Verbal Judo teaches a philosophy of how to look creatively at conflict and use specific strategies and tactics to find peaceful resolutions. These skills are beneficial to officers in their duties because dealing with the public is often difficult and trying emotionally. Maintaining a “professional face” is crucial if officers are to remain under emotional control and be able to effectively find solutions to potentially violent encounters without escalating to physical force options. Further, where there are times that such physical force options are indeed necessary to protect both citizens and officers, such force must always be part of the professional process so officers are protected within the four arenas: with our peers, on the streets, in the courtroom, and with the media.
Departments can expect that once its officers are trained in Verbal Judo, they will know the following things:
- How to use Words to achieve professional purposes and how to resist using language to express personal feelings.
- How to control themselves inside so they can exert control on the outside.
- How to employ empathy and the art of “representation” to become Contract Professionals, maintaining self-control and staying in contact with the needs of the department and their audience -- the public.
- How to effectively deliver words that are on target by first understanding the receiver’s point of view. This includes two distinct tactical approaches for dealing with difficult people: the eight step traffic stop and the five step “hard style”.
- The arts of “Translation,” to ensure that what we say is actually what we intend, and “Mediation”, delivering words in the form of a personal appeal, to achieve voluntary compliance from people who are under temporary emotional influences, ranging from despair and fear to anger and prejudice.
- How to read others and diagnose a verbal encounter.
- How to use the four appeals of persuasion and the twenty-four principles of street work.
- The five conditions where words demonstratively fail and officers must move beyond words to physical force options.