Deëscalation tip #61: More policewomen, please

What about the intersection of gender, deëscalation, and the po-po?

Over the past half century, various studies into policing and gender have come to the same sort of conclusion, echoed from this Washington Post piece that references several studies: 

In a 1988 article in the Journal of Police Science and Administration researcher Joseph Balkin reviewed the U.S. and international research spanning 14 years on the involvement of women in police work. He found uniformly that women not only perform the job of policing effectively, but are better able to defuse potentially violent situations: “Policemen see police work as involving control through authority,” he wrote, “while policewomen see it as a public service.”

This is so illustrative of the even greater gap between peace teams and many members of the police. As a member of the peace team here in Portland, Oregon, and as someone who knows peace team leaders from across the US and Canada, I cannot think of one of my many colleagues who is doing this for any other reason than public service and toward an outcome in which everyone is safe. That is part of what we stress in training and to organizers of events who seek our help in keeping things nonviolent, that we have zero authority other than the moral authority conferred on us by the organizers to remind any and all participants of the code of conduct the organizers have stressed.

Remind, not order or command.

When the event has been publicized as nonviolent, then all we do is remind. That feeds into the avoidance of escalation, helping to obviate the need to deëscalate so much. 

And, as might be expected, women on peace teams are often the most effective. The most effective men are almost always aspiring feminists.