Police officers learn to talk the talk

George Thompson was working as a police officer in Emporia, Kan., when he noticed veteran police officers calming agitated people with remarkable consistency.

Thompson decided to investigate. He had taught English as a professor and specialized in rhetoric, but he wasn’t able to communicate as effectively as officers who had learned to talk by experience.

Armed with a tape recorder and camcorder, Thompson traveled the country to observe street-trained professionals.

At the time of his research in the early 1980s, he said, there was plenty of defensive training for police officers: how to handcuff, how to use batons and stun guns, but “nothing about how to talk.”

His research culminated in 1983 with the founding of the Verbal Judo Institute. It may sound mystical and empowering, but Thompson said the techniques behind it existed long before the name.

What changed, he said, was that officers nationwide began paying close attention to a topic they had taken for granted for so many years.

The secret, if it could be called such, lay in veteran officers’ gift of gab.

They gave people options, tried to help them think rationally through the consequences of their actions.

They asked for cooperation instead of insisting on it.

Thompson said if you’re a police officer trying to get a rowdy person to leave a bar, you shouldn’t say, “Is there any way I can make you leave this bar?” The word “make,” Thompson said, is a springboard to “No, you can’t make me do nothing.” A police officer using Verbal Judo would convey a sense of understanding (“Sir, I can see you’re upset”) and spell out options, Thompson said.

Verbal Judo has been used by the Missouri State Highway Patrol for more than a decade and will soon be a staple of the Columbia Police Department. Sgt. Dan Beckman and Officer Amy Bishop were nominated Sept. 6 by command staff to attend training with the Verbal Judo Institute in November to become certified instructors. The five-day training session in Dallas costs $750 a person.

Beckman is a member of the Police Department’s Crisis Negotiation Team. He said he signed up for the training because it sounded interesting and the department needed a Verbal Judo instructor. He’s been through hundreds of hours of talk training.

The department is on a limited budget, so if Beckman and Bishop don’t find the training beneficial, the Police Department won’t send its officers there in the future, said Sgt. John Worden, director of thePersonnel Development Unit. But Worden said he expects good things from the training. For years, the Police Department has offered Verbal Judo training through the Highway Patrol as part of its training regimen.

But why teach officers how to talk? Shouldn’t talking come second nature?

Yes, said Thompson, creator of Verbal Judo, but many law enforcement officials “tend to be pretty power-oriented, macho kind of people.” What may seem like common sense isn’t exactly common, he said.

Ideally, officers should take communications courses from a number of different organizations and combine that knowledge to create their own talking techniques, said Ken Hawkins, an instructor at the MU Law Enforcement Training Institute. He hasn’t trained in Verbal Judo – he never had the opportunity to do so as a police officer – so he said he can’t compare its effectiveness to that of other programs.

A 2005 report entitled “Can Effective Policing Also Be Respectful? Two Examples in the South Bronx” describes how two New York Police Department precincts experienced a significant drop in civilian complaints after implementing programs such as Verbal Judo.

One precinct’s civilian complaints fell by 54 percent from 1993 to 1998, and the second precinct’s fell by 64 percent during that same time frame.

The report cautions, however, that such programs “set the context for the drop in civilian complaints but were not in and of themselves sufficient causes of the decline.”

The paper, published in Police Quarterly magazine, credits the complaint decline to precinct administrations seeking to tolerate complaints and discipline officers generating them.

The Missouri Highway Patrol’s only certified Verbal Judo instructor, Sgt. Geoff Borlinghaus, estimated he’s trained from 250 to 300 new troopers in the technique since 2000.

A second trooper is scheduled to undergo training to become a certified instructor this fall, he said.

The Columbia Police Department will continue to provide a variety of communications-related training. Officers also get instruction at interview and interrogation schools. Having certified in-house instructors will allow the department to provide all officers with four hours of annual Verbal Judo instruction, Borlinghaus said, and other local law enforcement agencies could be invited to attend.

The instructors will also save the Police Department money and allow officers greater scheduling flexiblity, since instructors from out of town won’t be needed, Worden said. “It’s just another communication tool.”