Former Ultimate Fighting Championship competitor Jimmie
Rivera now juggles his roles as a Bare Knuckle Fighting
Championship star and a police officer.
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Rivera parted ways with the Las Vegas-based promotion in August
2021 before signing with BKFC last year. “El Terror” co-headlined
BKFC 56 on Saturday in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he suffered a
technical knockout loss to Jeremy
Stephens at the end of the third frame via doctor stoppage.
When he is not slugging it out in bare knuckle contests, Rivera is
also a cop at the Elmwood Park Police Department. Rivera, who
admittedly needs to keep himself busy, initially tried his hand at
dispatch during the pandemic as a sense of uncertainty engulfed the
world of sports.
“I won’t say I have ADHD, but I can’t stop. I always have to work.
I’ve always got to do something. I’m all about the grinding. … It’s
also very bad mentally, to not do anything. You see people who
retire and they don’t do anything. They end up getting right back
into it or they mentally degrade and don’t look the best anymore,”
the 34-year-old recently told
MMAjunkie.com.
“I told [Elmwood Park Police Department chief Mike Foligno] I
wanted to get a little dispatch in. I told him I wanted to get my
feet wet a little bit. At the same time, he was like, ‘Yeah, I want
to launch this program.’ So we launched a program with Ron
Schulmann, one of the co-founders of Tiger Schulmann’s. That did
great.”
After working dispatch, Rivera found his true calling in a new
program where he gives jiu-jitsu lessons to fellow officers.
According to “El Terror,” the benefits range from better mental
health to a decrease in the use of force.
“People who are cops who are scared, they overcompensate at 100
when this could’ve been settled at a one or a zero. It didn’t have
to be like that. We’ve seen it already with the Elmwood Park Police
Department [N.J.]. The use of force has gone down. Complaints have
gone down. It’s a completely crazy nine-day difference after doing
it for a couple years, twice a year. What a tremendous difference,”
he said.
“Health is very close to mental illness. So being able to take care
of your health is going to be able to take care of your mental
illness. Police officers, they don’t have mental illness, but they
have a lot of stress. This s—t helps them a lot, just getting in,
hitting a bag, relieving stress on the bag, and at the same time,
getting a workout in. It’s something else we do as well.”