Deëscalation tip #69: Am I too old to learn?

Asking

When I see someone at their best in a conflict, I see someone who is first trying to learn more, not trying quash someone else. 

Anaysha: I will never agree that abortion is baby-killing!

James: Anaysha, can you please help me understand how a woman who is seven months along and suddenly decides the baby isn't what she wants has the moral right to destroy the mostly developed new life inside her?

Anaysha: I'm talking about the first trimester! Geez!

James and Anaysha may never precisely agree, but they are possibly on a path to understanding and even not condemning each other.

Affirm feelings, not conclusions

When I watch someone validate another's feelings without necessarily agreeing with what the other person is claiming, I'm watching someone manage conflict really well.

Philippe: I can't vote for Harris. She is in favor of genocide!

Maria: Understood, Philippe. There is nothing more evil than genocide. Can we discuss what might be the smartest strategic thing to do for those of us who vote?

Maria has validated Philippe's righteous and absolute rejection of genocide, which helps her open the door to a discussion of voting as a possible strategic move by citizens, even if the vote isn't a perfect affirmation of 100 percent of a candidate's positions.

Breathe in real life to deëscalate virtual provocations

If I get an email or a text that sets me off, I am not operating with my best conflict practices if I fire back in a reactive email or text. Instead, I need to take a beat (or a day) and then schedule an in-person coffee break or tea time with the person who revved me up. If, in our Zooming world, it's someone nowhere near physically, I need to make it as close to in-person as possible, with a private caucus, a one-on-one video chat so we can see and hear each other. 

Anticipation

Kyle knows his neighborhood organization meeting is this evening and he knows we are seriously divided on the proposal to bring in a tiny home village in our town's initiative to reduce homelessness. 

For some reason, several people seem to be expecting him to make the case for his side of this question. Other people have apparently seen this and have been using some barbed statements that seem to attack him personally. 

He's overweight and that is just a fact of his life, and some of the comments from the other side have used phrases like, "It's repulsive to see fat street people making our neighborhood unlivable with their trash and laziness." 

Knowing that this can happen this evening makes Kyle realize that he needs to calm and center himself beforehand. His self-image and his self-talk need a strategy to stay regulated, to rise to a professional level of communication even though he's "only" a local resident. 

He will tell himself this evening is bigger than just him and his need to defend himself personally. He will remind himself that, for this evening, he is above the natural defensiveness that he might normally exhibit. He will be triggerless for the two or three hours of this meeting, impervious to low comments meant to derail him. Tomorrow he can rant at someone on the street if he needs to, but not tonight.

Learn, unlearn, learn differently, practice

Managing our conflicts at home, in our neighborhoods, at work, and in our various organizations is a matter of conscious work. I am a professor in this stuff and I need daily self-reminders. 

I mean, I grew up playing hockey in Minnesota and my Dad, who skated for the University of Minnesota and then played semi-pro hockey, told me, "Keep your elbows up and fight dirty in the corners." When I am in conflict, despite my decades of learning better, I need to work on my approach, forgive myself for stumbles, and congratulate myself when I overcome my natural pugnacious urges. 

If civil discourse and its strategic benefits can work for someone as flawed as I am, it can work for anyone. Our society needs far more of this in our combative, polarized environment full of culture wars, identity slurs, and routine condemnation. We can do so much better.

Nonviolent policing #6: Serve and protect: Compliance first!

The old school overreliance on achieving compliance at any cost is a barrier squarely in the path toward policing without violence. 

Sadly, the mandate for compliance seems heavily ingrained, so that even when, for example, a magazine published for police discusses deëscalation, the pivot to application of violent force when deëscalation fails to produce compliance is swift and instead gives officers information on committing "justified" lethal force.[1]On the peace team, we stress another approach--kick the can down the road, we're the boss of no one, let's just keep everyone safe.

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[1] https://www.policemag.com/training/article/15678660/10-tips-for-better-deescalation-training

 

Nonviolent policing #5: Trust? Doveryai no proveryai

When Ronald Reagan began serious nuclear talks with the Soviet Union, he was taught the Russian phrase (much catchier in Russian because it rhymes) Doveryai no proveryai--Trust, but verify. He used it in public meetings with Gorbachev and others and it helped make it possible to legitimate the image of the negotiation. Bargain with the devil but make sure you are guaranteed the right to "toss his cell" at will--to inspect, to review, to see for yourself if good faith is reality.

This is how many have approached community policing, especially in communities that have been so traumatically impacted by police violence. When community policing is trauma-informed and persistent, it may not only statistically work (lower crime rates, fewer instances of police violence, etc.) but it may eventually change community views, including at least one study showing that community policing practices--100 percent of which revolve around nonviolent actions by police--are correlated to a decrease in community fear of crime (Lee, Lee & Zhao, 2023). 

This is how the incremental, patient approach--not a cynical doling out of a small measure of change to appease an angry community--can slowly but surely "turn that rig around."[1] Trust is earned. Community policing done well can increase the earning power. Every tragic episode of backsliding makes the struggle to earn that trust stretch out in a sad delay. Part of the key in the training--scenarios building creativity and drills building new mental muscle memory--is to avoid those damaging trust-busting incidents.

References

Lee, J., Lee, H. D., & Zhao, J. S. (2023). Community‐oriented policing (COP): An empirical study of its effectiveness on fear of crime. Social Science Quarterly (Wiley-Blackwell), 104(5), 988–1005. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1111/ssqu.13282

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[1] From an old truckers' saying about huge trucks with long trailers: "Give me 40 acres and I'll turn that rig around."

Nonviolent policing #4: Being brave

If a well-meaning officer is seeking an actual productive dialog with a subject, being clear on aspirations can assist in achieving the willingness to actually talk. And when a police department seeks a new relationship with a community deeply concerned with bias and police violence, it does itself no favors by denying instances of racism nor by shielding practicing racists in their department. In one German study a number of shocking, revealing facts were uncovered, during the 2020 global uprising over police killing or profiling black people: 

In 2020, for example, it became public that German police officers were sharing pictures, memes, and comments with racist, anti-Semitic, and demeaning content in WhatsApp Groups. Leadership, politicians, and the public were especially shocked about the fact that none of the many police officers who were members of the chat groups (up to 500) intervened. (John, 2024, p. 2).

It is common for police to boast that they are the only ones who "run toward the gunfire," as though they are thus uniquely brave. But how brave are those officers who fail to note untoward conduct by their fellow officers? When an officer's actions harm and hurt innocents and thus the community at large, it would seem to follow that any brave colleague would confront it in some manner.

References

John, E. (2024). Training German police officers to tackle racial discrimination: Professional virtues between compliance with legal norms and dialogue with affected groups. Policing: A Journal of Policy & Practice, 18, 1–8. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1093/police/paae048

Nonviolent policing #3: Exemplars

When have law enforcement women and men shown how to deëscalate someone who is highly escalated?

·       A motorcycle cop in San Francisco has talked many distraught people literally back from the edge on the Golden Gate bridge. He frequently uses major reframing rather than confronting the direct threat of suicide, for example, asking "What are your plans for tomorrow?" When they shake their head or say, "None," he might respond, "Well, let's make one." (Stone, Patton & Heen, 2023, p. 302).   Not only is he reframing the moment and the scene, he has stepped over to the side of the suicidal person and is now declaring that they are a team. "Let's" is "Let us," and making the lone depressed person no longer alone, but making them part of "us" is a double reframe. This officer has not lost one person. Reframing beats command and control.

·       Chris Voss goes through some examples of talking down people who are so escalated they are holding hostages and threatening to start killing them (Tactical empathy, 2022). Does evincing empathy always work? No, but utilizing it has no costs and, at the least, can buy a bit of time, sometimes quite a bit. The time and energy the threatening person expends in rejecting the empathy may (and in Voss's case did) allow your teammates to make progress that can also help close out an encounter without taking a life or even overpowering the threatening person. 

·       In Iraq, during the most furious period of the US military invasion and occupation, a small unit of US troops were patrolling a neighborhood when suddenly hundreds of locales poured into the streets, surrounding them, yelling and menacing, many of them armed. Rather than bunch up with guns bristling, the unit leader gave his order, "Take a knee."[1] They lowered their guns, took a knee, and the crowd deëscalated. They were allowed to leave without a single person on any side harmed.

References

Stone, Douglas; Patton, Bruce; Heen, Sheila (2023). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most, 3rd ed. New York, NY: Penguin.

Tactical empathy. (2022). In Films on Demand. Films Media Group. https://digital.films.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=102733&xtid=294086

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[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/01/17/battle-lessons

Nonviolent policing #2: Police social workers

Some jurisdictions are experimenting with a mixed team of sworn officers and police social workers (PSW): 

Qualitative case notes also revealed that PSWs can divert individuals from the criminal justice system by using crisis intervention and de- escalation techniques on-scene with clients. This research has important implications for improving community safety and well-being, and this case study reveals that PSWs with micro and macro skills are a promising model for improving public safety and justice in the right context. (Ban & Riordan, 2023, p. 537).

Social worker deëscalation training is far more baked into the curriculum throughout, the social workers are not oriented toward being armed, and the high degree of support and human services knowledge makes the person in crisis often far more amenable to deëscalation, less subject to irrational actions based on terrorized emotional states, and thus far more likely to accept help and guidance more calmly. 

References

Ban, C. C., & Riordan, J. E. (2023). Re-Envisioning Public Safety Through an Embedded Police Social Worker (PSW) Model: A Promising Approach for Multidisciplinary Resource Delivery and Diversion. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 39(4), 537–554. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1177/10439862231189423

From cathartic to effective

In my town, I am periodically confronted by activists who wreck stuff, throw things at cops, smash windows, and claim to be strategic and effective. 

Yeah, no.

What they cite as evidence is, "Well, here we are, months later, and we are still talking about it. That's effective."

Yeah, no. Virtually all the talk revolves around "How do we prevent anything like this happening again?" That is not effective unless the talk is focused on meeting the stated goals of the activists so as to take away any reason for them to again smash stuff. And even then, the strategic lens is net recruitment.

Organizers should ask themselves at virtually every decision point: how will this affect recruitment to either our numbers of supporters and allies or our direct participants or both?

This exact thing happened on the campus where I teach, and the results have been instructive. Students began to act to demand that the university stop any relationship with Boeing, since Boeing is a war contractor supplying Israel. The odd piece is that the university bought nothing from Boeing and invested nothing in the Boeing company. Instead, Boeing donated to my university. 

The university president almost immediately agreed to pause on accepting anything from Boeing and study the situation.

At Brown University, students heard their president make similar concessions in late April, 2024, and broke down their camp. Not at my university. The students, quickly joined by many more non-students, began by taking over space for themselves that had previously been public. They defaced the outside of the campus library with messages that many Jews found tantamount to calls for genocide, e.g., "From the river to the sea," a slogan coined in the 1960s by the Palestinian Liberation Organization that framed it as "pushing the Jews into the sea," a genocidal ideation that has never been taken as anything else by the parties most intimately involved--Palestinians and Israeli Jews. 

The trauma of the Jewish Holocaust remains real and to inflame it with such sloganeering is certain to get a frightened and frightening response. That it's not a trigger to young non-Jewish people today is simply a facet of their ignorance of history and has been a cruel bit of language meant by some to inflict the pain that it has. 

What I ask my students is, "OK, if a Black person asked you to stop calling him 'Boy,' would you do so? The use of phrases with historical baggage such as 'from the river to the sea' is analogous to that." I may mean no harm to that Black man when I say, 'Oh, boy, you are really talented,' but once a Black man mentions that some Black men may be offended by that language, I stop, and I wonder about those who continue to use slogans with genocidal connotations, such "From the river to the sea." 

The protesters began by commandeering previously public space and denying it to others, then, after non-students--often in their 30s and 40s, even in their 60s--joined and took over, they went into the university library and shut it down and occupied it, spraypainting messages of hate, breaking fire doors and a great deal else, with a repair bill now more than $1.23 million. 

Of the 30 arrested, just six were students. This was a hijacked protest. 

Interestingly, police let them know the morning they intended to come in to clear it out, and let them know a back door was open for a period, during which dozens fled. This raises questions about the possibility of agents provocateurs who committed the most egregious actions and egged on others--the history of such undercover agents is that they do not want their covers "blown," of course. Did one or more such agents escape arrest and possible identification by the tactic of allowing some to flee without consequence? 

In Ireland, students began an encampment demanding that Trinity College Dublin divest from Israel. Negotiations ensued and the college agreed to student demands on an incremental basis, at which point students broke camp.

This is basic Negotiation 101. Make a demand. Let the other party know what your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) is. Stick to it and impose costs if you are able. Do so without rancor or identity slurs, which saves face for everyone. Preserving everyone's dignity in the throes of conflict is crucial and ultimately allows your enemy to become your opponent and ultimately your partner in a collaborative path forward. 

Or you can fuck shit up, disrupt for the sake of disrupting, and call yourself strategic. You will create lifetime enemies and you will lose heavily in public opinion, but if you can achieve the catharsis you so clearly crave, I am sure it's worth it to you. Yeah, we will talk about you into the future, which is apparently your benchmark of "effectiveness." Just don't expect much approbation and especially do not expect to save a single Gazan life, instead contributing to the public apathy or even opposition to peace. Nice going. 

Nonviolent policing #1: Motivating change

Research into disincentives to police and their departments to employ violent compliance, especially to lethal levels, shows that reforms are needed in many jurisdictions in the US (Scott & Viscusi, 2021). These changes, argue the authors, include shifting punitive damage costs from the government's general funds to police officers and their departments, ending qualified immunity, and aligning punitive damages to the US federal value of statistical life (VSL), which would combine to produce effective pressure on police bureaus to change. 

How would police departments change? It would likely be a mix of far more stringent educational achievement and psychological fitness hiring requirements, much better deëscalation training in basic pre-duty weeks, and ongoing enhanced trainings as research develops new and more effective methods of less and less violent policing. 

Reference

Scott, Jeffrey, & Viscusi, W. Kip. (2021). The locale and damages of fatal policing. Denver Law Review, 99(1), 37-86.

The USA never negotiates with terrorists--except they always do

From hokey TV action shows to mainstream media quotes from "administration" spokespersons, the one hundred percent false claim is the official lie that "we never negotiate with terrorists." 

Yeah. We always do.

Negotiations come in many forms. Displaying your biggest weapons in a war games exercise with an ally for all to see is an opening note in a negotiation. 

Establishing a hot line between two enemies is a negotiation. 

Cutting funding to a weapons program that your enemy fears is a negotiation. 

Claiming that you never negotiate is a negotiation. 

Negotiation is a simple fact of life that is unavoidable and something that no one operating in any sort of strategic fashion would ever avoid. How it's done is infinitely varied. 

When Ronald Reagan said we never negotiate with terrorists and then negotiated the world's first nuclear weapons disarmament treaty, the Intermediate Forces treaty of December 1987, that showed a public, open example of negotiating with those previously deemed terrorists. 

They are always terrorists until they aren't. The evil empire can be reasoned with. 

Even refusing to negotiate is a form of negotiating, since that refusal can, at times, convince the enemy to seek negotiations. 

There is no hard and fast rule to convince your enemy to negotiate, but there is a convention that says to your enemy, "Pay no attention to my public refusal to negotiate. I'm interested." 

While most scholarship describes a sequence--resistance, dialog, negotiations--once we expand the realistic definition of negotiation to include all the words and actions meant to engage the enemy or opponent, we see that the process is often a fluttering of adaptive management from one component to another and back again (Dudouet, 2017).

Reference

Dudouet, Véronique (2017). Powering to Peace: Integrated Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding Strategies. International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICNC-Special-Report-Civil-Resistance-and-Peacebuilding.pdf