How To... AMAURY MURGADO
HOW TO...RESPOND INSTEAD OF REACT Stay in control of an encounter by calmly interacting with a subject instead of letting your emotions get the best of you.
T
he Aug. 9, 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, triggered a chain of events that changed how the public perceived law enforcement. The current trend of ill will toward law enforcement by certain segments of the population is a real concern everyone in uniform has to deal with. The days of just dealing with citizens who are angry about a situation they find themselves in are long gone. We now have to deal with some citizens' open hostility. One of the best strategies we can employ to help overcome and reverse this trend is to maintain our professional standards by calmly responding to highly charged situations instead of reacting to them. There is a real difference between the two, as responding is influenced by training and logic while reacting is guided primarily by emotion.
REACTING I am not suggesting that all reactions are bad. We need to
hone several types of reactions in order to deal with exigent circumstances, such as an attack. I'm talking about the situations where you have time to make a choice before it escalates into something else. There is a brief window of opportunity that you can exploit to your favor. You need to own your role and not let yourself get sucked into the other person's agenda and the narrative that they follow. When you react to someone's emotion, you have lost control of the one thing you can control. If you can't control yourself, there is no way you will be able to obtain control of anything else. In order to get ahead of this, you must maintain the initiative and move toward a problem-solving mode. The main problem with a reaction response is that it is emotionally driven. If you allow yourself to be driven by emotion, you lose focus and torpedo your own efforts for securing your primary objectives. If you react instead of respond, you will most likely fall prey to the narrative instead of helping to write it.
RESPONDING
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In dynamically charged situations, responding calmly
When possible to safely do so, take the time to use logic and training to calmly respond to an excitable subject.
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POLICE JANUARY 2017
makes more sense because it's guided less by emotion and more by logic. To some, responding this way may seem more passive, but it's quite the opposite. In contrast to merely reacting to someone else's words and actions, responding requires a more active approach that allows you to inject the influence you need to sway the outcome of your interaction in a much more positive way. When you respond, you are no longer being controlled by the event; you are taking measures to control it. Reacting creates yelling matches; responding creates useful dialogue. I have learned from experience that trying to stop your emotions is counterproductive. The trick is not to stop them but to control what you do with them. It is a lesson that ought to be stressed early in everyone's career. It would save each officer a great deal of controversy and the negativity that comes with it.