armor and you want to add your commentary and it down in the comments below we're always happy to learn more here so the waist and persistent armor is classified by the National Institute of Justice is actually pretty complicated it appears from the onset that there's three levels there's level 1 2 & 3 of stab resistance but there's really 6 different levels of stab resistance that they have the first subcategory is edged and spiked resistant threats so when you see something you see a vest that says it's edge one edge to edge three they're talking about knives and when they're talking about spike ones biked or spike three four talking about ice picks or improvised weapons now in the edge category there's two different test knives and I'll show the schematics here as I'm talking about them the first is a small Tonto kind of looking blade kind of like this one that they use as a test blade and the other one is a long thin double edged knife like a long kitchen knife or a fair room Sykes fighting knife on the spike category they basically use a commercial ice pick I'll show that diagram as well right here now what they do is they take each of these threats and stab them both perpendicular and at a 45 degree angle at a certain energy level and in order to be edge rated they have both knives have to get stabbed at that energy level and not go more than a quarter-inch through the vest so vests aren't really meant to be stab-proof they're meant to be stab resistant and the same thing goes to the spike to give them about a quarter inch going through the bust and still keep and to still have the rating then they take them and stab them at the energy level plus 50% that they're rated for to see if it's just going to slide all the way through or it's going to stop in a reasonable distance and the reasonable distance they figure is 0.7 nine inches a little over three quarters of an inch of penetration they call that energy level - same thing for spike testing the way they work out what the initial energy level is is a representative sample than male population I think the sample was originally taken in the UK many many decades ago they take the average male population how much force they can impart to a knife in a standing motion and they take the 85th percentile 90th percentile in 96 percentile that your level 1 level 2 level 3 level 1 is 85th percentile level 2 is 98 percentile well 3 is 96 percentile so what this means for you when you buy a level 1 spike rated stab vest is that if you were to fill a room with a hundred inmates and hand each of them a icepick and have them stab you as hard as they possibly could while wearing that level 1 spike rated vest 80 of them wouldn't be able to get it more than 1/4 inch for the bust into your pink flesh and if it was a level one edge rated knife the same 80 guys wouldn't be able to get the knife more than 1/4 inch through the best the testing procedure also includes a 45 degree angle stab where it still it also can't get more than a quarter inch in based upon the level that it's being rated at and it includes an overload test which is to show that the blade can't go all the way through and just break loose at a certain point and slide through and keeps manufacturers honest so at the level 1 they would stab the bust at whatever the energy level is and then go back and stab it again at the energy level that they're testing for plus 50% and at plus 50% the blade can only go about a little over 3/4 of an inch through the vest and still keep the rating so you don't have a situation where somebody makes a level one rated spike vest and some really big burly dude stabs you with the ice pick as hard as you can and the ice pick just slides all the way through the vest is going to continue providing a resistance to the weapon it doesn't just get a quarter-inch in and slide all the way through and get in your spleen cut resistant vests aren't generally tested against slash resistance because even ballistic vests that are designed for firearm protection are slash resistant if you think about the Kevlar gloves that we wear for work they're very slash resistant and yet they're very thin and they're made of a lot of the same materials kevlar spectra Dyneema things like that that are generally you find used in bulletproof vests so any of those any bulletproof vest should be pretty slash resistance so the NIJ doesn't even bother testing against those there are dual use spike and edge vest you see that a lot in a correctional environment with tactical teams they'll have level three spike level three edge of us most of us that you see inside the United States are just spike rated and most of us that you see in the UK are dual rated or just blade rated in the UK thus has to be tested against blades before they can even try to spike read it in the United States most of our stand busts are worn by correctional officers and this is their primary threat there are available on the market and are used primarily by sheriff's departments that have combination personnel who are working Corrections inside a facility and they're working what's called externals which is being an armed police officer out on the street or guarding prisoners as they're working on a work release program or on a chain game-type program outside of the facility where there might be ballistic threats there's a dual vests that are both ballistic rated and spike or edged weapon rated and what you see most the time is a level 3a or a level two ballistic rating and a level one or level two spike rating on those types of us of course stabbed us in the UK are a big thing police officers who are working outside in fact armed police officers as well are wearing stabbed us because knives are their primary personal weapon concern we're in the United States guns are our primary personal weapon concern so that's armor protection levels for stab vests something that I don't see of a lot on the Internet in fact I had to go to source material to find a lot of the technical information about this and how these vests are tested it was actually pretty interesting so if you have anything to add to the conversation edit below in comments if you're a correctional officer and you have direct knowledge of these things being used and stabbed and how well they work and how much force those dual readings on the scale mean put down in the comments below I'll be interesting to hear about it you guys have fun out there be safe well if you like that video go ahead and subscribe because there's a whole lot more to come as soon as I finish up these calls go ten eight County to anyone

Channel: free field training

Views: 54,096

Rating: 4.7590361 out of 5

Keywords: correctional officer, Police, corrections, security, body armor, protective vest, stab armor., security guard

Id: Mn3_HgMbhxQ

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2016