Bored with his life in academia, George “Doc” Thompson left his prestigious career and went on to teach a million police officers to ask questions first and shoot later.
Thompson was a judo black belt who ran a dojo, studied rhetoric and persuasion at Princeton and had a PhD in English literature. But after 10 years of teaching university classes, Thompson wanted a change. He took a sabbatical and decided to become a cop, working the midnight shift as a patrol officer in New Jersey.
The father of a tactical communication style known as “verbal judo”, he wrote his first book on the subject in 1983 and became a successful law enforcement trainer.
“Anybody can teach English,” he said in one of his training video from the 1990s. “Not anybody can talk a knife out of somebody’s hand.”
Making police more restrained was a hot topic after the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, but in the wake of 9/11, de-escalation techniques and community policing seemed to fall out of fashion. Instead, US police departments increasingly resembled military units both in ethos and equipment.
Thompson died in 2001, aged 69, but some police instructors are now once again emphasising the value of communication in avoiding combat, advocating scientific analysis allied with realistic training to prepare officers to handle stressful situations.
In the current context of tensions inflamed by a series of police shootings of African Americans and of cops killed in revenge attacks, the use of verbal de-escalation to defuse combustible encounters has rarely seemed so important – or so under threat.
More than 30 years ago, Thompson codified what he saw as common sense: using tactical language calmly under pressure to achieve a clearly defined goal – with the priority of keeping officers safe.
“I simply used my academic background to put words to what great cops have always done,” he said. “Verbal judo is not the flavour of the month. It’s been around for 200 years. Great sheriffs never ran a town badmouthing people and put people down and disrespected people; they’d have been shot out of the saddle.”
Thompson’s research found that almost every injury came from an escalation in a situation, rather than from the officer arriving when violence was already underway.
“We know that the most deadly weapon we carry is not the .45 or the 9mm, it is in fact the cop’s tongue ... A single sentence fired off at the wrong person at the wrong time can get you fired, it can get you sued, it can get you killed,” said Thompson.
Joel Francis, a former police officer in New York, is a national instructor at the Verbal Judo Institute, teaching techniques he deployed on the beat. His clients are private companies, as well as law enforcement departments. “Our calendar is pretty full,” he said.
“There’s so many times when people are screaming and yelling and you just go to them: ‘Hey, buddy, how you doing? My names’s Sergeant Francis, I’m with NYPD, I noticed that you’re really upset, now what’s going on with you, is there any way I can help?’” he said. “What’s the expression on your face, what’s the tone of your voice? A lot of it has to do with keeping yourself calm. We have to have some sort of a professional language to use, and that’s what verbal judo really supplies.”
He added: “We know that we can always use the strong arm of the law to make them comply, but we’re trying to give our officers tools that will generate voluntary compliance.”
Cutting-edge police instruction includes not only the how, but the why: analysis of mental reactions to high-tension situations that accompanies brain-training stress inoculation techniques.
Craig Geis is director of training at the California Training Institute, which teaches courses on the subject to a variety of clients, including federal and state law enforcement.
“It’s very easy to say officers get tunnel vision and officers don’t hear things. I think on the other side too, suspects get tunnel vision and suspects don’t hear things. A better understanding of human behaviour helps people to say: ‘In this situation let’s try and look for an appropriate technique to use,’” Geis said. “What is the mental state of the individual? What is the mental state of the officer at the time, are we using the proper techniques?”
David Blake, an instructor and retired police officer, said that good training includes “reality-based” elements that see police pitched into wide-ranging simulations that are as lifelike as possible and not limited to narrow scenarios where there is an expectation of violence.
He believes that departments should place more emphasis on understanding how people act under pressure. “The science of human capabilities and limitations needs to be included in police policies. Officers, in many places, qualify with their firearms one time a year but only experience some kind of scenario-based decision making training maybe once a year, once every two years, maybe some don’t see it very much at all.”
Sue Rahr, the sheriff of King County (which includes Seattle) from 2005 to 2012, says efforts to transform the culture of police training in Washington state began in earnest not in the academy’s classrooms, but its hallways.
Rahr is now the executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, where she establishes standards and provides training for officers in the state. She quickly noticed that the atmosphere in hallways was like a military-style boot camp, with attendees taught to obey orders by rote.
“When the officers would come across a staff member they were required to snap to attention and be silent. Which is not a skill they would ever use out on the street. I said: ‘Instead of having them snap to attention I want to require them to make meaningful eye contact and initiate a conversation, because that’s what cops need to practice in the street.’”
The atmosphere quickly became friendlier and more conducive to fostering the kind of community relations that officers need on the streets, she said, as well as boosting the face-to-face skills of millennial recruits.
“This generation, a lot of their communication happens electronically, not face to face, and I had been hearing a lot of complaints from people about: ‘Gosh, these kids can’t communicate, they can’t carry on a conversation.’ It is a gross exaggeration, but if you’re going to become a cop you really need to develop your conversation skills because we’re in the business of managing and dealing with human behaviour and that is the absolute building block of being able to influence behaviour,” she said.
Some, though, saw it as promoting soft, “hug-a-thug” policing that puts officers’ lives at risk by encouraging hesitation in a climate where they believe the public is increasingly belligerent towards law enforcement.
When the Los Angeles police department last year announced the creation of a Preservation of Life medal to honour officers who have de-escalated potentially deadly situations, the force’s labour union described it as “a terrible idea that will put officers in even more danger”.
In Washington, Rahr weathered the internal criticism. “It ruffled some feathers, which is to be expected when you change a tradition that had been at that time fairly longstanding. But we saw results immediately,” she said.
Then she set her sights on the display case in the main lobby. It was filled with emblems of policing, from badges and hats to nightsticks. “Legitimate symbols,” Rahr reflected, “but is that really what law enforcement is all about?”
She had the case removed and replaced with a giant mural of the US constitution. “Your core mission is not to have a nightstick and a gun and pepper spray – your core mission is to support the constitution, protect people, while defending their civil rights,” she said.
A header was placed over the mural with words that in effect became the academy’s motto: “In these halls we train the guardians of democracy.”
“People talk about policing as it’s all about the guns and the weapons. That is so backwards. It’s all about the ability to influence human behaviour,” she said.
Still, her strategies to create more empathetic officers do not neglect the use of force. “Simultaneously we also increased firearms training because one of the other elements of getting a police officer not to behave like a bully but to be that firm, confident guardian is they have to be very, very confident in their skills and confident in their ability to use force if they have to as a last resort. We actually made the firearms and defensive tactics training more difficult,” she said.
“They must view their role in their community as a guardian – but they also have razor-sharp warrior skills in their back pocket if they need to do that.”
Rahr’s approach has been influenced by Tom Tyler, a Yale law and psychology professor who has researched how people react when they feel a sense of injustice. She introduced what she calls the LEED model, Listen and Explain with Equity and Dignity: in essence, be fair, treat everyone with respect and do not humiliate a suspect.
She has also learned a lot from military members. “If you interact with those guys that are on special forces, they don’t walk around beating their chest, they are very quiet, very polite – but you look in their eye and you know, that guy could kill me in two seconds if he wanted to. But it’s that silent confidence that is picked up on by suspects,” she said.
When she was the sheriff and jail inmates refused to be fingerprinted, she would send in Swat team members (not in body armour).
“What they would do is approach the inmate and talk very quietly and say: ‘Here’s the deal, the judge has ordered us to do this and it’s going to happen but we really don’t want to fight you. We don’t know what your business is with the court, but let’s just get this done with nobody getting hurt.’ And to this day I have never heard of an inmate not cooperating with them,” she said.
Her training uses psychology to help officers understand their own perceptions and prejudices as well as those of the citizens they encounter. “The brain does not work like a video camera, it doesn’t just look at something and take in all the information. Because there’s just simply too much data,” she said. Instead, it filters.
“That filtering process is heavily influenced by your upbringing and your experience, what you expect to see. So in a dangerous physical encounter the brain is going to filter in information that reinforces what you already believe, and it’s going to filter out information that conflicts with your existing belief system,” Rahr said.
“The ramifications of this are obvious when we talk about race. If you have spent a lifetime watching television shows, movies, media reports that portray young black men as dangerous, that is sitting in your brain. And so when you get into a very high risk situation, those filters are going to be very strong.
“At the academy what we try to do is teach the recruits to adjust their filters, to refocus not on the person’s race, not on the neighborhood they’re in, but to focus on physical behaviour. Where are their hands? How is their body positioned? What are some of the key words they’re saying? You can imagine that’s difficult to do but it is possible and we put a lot of focus on that.
“The secondary ramifications of that perception process explain a lot about why the country’s so polarised. Because when an emotional incident happens like in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, when those things happen that’s a very emotional situation and so your brain is going to process all the media reports about that. So if I’m a cop that feels like I’ve been unfairly accused of racism or that all cops are racist, my brain is going to filter out information that doesn’t defend my position.”
Rahr concedes that in the current antagonistic environment, with many complaining of a “war on cops”, it will be harder to persuade police to adopt a “guardian” mentality when they may feel military-style tactics are justified by the threat to their lives.
“We have a lot of communities [where] not only do they feel like they’re being mistreated by police but the school system and the economic system. Policing is a much more visible symbol of the other issues and inequities across all social institutions. Because the stakes are so high in policing, obviously, it takes center stage,” Rahr said.
Last year Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, signed the Douglas M Ostling Act into law, which requires all state law enforcement to undertake crisis intervention training, a form of instruction that helps officers de-escalate confrontations with mentally ill people – a common occurrence for many cops. The act is named after a mentally ill man who was shot dead by police near Seattle in 2010.
Joe Winters, a King County sheriff’s deputy, instructor and Swat team negotiator, said that the training has reduced the department’s number of Swat callouts. Now, he said, officers recognise the signs of common mental illnesses and are trained to build a rapport with the person and slow things down instead of quickly barking orders and issuing threats when the subject behaves in an unexpected manner.
He recalled one occasion about four years ago when a schizophrenic woman was angrily refusing to leave a mall because she thought it was her home. “Before I would have tried to argue with her about the delusion that this was her home,” he said. Instead he aimed to validate her feelings, ignored the “crazy stuff” and tried to connect with her by saying that he imagined her life was not easy.
“I de-escalated her just by listening, honestly,” the 44-year-old said. “I don’t know any cop who wouldn’t get down on one knee to talk to a kid. When it comes to adults, are we willing to do the same thing?”
Eventually, she left peacefully.
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