Testimonial: Major Easton McDonald – Loudoun County Sheriff's Office
When Assistant Chief Easton McDonald was a Major at Loudoun County VA Sheriff’s Office, he oversaw 39 school resource officers (SROs) as well as LCSO’s traffic units. Finding effective strategies to improve communication and de-escalation was crucial.
With over 20 years of law enforcement experience, McDonald had been trained in both CIT (Crisis Intervention Training) and verbal judo, a widely used communication technique in policing. While these approaches were helpful, he noticed gaps in their ability to handle the wide range of complex situations officers now face.
“I had been a verbal judo instructor,” McDonald explains. “I had CIT training, and I was a CIT instructor. But when I encountered Insight Policing, it grabbed all of those sciences together and made it work better.”
Unlike verbal judo, which relies on preset conversations, or CIT, which focuses specifically on mental health, Insight Policing equipped officers with adaptable tools for any type of encounter. “Insight Policing could handle it all—whether it was mental health, a crisis situation, or a serious incident,” McDonald shares. “It’s an approach that works for everything.”
McDonald points out the shift in modern policing from older methods like “Ask, Tell, Make,” where officers first ask, then tell, and finally make individuals comply. While this method was once standard, it often led to increased use of force. "Ask, Tell, Make doesn’t work. I mean, it works, but at the end of it, you're going to be doing a lot more “making” than you are going to have with compliance,” he says. “Insight Policing allows you to ask those curious questions. It allows you to just give a little bit more time, find out what's going on, who am I dealing with."
By incorporating Insight Policing into training for his SROs, McDonald saw firsthand how the method helps officers slow down, engage with students and other subjects, and de-escalate situations before they reach a critical point. “Ninety percent of this job is communication, and anytime you can find something that assists you in communications, it makes this job so much easier.”
For McDonald, the success of Insight Policing comes from its ability to combine communication strategies like verbal judo and CIT with a science-based approach to conflict decision-making. These skills equip officers with the tools to slow down situations, ask the right questions, and avoid unnecessary escalation. Importantly, when force or even shooting is needed, Insight Policing helps officers demonstrate that every possible step was taken before reaching that point.
“At the end of the day, you're going to solve the problem,” McDonald explains. “Your body cam is going to show that you tried several different options—you didn’t just come in and start shooting. You came in, you worked this to the best of your ability, and if you did have to use force, it was because you had no other choice."
To learn more about Major McDonald’s experience with Insight Policing, watch the full video here.
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