Insight Policing

Law enforcement officers face conflict on the job daily. Not only is it difficult for citizens to be stopped by the police, but officers have the difficult job of gaining compliance when people are upset and become aggressive and resistant. The prescribed response to aggression and resistance is escalation of force. This presents two challenges for the police and the community that create a reinforcing conflict cycle. On the one hand, when officers use force, trust in the police plummets, even among those who are not directly affected by violence. This mistrust is especially true in areas with fragile communities where community members are disproportionately affected by system inequalities within the criminal justice system. On the other hand, when officers have negative encounters with the public, feelings of frustration and anger increase, leading to more stress and less satisfaction on the job as well as more negative views of the public in general. The challenge is that officers must secure compliance, even when faced with aggression and resistance. As it stands, they are not prepared to do that in a way that maintains trust and legitimacy,making officers’ jobs harder and community trust more precarious.

Insight Policing is a strategic conflict communication skill-set that prepares officers to problem solve safely, effectively and without the use of force when faced with aggressive, resistant, and non-compliant behaviors. Insight Policing frames these behaviors not merely as defiance or in violation of the law, but as conflict behaviors. In this way, officers are able to leverage the science of conflict decision making in their communication tactics to deescalate tension, get to the root of the citizen’s problem quickly, and gain the information they need to make targeted law enforcement decisions that people find fair. By engaging conflict effectively, officers can break down barriers with the community in the moments that count most—moments of enforcement. When adopted widely and as a cornerstone of policing practice, the conflict communication skills of Insight Policing will build community trust, strengthen police legitimacy, and change the public perception of police for the better.

Insight Policing is poised for growth. We have been working on developing, refining, and implementing Insight Policing since 2013, first through a grant from the USDOJ in collaboration with the police departments of Memphis, TN and Lowell, MA. In 2014 the federal government froze all discretionary funding, which presented a challenge for further agency adoption. We continued to test and refine on our own with Montclair, NJ in 2015 and Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Academy in 2017. Since 2018, we have trained 295 officers from agencies across the country and in Canada in small format, experience-based classes both in-person and virtually. 141 officers have been trained in 2021 alone. We are poised for further growth as we develop and launch an agency train-the-trainer program for agencies to train officers in-house. The train-the-trainer will increase the capacity of Insight Policing delivery, making conflict communication skills widely available to law enforcement agencies.