American Police Need Verbal Judo
By: Gerard Shields
Tags: Police, Communications Strategy, Racial Justice

Communication, Racial Sensitivity Training Key to Reducing Deaths

The four white Los Angeles police officers videotaped brutally beating Rodney King in a 1991 traffic stop after high-speed car chase were a week away from taking George J. Thompson’s class on Verbal Judo.

Had the officers completed the training of the college professor turned police officer — who preached persuasion over force — the King violence may have been avoided.

Since that historic incident, many more citizens possess cell phones capturing footage of unarmed Black men being killed at the hands of white police officers.

No incident has been more impactful than the death last spring in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who smothered after a White police officer knelt on his back. The killing has reverberated through the nation resulting in massive calls for change in how society regards African Americans.

Many of the deadly police confrontations occured during routine calls. Eric Garner died in 2014 after being choked by New York police summoned to investigate allegations of his illegally selling single cigarettes without tax stamps.

Freddie Gray died in a Baltimore police van in 2015 after running from police. Gray was shackled without a seatbelt, breaking his neck after being thrown around the wagon. Last summer, Rayshard Brooks of Atlanta died after falling asleep in a Wendy’s drive thru line.

Floyd’s life ended after police responded to a call that he passed a fake $20 bill. Though Thompson has died, his 1993 seminal book contends police failures to effectively communicate with the public escalates such non-violent situations.

The “cocked tongue” is the most powerful weapon police possess, he writes.

The man who taught Shakespeare and Milton developed his Verbal Judo theory, and training institute in Auburn, N.Y., when he quit his cushy college job to test his communications theories as a police officer.

His first night on the job, the frustrated Thompson ripped three uncooperative drivers from the car and threw them to the ground.

His tactics changed when answering a domestic dispute with his hand resting on the butt of his .357 magnum. His training sergeant walked into the scrabble, sat down, and began reading the newspaper.

“Folks, folks, excuse me over here,” Bruce Fair said. “You got a phone? Look here, a 1950 Dodge in good condition. I know it’s late, but I don’t want to miss out on this.”

The fight evaporated with Fair asking: “Is anything the matter? Anything my partner and I can do for you?” The couple replied: “No, not really.”

Thompson’s call to master mind to mouth harmony, was born. Police officers traditionally arrive at tense situations with what Thompson called the “classic macho approach.”

Police officers routinely approach a man with a knife by challenging the guy, pointing their gun, and shouting: “Put that knife down or I’ll take you out! I’ll blow your head off.”

Thompson’s recommends a different approach: “Hey friend, let’s do each other a favor. You don’t want to spend the night downtown with us, eating our food, sleeping on our steel cot, and missing your woman. And I don’t want to sit at a typewriter for a couple of hours doing paperwork on this.”

But is Thompson’s gentle and more passive way realistic? Gary McLhinney, former president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Baltimore, one of America’s most violent cities, says dealing with suspects hopped up on drugs, unable — or unwilling — to reason, makes persuasion difficult.

“It takes two to deescalate a situation,” McLhinney said. “If the person I’m dealing with is not in the mood to deescalate, it isn’t going to happen. But I do believe in the Verbal Judo concept and that words are important and if you can be taught to use the right words, you can prevent things from getting out of hand.”

McLhinney, who also served as a Maryland police chief, said a survey of officers found they sought more training in one key area: communicating with the public. One officer told McLhinney “no one ever taught him how to talk to people.”

The contrasts may have been best displayed in the killing of Brooks on June 12. The first police officer found Brooks behind the wheel asleep in a Wendy’s drive thru line. After tapping on the window and getting Brooks to open the door, he asks the driver if he is okay or had a bad day, referring to him as “my man.”

Brooks nods off again and the officer asks him to park his car in the lot and take a nap. Suspecting Brooks is intoxicated, the officer calls a drunk driving police specialist, who shows up on the scene employing a more aggressive style.

Though respectful, the officer gets argumentative with Brooks and the police pair talk with Brooks, who failed a sobriety test, for 40 minutes. The incident escalated when the second officer grabbed Brooks’ hand to place behind his back to arrest him.

Brooks, who was on probation and knew he would return to jail if convicted, wrestled with the officers, tried to grab their tasers and was eventually shot to death.

The issue of race has thrown gasoline on American police communications, observers say. Phyliss Alexander once taught sensitivity training to the police academy in Allentown, Pa.

In her work, Alexander employed a simple test. Participants were asked to scrawl across the top of a paper all the ethnic groups they knew such as African Americans, Asians and Hispanics. On the left side of the paper, test takers listed social institutions, such as church, school, work, and community.

Alexander then asks participants to list — on a scale of 1 to 10 — their interaction with each group in each institution. Participant numbers are traditionally low.

“We are set up to be in isolation from one another,” said Alexander, a former director and current board member with the National Coalition Building Institute, a Washington, D.C. non-profit created to reduce racism in schools, communities, and corporations.

“We live separate lives in the same country,” Alexander said.

White officers involved in the deaths of Black citizens likely have had little interaction growing up with people of color, Alexander said. So how do you raise your numbers? Read the literature, taste the food, listen to the music, and try to consciously interact with those who are different from you, she said.

Black officers are not involved in the killing of whites because they have been immersed in a white world, Alexander acknowledged.

“Black officers are going to be trained in the way society trains us and gives white people the benefit of the doubt in a way that they are not trained to give Black people the benefit of the doubt,” Alexander said. “We receive the same mis-training that everybody else does on what it means to be white and what it means to be Black.”

McLhinney agrees that racial sensitivity training in law enforcement is lacking. He estimates officers receive from two to eight hours of such training over a four-month academy class.

“A lot of racial sensitivity training I see is really kind of off-the-shelf stuff, it’s not meaningful,” said McLhinney, approaching 40 years in law enforcement. “Any training needs to be reinforced; it needs to be continual.”

“We do that with firearms training,” McLhinney added. “Intense introductory firearms training is always a part of a police academy and then it’s followed up with, sometimes every six months, sometimes every year, that’s how you become proficient in something.”

Thompson writes that he is not suggesting that law enforcement — charged with the difficult job of bringing order to chaos — respect the actions of hardened criminals over hapless victims.

All people want to be treated with dignity, asked rather than be told and be given options over threats, Thompson says. He recalls the words of a North Dakota police officer.

“We treat people like ladies and gentlemen not because they are,” the officer said. “But because we are.”

Listen to the Retail Politics Podcast interview with Gary McLhinney below.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/49ZsO717Z6b7TgWeDrjn9V