If your insurance brokerage firm provides coverage for law enforcement clients such as police officers and others, they may have questions about how to adopt de-escalation tactics successfully. Practicing de-escalation, or the strategic defusing of difficult situations your clients may encounter in the course of their work, is not only an essential professional approach but may even help avoid lawsuits, insurance premium spikes, and more. Your clients may find it helpful to make the most of their partnerships to adopt new tactics and pinpoint potential issues. Here’s how these strategic partnerships could benefit your law enforcement clients.

De-Escalation Tactics Can Help Your Clients Defuse Tough Situations

Perhaps one of the most important reasons your clients should work on adopting de-escalation techniques is that it can help them defuse tough situations in the moment when they’re on the job as well as potential legal complications later on. If they’re struggling to come up with strong solutions, some of the benefits they might see when working with a range of partners could encompass:

• Reviewing body camera footage of arrests and other common types of encounters
• Classifying and coding reactions and other types of police behaviors
• Identifying frequent patterns, especially when behaviors break training protocol

Partnerships Can Help Fill in the Gaps and Provide Unique Tools or Perspectives

Even with a range of expertise on the force, getting new perspectives can help law enforcement professionals fill in the gaps in their analyses. When your clients work with partners to find solutions, these partners could bring unique tools and perspectives to the table. For example, a fruitful collaboration might investigate such questions as:

• What patterns of behavior can be identified in bodycam footage?
• How do current law enforcement officers perceive the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their department’s policies?
• Could coding and algorithms help identify certain behaviors in the footage?
• What’s the psychology behind certain behaviors and common de-escalation tactics?
• How can these patterns best be addressed during de-escalation training sessions?
• What changes could be implemented to improve officer de-escalation skills and local community relations?

Your Law Enforcement Clients Could Utilize a Number of Partnerships

If your clients are unsure where to turn for help in creating a de-escalation strategy, you may want to remind them that there are several potential resources they could lean on. Some surprising but possibly fruitful partnerships, for instance, might include the following.

• Specialized law enforcement training centers
• Think tanks focusing on the effects of different types of policies
• University centers for organizational psychology, efficiency studies, behavioral sciences, and more
• Corporations that specialize in police technology, such as bodycams

Identifying new de-escalation solutions can help your law enforcement clients not only develop professionally but even avoid certain lawsuits in the future. If you insure law enforcement professionals, be sure to inform them of how they can utilize strong partnerships to assist in identifying and adopting key de-escalation tactics.

About PGUI

Professional Governmental Underwriters, LLC  is a full-service risk management company dedicated to assisting public, educational and non-profit entities in the management of their professional liability exposures including educators liability insurance. We are dedicated to providing state-of-the-art professional underwriting management and loss control advisory services on behalf of our designated carriers. For more information, call us toll-free at (800) 586-6502.