Week 5: Police Training

This week, I wasn’t able to watch The Way Way Back (2013) because I had several other committments. On Monday, there was a Dine & Dialogue lunch event hosted by New York State’s Department of Hate Crime Prevention that The Peace Institute was invited to. I went to take pictures because they didn’t have another photographer. Then there was the police training, which was the more important of the two events this week.

On day one, the focus was on understanding different reactions to conflict, distinguishing between needs and interests, and practicing active listening. I’ve already broken down the five reactions to conflict, so I won’t repeat them here. This part of the training was meant to help you better understand yourself and how your presence affects conflict. This is extremely important because you might see yourself as a problem solver and think you’ve de-escalated a tense situation, but later discover that someone who tends to be overly accommodating didn’t get what they needed because you found a solution too quickly and applied it. The most effective way to avoid a situation like that is not to immediately jump into solving the problem, but to first understand it.

They also went over how to better identify an interest versus a need. An interest is something you want. For example, they showed a clip from The Break-Up where a big argument starts over doing the dishes. In the clip, the girlfriend asks her boyfriend for 12 lemons, and he brings back three. This is an example of an interest: she didn’t actually need the lemons, she needed her boyfriend to pay attention to what she was saying and listen to her. In the same clip, he says all he wants is to play video games before doing the dishes after a long day. He doesn’t need to play video games; he needs a break from work before doing something labor-intensive again. This clip perfectly illustrates the difference between positions and needs, and how to identify them. This is important when de-escalating a conflict because, without understanding what people truly need (rather than just what they want), there is no way to fully resolve it.

Active listening is actually a rather simple concept. Basically, you repeat back what someone has said to you. It causes a somewhat surprising effect: the person speaking often begins to open up and share more. It may seem unbelievable, but it works very well, and people naturally do it all the time in everyday conversations. There was probably a moment in your life when someone was talking to you and you repeated what they said, maybe even accidentally, because you didn’t know what else to say. Looking back, you might realize that it encouraged them to keep talking. This is a very important skill for a de-escalator to have because it gets people talking and gives you more information about what actually happened. There are also variations of this technique. One of the best is asking open-ended questions so people are encouraged to answer more fully. You can also ask about a different time something similar happened to help take the speaker out of the immediate situation, or ask something slightly unrelated to keep the conversation flowing.