Shifting from Assumptions to Discovery with Insight Policing
In many policing situations, officers are trained to interpret resistance as a sign of criminality—a sign that someone might be hiding something or engaging in illegal activity. This leads to a predictable line of commands for compliance or investigative questioning aimed at uncovering guilt. The challenge, though, is that often resistance is not the result of crime, but of conflict behavior. What if there was a different way to approach it that took this into account - one that wasn't bound by the assumption of guilt but by an inclination to discover the unknown motivations behind a person’s resistance?
This is the heart of Insight Policing—an approach that can be linked to ideas of exploratory learning. Unlike traditional responses to resistance that rely on fixed procedures to reach predetermined conclusions, Insight Policing equips officers with the skills to explore conflict behavior as a decision-making process by using targeted, open questions to uncover what’s driving a person’s actions.
Just as in exploratory learning, where the goal is to expand understanding without the limits of assumptions, Insight Policing teaches officers to approach each situation with curiosity. Insight Policing is about discovering something unknown— the motivations behind a person's conflict behavior—rather than applying a pre-set response. Through this method, officers can de-escalate tension, build rapport, gain compliance, and ultimately keep everyone safer.
Exploratory Learning and How it Links to Insight Policing
Exploratory learning is a style of learning that aims to expand knowledge, form productive questions and discover new information in emergent and often unpredictable contexts. This is in contrast to exploitative learning, which relies on routine processes and standards to understand and engage with new material with predictable results in mind (March 1991). The idea of learning through the exploratory method is to approach material with a sense of novelty in order to understand the whys behind it without the baggage of assumptions. This can lead to new discoveries and understanding that is often unexpected.
Exploratory learning echoes the framework of the Insight Approach to conflict resolution, which is the framework that informs Insight Policing: Conflict Resolution for Law Enforcement in particular. The Insight Approach, grounded in the science of conflict decision-making, demonstrates that conflict can be resolved effectively when parties discover the whys behind conflict. This discovery is made possible by exploring, through curious questions, the threat and defense motivating conflict behavior - information often obscured by the strong emotions that accompany conflict.
Insight Policing builds on the Insight Approach by establishing a skill sequence that leads officers to respond to citizen conflict behavior on the job by exploring the decision making behind it before reacting with force. Using Insight Policing skills helps officers get to the “why” of a citizen’s conflict behavior and discover information that helps them prevent escalation and problem-solve safely, effectively and with a higher chance of voluntary compliance. Connecting Insight Policing to the ideas behind exploratory learning helps us understand how Insight Policing works.
Exploratory learning is typically conducted to gain better insight into a concept that doesn’t have a lot of established knowledge. According to Psychology Today, “Exploration in your daily life is learning new things in your field and following your curiosity.” This kind of curiosity driven learning is mainly used when looking to further understanding rather than seek a known answer.
This is essential when dealing with conflict. According to the Insight Approach, when we are engaging in conflict, we are defending against what we perceive to be a threat to something that matters to us. In order to de-escalate conflict and create space for resolution, it is important that we are heard on what we find threatening to what matters. When we feel heard on this, feelings of relief and security take the place of threat, allowing for a more productive conversation.
In order to hear a person out on what matters, it is important to explore without assumption. Assumption can block our curiosity and prevent us from discovering the motivation for the conflict behavior. Without understanding the motivation, finding a sustainable solution is almost impossible.
Insight Policing adapts this framework to a progressive skill sequence for getting curious in the face of conflict and exploring the “whys” behind it. First officers notice conflict behavior as a decision to defend in response to a feeling of threat. Second, officers verify what they’ve noticed to mitigate assumptions. And third, officers ask curious questions aimed at discovering the threat and defense motivating conflict behavior.
Using these skills leads officers to interrupt escalating encounters by discovering the whys and the motivations behind conflict behavior - behavior that often presents as aggression, resistance and non-compliance, which are difficult to deal with and can get in the way of law enforcement objectives. Discovering the whys opens lines of communication and allows for solutions that meet the needs of the context.
An Example of Exploring Resistance through Insight Policing
One example of this is when an officer trained in Insight Policing responded to a disturbance at a high school football game. A player’s father had become unruly with the referee, and the officer’s goal was to remove the father from the game. The officer initially approached the situation by ordering the father to calm down, but the father refused. He was clearly exhibiting conflict behavior through his aggression. Rather than continuing with orders, the officer noticed the conflict behavior and verified to the father that he seemed worked up about the game. Hearing his behavior verified back to him, the father began to regain control and engage with the officer rather than defend. When the officer began to explore the whys behind the father’s conflict behavior, asking the father what was leading him to yell at the referee, the father reported that the referee had ordered him to leave the game, which offended him. It was also the only game he could attend all season, and he didn’t want to let down his son.
Learning this information by discovering the motivation behind the father’s disorderly conduct not only made the father feel heard and understood, but expanded the officer’s options for responding. Rather than escalating to remove the father, she was able to explain - in a way that the father could hear - that his behavior wasn’t going to help him finish watching the game, and point out a place off the field where he could continue to watch without getting into any more trouble with the referee. In the end, the father moved off the field to finish watching and was grateful for the intervention - a direct result of the officer’s Insight Policing skills as tools of exploratory learning.
Exploratory learning is about curiosity and discovery. What we know from the Insight Approach is that those are essential components of engaging conflict well. Insight Policing activates exploratory learning through curiosity-based conflict communication skills that lead officers to de-escalate, discover, problem solve and gain voluntary compliance.
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