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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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