Police De-Escalation

Dr. Robin Engel takes a deep dive into police de-escalation, an approach that includes techniques to reduce the tension that can be part of any police-citizen interaction.  The tactics are designed to minimize the use of force by resolving incidents peacefully.  

Main Topics

• Until recently, de-escalation research was non-existent and seen as potentially threating to the officers.
• Dr. Engel discusses how training contributed to substantial reductions in the use-of-force, as well as reductions in officer injuries.
• Still, de-escalation training must be combined with supervisor support and frequent reminders of it’s utility.

Dr. Engel can be contacted at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University.  Her research can be found on Google Scholar.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
Policing has always been associated with change and reform, even if those changes are few
and far between.
For example, police academies didn't actually start until the 1920s, and field training
didn't become a standard feature of policing until 1972.
Community policing and problem-solving started basically in the late 1970s, but it wasn't
until the early 1990s that federal funding was provided to diffuse community policing
across the country.
More recently, there has been a flood of reforms in policing.
In the past 30 years, for example, we have seen greater use of technology such as in-car
computers, dash cams, and body cams.
Other reforms that are intended to improve the police are tools being used by street-level
police officers.
We are talking about the approach an individual officer uses to handle a situation or deal
with a problem.
For example, there is greater understanding of implicit bias, and many police officers
are engaging in hotspot police patrols.
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Robin Sheppard.
Robin currently serves as a senior research scientist in the John Glenn College of Public
Affairs at The Ohio State University.
She was formerly a professor at the University of Cincinnati, and she was the vice president
of safety and reform at UC, and the director of the International Association of Chiefs
of Police Center for Police Research and Policy.
Robin has won numerous awards for her policing research and has multiple publications related
to police supervision, traffic stops, and focused deterrence.
Recently, Dr. Engel has started working with a few other scholars on de-escalation training
for the police.
So we're going to explore that topic in this podcast.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thanks Scott for having me.
And do you know what I loved about that introduction is you inadvertently referred to me as Robin
Sheppard, which is my maiden name.
And I love what I love about that is we have known each other for a very long time all
the way back.
Yes.
That's right.
Three decades.
Yes.
30 years.
A long time going all the way back to the University at Albany when we were graduate
students together.
I love first that you're doing this podcast and secondly that you thought enough of me
to have me on.
So thank you so much.
My pleasure.
I apologize.
I just can't shake it.
I know.
It's routine.
Right?
So I love it.
We were talking about what the brain remembers and what it doesn't remember before we started
the show.
And it's like, well, there you go.
You're going to be that forever.
So anyway, as I also mentioned during the introduction, you studied a variety of policing
topics.
Interested in the topic of de-escalation for the police?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
Obviously, I'm trained as a researcher and that's how I spent most of my career.
But back in 2015, so over 10 years ago now, I found myself in a different situation.
And that is I was at the University of Cincinnati as a professor, but we had an officer involved
shooting by a campus law enforcement officer about a half mile off campus in the city jurisdiction.
And that was that critical incident.
The officer made a traffic stop for a missing front license plate and within a minute had
shot and killed the motorist, an unarmed black male.
And as a result of that, there were all kinds of protests.
The officer was tried for murder twice, two hung juries.
And while all of this was happening, the campus, the president of the university and others
weren't really quite sure what to do.
So they reached out to me as, you know, an academic scholar in this area.
And within a week, I found myself taking over the police department as a vice president
of safety and reform.
And with that, I spent three and a half years where I was literally working to rebuild that
police agency top to bottom.
So as part of that, we had to look at our use of force policy and our training and our
supervision.
And so that's how I first became interested in it, because I thought I'm a researcher.
I'm going to go to where the evidence is.
If I want to change police training, I'm going to get my cops the very best training that's
out there that's research and evidence based.
And when I went to look for that, there was none.
So this is a time when everyone was pushing for deescalation training.
It was after Ferguson in 2014.
So this is 2015.
And citizens are demanding deescalation training.
And there was not one study that showed the impact of deescalation training.
So that's how I first became interested in it.
Right.
It echoes a little bit of my thinking is what's out there, what's not out there.
And trying to study something that's not been looked at before keeps me busy.
And I like doing that.
So you did actually cover a few things I wanted to get into, but more specifically,
from a broader perspective, in this area of inquiry, what's the value and relevance to
the police?
Now you kind of hinted at that, but why should any of the listeners care about deescalation
training?
Well, you know, it was striking to me again.
So I'm leading this law enforcement agency.
And by the way, we had about 60 sworn officers, 150 or so in the Department of Public Safety,
more broadly in the university, situated in Cincinnati.
So the Cincinnati Police Department, over a thousand sworn, et cetera, but our jurisdictions
overlapped.
And so when I decided we were going to change our use of force training and started looking
into it, I got immediate pushback from my officers and from the Cincinnati cops, some
of them as well, that I knew saying, you're going to teach these cops to hesitate and
you're going to get them killed out there.
And that was the the association with deescalation training, which had come in on a wave of police
reform.
And to be honest, there was no evidence to suggest that that was or wasn't true.
I could not say with confidence that the training that I was going to bring to this agency wouldn't
make cops less safe.
And so that's a huge burden.
So suddenly I'm no longer an academic.
I'm actually in charge of this law enforcement agency.
And the lives of these individual officers literally sits, you know, on my shoulders,
if you will.
Right.
Thinking about the changes to policy and training and supervision and all those other things.
So it became very real really quick.
And it's relevant for every officer that's out there.
The training the officers get, if it's not the very best quality.
And how do we measure that?
By research, of course, and by evidence.
But if it's not of the very best quality, we are putting our cops at a disadvantage.
And that's real and important and every cop deserves to have the very best training that's
out there.
Right.
As a side issue, I've been having a interaction with somebody about the training for active
shooter events.
And so it's the same kind of thing is, you know, what is actually the good training?
Is there any evidence to suggest that, you know, one mechanism or one standard is better
than the other?
So, yeah.
Okay.
So this can get really complicated.
But the other thing you were saying right now and something I read from your 2022 article
just a few years ago, it mentioned that most large cities are offering some sort of de-escalation
training.
Are you aware of is this growing into the smaller agencies?
Oh, yeah.
It's growing tremendously.
So again, this was back 2015 when I was first looking at it.
And that's when de-escalation training started to kind of become part of that larger police
reform package.
And there were a handful of trainings that started to gain some traction.
But now there are so many de-escalation trainings out there.
Obviously, they vary in quality and content and training modality, all of those things.
But we still don't have a good sense of how many trainings or how many agencies.
But we believe there to be in the thousands.
And some states actually require statewide mandated de-escalation training.
Some agencies require de-escalation as part of their use of force policy now.
And so there's been so many changes over the last 10 years.
And this really is a trend that's not going away.
It's actually dramatically growing.
Are they moving this into the academy, like planting the seed early?
Yes, absolutely.
So a lot of training academies are doing this as well.
In-service training, sometimes the de-escalation training is like a one-off.
It's like a day and a half or two days that's done in service.
But now we're seeing in the training academies that officers are being trained in de-escalation
tactics and skills from the onset as part of the larger use of force training.
OK. Now you also mentioned that there was a drawback of using de-escalation tactics
so that it might actually endanger the officers because they might hesitate.
Can you expand on that just a little bit more?
Yeah, you know, that was a real concern by officers across the country.
And, you know, certainly not an isolated concern of the unions.
Everyone was really thinking like, is this true?
So one of the things that we did, and I know we're going to talk a little bit more about
the study, but one of the things that we did was we took a look at officer injury as well
as subject injuries when we started measuring the impact of the training.
Because I was so concerned that that actually may be the case, right?
We need to look at this.
And I'm, you know, I'll just cut to the chase.
I know we'll talk about the study in a moment, but I was so pleased to find
in this in the work that we've done that actually de-escalation training is making officers safer.
It is not increasing their risk of injury.
In fact, after the training, officers are at less risk of being injured during an encounter with
non-compliant substance.
Well, that's that's good news then.
OK, so just slightly before we get into the research, I do also think it's important to
point out that a variety of studies done in the past into policing and their use of force
shows that it's actually quite infrequent.
Yes, absolutely.
So so when you think about a police citizen encounter, I mean, they have estimates of
anywhere from one to five percent of those encounters with with subjects or suspects
are, you know, result in some type of force.
And the majority of force that is used is very minor force, right?
So so the risk, if you will, of an event escalating to the use of force is statistically rare.
Now, having said that, of course, if you're either the suspect or the officer that's involved in
that situation, it doesn't matter how statistically rare it is.
It's real.
Right.
And we need to prepare for that as best we can and make sure that we're doing everything that
we can and giving officers the tactics and the skills necessary to reduce that risk of
having to go either hands on or to use weapons as part of their encounters.
Right. You're making me think that there's some data out there that suggests that there are
round round numbers estimated at 50 million police officer citizen interactions a year,
whether to traffic stop or whatever.
So 50 million, you're looking at one to five percent is pretty small, but that's still
in absolute numbers.
It can get pretty large.
OK, so now sticking with your research, what was the summary of how your research was done in
whether it's Louisville or wherever you might have done it?
Yeah, we've we've done multiple studies now.
And, you know, one of the things about working with police officers, of course,
as a social scientist, we want to be able to control all the environment and understand
whether or not it's actually the training that had the impact and not any of these other things
that are going on in the environment around the officers.
Right. But we cannot put officers in a test tube.
I've asked for I've asked for laboratory conditions and I have not received them in
any agency I've worked with.
So given that, we had to think about statistically and the research design.
How would we set it up?
And I might I'm going to nerd out on you just for a moment.
Works for me.
OK, terrific.
Well, one of my colleagues, Nick Corsaro, he's a statistician at the University of Cincinnati.
Brilliant guy.
And I said, OK, if we're going to do what's called a randomized control trial, an RCT,
that's where half the officers get the training, the other half don't.
You see what happens now in a police agency.
You can actually do that because ultimately everyone will get trained,
but you can't train them all at once anyway.
So if you randomize who gets trained first, then you'd have a better test
of whether or not that training works.
But the problem is in an operational police department, randomly selecting by officer
is not conducive to actually running the police department.
So we needed to find some way.
And also you could end up being a trained officer working with a non-trained officer
and then you don't know is it really that you're working together,
that your things are changing or was it the training, etc.
So this colleague of mine, Nick Corsaro, so he started looking in the research
and what he found was studies of malaria in Africa.
OK, how random is this?
All right.
So yeah, you're like, where are you going with this, Robin?
OK, so vaccinations of malaria in Africa by village.
So you do the whole village, but you could randomize which villages go first
and then they could determine what the impact was of the vaccine.
So that's what we did in Louisville Metro.
We randomized which divisions, police divisions got trained first.
And then so we trained the first cluster of divisions over a three-month period
and then we waited a month and then we did randomly the next cluster
and then waited a month, etc.
That's a stepped wedge.
And then we could compare those officers to themselves before they were trained,
but also to other officers that weren't trained yet until everyone is trained.
OK, the malaria comment was like, OK, I read your article.
That wasn't in there.
So that's why I had this look on my face like, OK, I have no idea what you're doing with this.
OK, but that makes sense.
You randomly apply the training to different districts over a certain amount of time
and then, as you say, you can compare me with before I had training with me and after training.
So beyond the nerding out, what were the basic findings of the use of force
or the dependent variables?
Use of force and arrests, those kinds of things.
What did you find?
Well, listen, we did the evaluation, the first evaluation with Louisville Metro.
Now, the reason why we couldn't do it with my own agency at UCPD is,
luckily, that campus law enforcement agency, we had so few uses of force.
That's a good problem to have.
But as a researcher, that's a bad problem to have, right?
You need to be able to study change.
So at the same time, 2018 and then into 2019, Louisville Metro was doing what's called ICAT training.
So that's Integrating Communications Assessment and Tactics.
That's what ICAT stands for.
And ICAT was produced by the Police Executive Research Forum, PERF.
And it's one of the most widely used de-escalation trainings.
So this was a great opportunity to test something that was widely used
and in a large enough agency that was going to be doing this training department-wide anyway,
but we could randomize who went first, which is what we did with Louisville.
And this is what we found.
So this is from 2019 was when the training occurred, 2018, 2019.
And then in 2020, we released the results.
And we found a 28% reduction in uses of force, a 26% reduction in subject injuries,
and most important from my perspective, a 36% reduction in officer injuries
as a result of this training.
These were changes that were associated directly with the timing of the training
that went across time and across divisions within Louisville Metro.
So that's really the strongest evidence.
And to this day, actually, there's only two other studies that have shown
behavioral changes of officers in the field that's linked to a de-escalation training.
And this was the first.
Well, those numbers are great.
So you're seeing a substantial reduction in all the things you want to see.
That's correct.
Put it this way, an improvement in the things you want to see improved.
Now, I hinted at this to you that I was going to talk about possibly the come-along techniques.
And as I mentioned, I learned those years and years and years ago.
And when we learned it, it was like, this is freaking awesome.
Nobody gets hurt.
People pay attention.
And it's just good for everybody.
The numbers showed an increase.
And I don't remember if it was significant.
Oh, yes.
My thinking was that a come-along is a good thing.
These are positive changes.
And everybody that's listening probably understands it.
The pain compliance that you do this or you're going to have to experience some pain,
but it's not going to be debilitating.
It's not going to be permanent.
I don't get permanently hurt.
You don't get permanently hurt.
But you pay attention.
You get in the car.
You behave yourself.
My thinking is that after the de-escalation training,
suggesting that it causes an increased use of the come-alongs is that the officers are saying,
OK, look, I can't control this guy just by talking him down.
But at least I can use a technique that's a de-escalation and physical force
so they don't get hurt.
I actually found that to be really fascinating.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so people think that de-escalation means no force.
And as part of our study, we're looking at, OK, was there a reduction in force?
Force, yes or no?
But the truth is, force is on a continuum.
It's the severity of force.
And so if you think about if a de-escalation tactics and strategies are working,
you would expect not just a reduction in overall force,
but a reduction in types of force.
And that's exactly what we are finding as well.
That severity of the types of interactions
and that's likely why that officer injury was reduced, right?
Because officers get injured when they have to go hands-on.
That's when an officer is going to get injured, right?
And so using other tactics and skills so that it reduces the likelihood
that they have to go hands-on is one of the reasons why those officer injuries are coming down.
So absolutely what you said is exactly right.
There's lots of different things that you can try to do
and that officers are trained to do.
But sometimes a type of force is still a de-escalation tactic
when compared to a different more severe type of force.
Now from that study, was it possible to determine how long it took for the training to take hold?
Was it immediate or was there a bit of a delay?
And even if the delay was a month or so, it's still pretty good.
Yeah, no, we found that it was pretty much an immediate effect as best we could tell.
We had to look at it monthly, so there's a little bit of a lag there.
But the other thing that was interesting to us is we also did surveys of the officers
directly before, directly after the training, and then in a four to six-month follow-up period.
And one of the things that we found was training decay.
So over time, actually, some of the changes in attitudes and tenets of the training
that the cops were changing their behaviors or their self-reported behaviors
of the use of the tactics and skills, over time that became watered down.
And so that made us start thinking about training dosage is just as important
as the initial training itself.
This can't be a one and done, right?
The most effective trainings are going to be ones that have that constant refresher or reminders,
whether it be in roll call training.
There's a whole different host of things that you can do to continually reinforce that training.
The other thing that you might find interesting, Scott, was that
the impact of the first-line supervisors and perceptions of their acceptance of that training
actually increased officers' likelihood of using de-escalation tactics and skills in the field.
So that was just, for me, just screamed out like, okay, we need a holistic plan.
It can't just be training.
It has to be reinforced with first-line supervisors.
It has to be reinforced in policy and it has to be accepted by the agency as a whole.
That's organizational cultural change and not just a one-off training.
Yeah, that's telling us a lot.
And those are topics for a different podcast.
I wish we could get into those more at the moment.
We're winding down a little bit, but you also did, and I want to talk about this study that
you did in Indianapolis, because it was different than looking at whether the use of force had gone
up or down, more or less.
But this was the, if I remember correctly, the attitudes and the opinions of the officers.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, yeah.
So what we did with the Louisville Metro study, that was all post, I'm sorry, it was pre-2020.
So then the question became, you know, pleasing changed dramatically.
Our society changed dramatically after 2020.
And the calls for reform and the backlash on reform and all of these things happening.
So the question was, does de-escalation training still matter post-2020?
So we were able to take a look at the Indianapolis Police Department and replicate the type of work
that we did with Louisville Metro.
But we added in more information from the officers themselves trying to better understand
their baseline measures, their attitudes and, you know, changes in their training as well.
So I will just shorten it up for you.
Indianapolis Police Department had already done de-escalation training.
They already had that in the works.
It was written in their policy.
It was reinforced.
But they added in ICAT training specifically.
So this is an agency that knew and was accustomed to de-escalation training.
But then they brought this in as well.
And they surrounded it with all different cultural changes within that agency.
And we found a 20% reduction in officer use of force and a 25% reduction in subject injuries
that corresponded again with the timing of that ICAT training.
So pretty impressive.
I mean, it's showing in a whole host of different areas why de-escalation training matters.
Right.
There's a lot to digest from this podcast and this conversation.
So with the few moments we have left, can you identify for any police agency, large or small,
a couple of the implications for their practices, personnel or the police leaders,
particularly the brass?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
So for our police commanders and our executives out there that are listening to this podcast,
you can't just pick a training off the shelf and check a box and say,
well, we've done police reform and we do de-escalation.
There are so many things that will really supplement and support that
in terms of actual cultural change.
So the training that you select obviously is one of the most important.
Then test the training.
Work with your local researcher to test that training.
Make sure it's doing what you think it's doing, right?
The intended effects.
That's step one.
The second piece is make sure that you have strong policies
and that de-escalation is part of that policy, right?
And that's being reinforced then with your first line supervisors
and provide incentives for those first line supervisors
to really reinforce and bring this along.
But honestly, it just needs to be holistic.
There has to be a mission and a vision and an understanding
that this is about sanctity of all human life
and that everyone goes home safe after a police citizen encounter.
And as you embrace that, there are lots of things that you can put in place
to make sure that that's making both officers and citizens safe from moving forward.
This has been excellent information, Dr. Engel.
I really appreciate you coming on the podcast
and I know you've done some other stuff.
So hopefully we can get you back in the future.
I would love to come back and I love what you're doing.
This is so important for the field.
So thank you for your efforts as well.
Thank you for the kudos.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, this was Dr. Robin Engel.
She's down in Ohio State.
I will put some of the information that's possible to contact her if necessary
in the show notes.
Thanks again, Robin.
Have a great day.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of the Police in Service Training Podcast.
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