De-escalation training: a few insights

I had the privilege of asking Jonathan Wender some questions. Among them a question about de-escalation training.

What can be improved about de-escalation training in the USA?

First, American policing needs to agree on a simple operational definition of de-escalation.?

“De-escalation” has become a politically charged buzzword that even many instructors cannot clearly explain. When the general public thinks of de-escalation, they imagine a set of practices – usually verbal persuasion – that can supposedly prevent the use of force. According to this thinking, if the police used force, they must have “failed” to de-escalate. Following this na?ve logic, de-escalation is seen as entirely separate from the use of force.?

Unfortunately, the widespread confusion of politics and human performance in American policing leads to confusion in training. The result is de-escalation training programs that are rigid, linear, and unrealistic. Such programs can lead officers to wrongly think that de-escalation and force are mutually exclusive. For example, we frequently hear officers, instructors, and police chiefs speak of “soft” versus “hard” skills. The “soft vs. hard” distinction risks turning de-escalation into political theater, where officers are merely engaging in a ritual performance that provides ethical and legal justification for the escalation to force.?This is radically different from teaching a holistic approach that requires the continuous integration of what the Polis team calls “skills of influence” and “skills of control.”

This leads to my second recommended improvement, which is that American policing needs to depoliticize de-escalation and reframe it as a technical matter of adaptive decision-making. We need to prepare officers to resolve complex, ambiguous situations in ways that maximize safe, lawful, and ethical outcomes. This means teaching the precise, continuous integration of skills of influence and skills of control, not their siloed, linear application. Officers need to learn that there are situations where the best resolution is simply to disengage and leave. They must understand that needless aggression and provocation can transform a minor conflict into a lethal confrontation.?But they also need to learn that there are situations where the early application of a low level of force can prevent escalation to severe violence.?And they must understand that some situations can only be resolved through the immediate use of deadly force. Unfortunately, too much de-escalation training fails to impart this kind of holistic thinking. To understand the dangerous limits of siloed de-escalation training, suppose that doctors learned that preventive and interventional medicine were separate and largely unrelated. This would foster maladaptive medical decision-making, and would lead to needless negative clinical outcomes.

Let’s consider another medical principle with direct relevance for policing. Everyone is familiar with the duty of physicians under the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm.” This duty is comparable to the duty of police officers to de-escalate, by which I mean to seek to create a safe, lawful, ethical outcome in a manner that causes the least harm to the persons involved in a given situation. If a physician can prevent or heal illness and injury without painful, risky intervention, that is the desired course of action. But of course, healthcare is never so simple. For example, suppose a patient has a severely infected limb. Do we perform limited surgery to save the limb??Do we amputate the entire limb to prevent systemic infection that risks the patient’s life??Do we adopt a non-surgical approach and try intravenous antibiotics? Or do we try unorthodox therapeutic methods from non-traditional medicine? Depending on the particular case, the ideal course of action may be relatively more or less clear.???

In policing, “first, do no harm” means that whenever possible, we should avoid the use of force or other coercive intervention such as an arrest.?But as in medicine, there will always be situations in policing where the failure to take more proactive, aggressive measures can lead to lethal outcomes.?My wider point here is that we need to take a more scientific, data-driven, operationally adaptive approach to de-escalation.

Meer lezen?

You can also read about these topics in the full blog:

• How are police trainers recruited and trained in the USA?
• What is meant by “first and foremost, use of force training should focus on situations, not techniques”?

Blog

https://www.train-de-trainer.org/2023/02/jonathan-wender-ph-d-trust-is-safety-and-safety-is-trust/What is a “Good Stranger” and how do you become one?