Studies of antagonistic interactions, specifically in policing, frequently view (de)escalation as a linear process without considering how officers perceive and anticipate interactional processes. In this presentation, I argue that officers perceive tense encounters with civilians are characterized by a back-and-forth going of various trajectories, goals and directions. Based on our interactionist and ethnomethodological conceptualization of interactional trajectories, and an analysis of elicitation interviews with police officers, this presentation discusses the findings on officers’ interpretations of ‘turning points’, e.g. sudden shifts in their own, their colleagues’ or civilians’ bodily behaviour that redirect their projected trajectories and which necessitate police action, sometimes violence. In the presentation, I argue that a conceptualization of trajectories and turnings points, sheds light on the importance of bodily action police-civilian encounters; in order to maintain public order it is crucial to anticipate and redirect perceived turning points that potentially disturb routinized patterns of bodily actions.

Police officers perform a large part of their work in public spaces. Therefore they must not only be concerned with their primary task, but also with the bystanders who form their audience. In some instances these third parties can play a more active role by obstructing or helping police officers. Studies have stated that third parties have an important influence on the development of conflicts. On the one hand third parties have the potential to prevent or de-escalate conflict. On the other hand involvement of third parties can lead to further escalation. The current project will focus on what bystander actions police officers encounter in what type of situations.
To answer these questions, police officers were interviewed about what different types of bystander behavior they experienced, and were asked to give a detailed description of a situation with a helping bystander and a situation with an obstructing bystander. Additionally the researcher will ride along with different shifts of officers to observe police-bystander interactions. The preliminary results show that police officers encounter both helping and obstructing bystanders during nightlife surveillance and emergency response service. The presentation will provide a more detailed description of the different bystander behaviors.

Every day, police officers find themselves in risky interactions with citizens, which can escalate into verbal or physical conflicts or even violence. Although numerous research has been conducted on the explanatory factors of force escalation in such interactions, little is known about what officers can do to minimize the risk of using force. One promising recommendation is to include de-escalation training in use-of-force policies. However, knowledge of its effectiveness is limited as quality and content of trainings varies dramatically. Moreover, the concept of de-escalation itself remains largely undefined and the measurement of effectiveness varies across articles. Thus, while de-escalation training is being recommended to minimize the use of force, the conceptualization and measurement are unclear. Consequently, prior to focusing on effectiveness of training, we first need to understand the concept of de-escalation itself. Building on previous reviews on de-escalation techniques in the mental health context, a systematic review on effective de-escalation techniques from various professional contexts is conducted. The goal of this review is to integrate insights from these professions and present an overview of the different techniques police officers can use to prevent and de-escalate conflicts in interactions with citizens. In this presentation, the systematic review will be discussed.

In this presentation, I present my PhD research on what goes on in conflictual encounters between law enforcers (primarily police) and citizens. The goal of the project is to increase the knowledge on conflict behaviors, and to show how police (and citizens) can use specific behavioral patterns to de-escalate conflict or prevent violence in such encounters.
In the first part of the presentation, I will focus on what police and citizens actually do. I draw upon an analysis of CCTV footage from police-citizen encounters in Amsterdam. I show how different citizen behaviors affect police use of force behaviors, based on findings from quantitative analysis.
Secondly, I will focus on what police officers say they do in these encounters. This is based on qualitative interviews. These data are used to contextualize the above findings with insights on how police themselves understand, interpret and act upon different type of citizen behaviors. On the basis of these parts of project, I try to synthesize different type of findings to reflect around practical and training implications for police officers.