Persuasion and effective Communication for Law Enforcement: Applications for Patrol, Investigation, Undercover Operations and Survival

By Ph.D. Randolph D. Hicks II

Based on actual street encounters, Randy Hicks offers the reader effective communication methods. Using his 50 years of patrol time, undercover and investigation, academy instruction and university teaching, Hicks has devoted his professional life to learning everything he could about law enforcement’s most demanded tool: communication at

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randolph D. Hicks II
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641117661

Ph.D. Randolph D. Hicks II

Randy Hicks is a down to earth veteran Law Enforcement officer with years of experience in Patrol, Investigation and Undercover Operations. He earned his PhD in police education and training from the University of Southern Mississippi. For over 50 years he has dedicated his life to serving the public and then to serving fellow officers. The specialty which he pioneered in combining communication at close range with survival principles and tactics has benefitted innumerable officers. To this day his greatest satisfaction is receiving the thanks and encouragement of so many former attendees in his academy and university classes who have witnessed and effectively employed that which he has been able to pass on to them. This book is his attempt to benefit you also. In his late 70's, he continues his karate and physical fitness training, continues teaching in academies and university classes full-time, continues trying to 'be there' for people and delights in coffee sit-downs with brother 'cops.' Randy lives in San Angelo, Texas with his wife Martha, and with the actual ruler of their house: their Weimaraner, Lilah-Jean!

Book preview

PREFACE

F

orty years have passed since your writer put together his first comments addressing the immeasurable value of the basic principles of human communication to our tasks in law enforcement. In 1973, Undercover Operations and Persuasion, the first book dealing with this important subject, was published. The ensuing four decades have left most of us who have been in or associated with law enforcement overwhelmed with the changes that have swept over us like some sort of technological and cultural Hurricane Katrina. We have had to simultaneously develop and employ appropriate innovation and change…and not abandon but enhance that which time and experience have proved basic, crucial, and unchanging. This book, featuring a dramatic expansion from solely undercover work into the more basic and much broader areas of investigation and uniformed patrol and survival on the street, is a much-needed enhancement. Policing is both an effort to protect the public and help them with the difficulties of human life. It occurs in a myriad of contexts and situations wherein officers endeavor to win citizens’ cooperation—at close range—primarily through employing everyday interpersonal communication. This has not changed and will not change, but it remains the most basic function of those people to whom this book is respectfully dedicated:

Police by Profession

Enforcers by Trade

Cops by Choice

INTRODUCTION

W

hat you are going to read is unlike anything ever set to print about those of us who hope that—for us—there is a special place in heaven: cops. Strange birds with unusual attitudes. People whose most common response upon being exposed to a theoretical description of some important but abstract concept is That’s a fine theory, but what is it going to do for me on the street? If the practical utility of a theory or principle cannot be clearly demonstrated to a police officer, it has little use. A law enforcement officer is not a person who deals in abstracts for the sake of pure intellectualism but one who gets paid not nearly enough for making hard decisions, sometimes with grave consequences, often on short notice. As a result, your writer is going to try to talk with you about the nature of communication as law enforcement technique. Your author’s primary challenge in reconnecting with the only people he really understands has been to unglue the professor’s hat he has worn from time to time and throw it directly into the trash, thereby enabling him to go about as a man with some common sense rather than one with a cardboard head! There are less charitable descriptions of what needed to be removed from where in order to neutralize one of the most potentially dangerous threats to good policing: inexperienced academics and theory-based university criminal justice education! Most of what you will encounter here was not invented or created in a pure sense by this writer. Like each of us has done in our own professional development, principles, lessons, and experiences of ourselves and those passing this way before have been borrowed, recombined, and adapted to the task of building what we all want: better police. This is an attempt to pass what is known to work well to you in the same spirit in which it was passed to your author in his career. None of us own this.

And what is this? Probably the most consistent question on the mind of both preservice and in-service police when first baffled by the introduction of policing and communication in the same day! Glad you asked. This is not about formal communication as we know it but is more about human nature and its application on the street level. Few outside our blue-shrouded world have the vaguest idea of what the police are all about and even less idea of how we go about doing what we do. Actually, we don’t think enough about it ourselves. Basically, a cop is a kind of salesman of alternatives who gets paid to persuade other people to cooperate with him. Our success is mostly determined by our degree of human understanding exercised in unique and individualized situations—predominately communicative dyads and triads—which are ongoing, changing, and developing as we deal with them. There are few absolute scripted, workable procedures that can be routinely applied. However—and this is important—there are basic principles founded in the nature of human beings that do consistently and reliably provide a basis for the best methods of handling situations encountered by the police. And that is what this book is.

But wait. It has suddenly occurred to the writer that he may have given you an erroneous impression that must immediately be corrected. More accurately, with equal suddenness it has occurred to him that he has a long-standing promise to keep. Way back along the line, he promised some of the officers of a particular agency that he would include a story in his books. Now he finds himself in a position of either having to further test the patience of the publisher by including a totally irrelevant tale that can in no way be justified or going back on his word and incurring the wrath of several of his former compatriots, all of whom have long memories, carry grudges, and pack guns. Choosing the obvious lesser of the evils, the writer wishes to state emphatically that, in case you have been given the wrong impression, not all distasteful situations in which an officer finds himself can be successfully handled by persuasion. The following story fulfills the promise made many years ago and serves as an illustration. It has been passed down by word of mouth from officer to officer, told and retold, described as the gospel truth and the biggest lie in law enforcement history:

The Episode of the Phantom SUV

It all started with an undercover officer who worked in the Los Angeles office of the afore-un-mentioned agency. Precisely what happened is difficult to determine, but the official accident report the officer submitted to his headquarters furnished one version.

It seems that the officer was driving his undercover car home at about 8:30 p.m. when all of a sudden, another vehicle came roaring down on him from a side street and forced him to cross the divider and smash into an almost-new Lincoln Continental. The officer, according to the report, was unable to obtain the license number of the vehicle but described it as a large SUV, black in color that reportedly did not have its lights on. Now, in those days, headquarters was composed of former street agents, an understanding group of men who were inclined to take the word of the troops when they could find an excuse to do so. They were not the kind inclined to make something out of nothing or to ask irrelevant questions like, for instance: How is it that the accident occurred at 8:30 p.m. when the officer went off duty at 7:00 p.m.? Or: How could the SUV have come from the right when the only side street on the block enters from the left and dead ends! Or: How is it that our officer—who has a jacket (reputation) for the way in which he started practicing to be drunk at noon every day and always improved throughout the afternoon—was absolutely certain, as were several brother officers, that he had not had one single drink on the day of the accident? Well, none of these irrelevant questions were asked, and the victim-officer received the sympathy of all while he waited patiently for his vehicle to be repaired. He was assured by his grinning supervisor that they would do everything they could to apprehend the driver of that large SUV, black in color.

Things flowed along normally for several months until one rainy Wednesday afternoon in Central Valley. It seems that an officer was on his way back to the office after court when, according to the report, a four-door SUV, black, in attempting to pass, forced the officer off the pavement, across the shoulder of the road, over an embankment, and into a grape vineyard. It was impossible to get the license number of the vehicle or get a good look at the driver because, according to the report, it was raining too hard and things happened too fast.

The officer in question was known throughout the agency as the Red Ball Express. It was a title he had earned by going through a set of tires on a new department car in fewer than ten thousand miles and in fewer than two months. (It should be noted, in all fairness to the officer, that during these two months, he had also made more cases than anyone had in that period of time in the history of the organization—but the remainder of the saga of RB, as he was fondly called, needs to wait.) Anyway, headquarters again adopted a tongue-in-cheek attitude, the vehicle was dragged out of the mud and repaired, and word spread fast that the Phantom SUV had struck again. Following this second attack upon legitimate authority, all resources were pooled and organized into an intensive search for what was clearly the largest menace to California law enforcement since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. All such efforts failed, and after several months without any subsequent occurrences, headquarters began to breathe a little easier, apparently convinced that our phantom had decided the officers were not such bad guys after all and should be left alone, or that he had killed himself or gotten lost or suffered an encounter with an 18-wheeler. Such hopes were not to endure.

The next officer to be zeroed in on was one in San Diego, whose vehicle, according to the report, was sideswiped at precisely 9:00 a.m. while parked in front of the federal building. According to a reliable witness who was never identified, a late-model black SUV came careening down the street, sideswiped the undercover car, rounded the corner at the next intersection, and disappeared. Reportedly, it bore no license plates. In this case, there were also some peculiarities. The shop repairs read: Remove red paint from rear-quarter panel, straighten and rub out. Oddly, the officer’s private car—which was driven exclusively by his wife and which just happened to be red—had disappeared from the driveway for a few days only to reappear with a new paint job. Hard, though, this might have been to explain to headquarters, it was nothing compared to what appeared on the chief’s desk the next morning: not one but two damage reports. According to the second report, precisely fifteen minutes after the assault on the officer’s vehicle in San Diego, the Phantom SUV crossed a double-yellow line in San Francisco, knocked the front fender off a supervisor’s vehicle that was waiting to make a left turn, and sped away. It seems that the two officers each submitted his report unaware of the other’s misfortune.

Both learned of this at about the same time, when they were informed by their respective supervisors that they had been invited to headquarters for a little conference. Curiously, the Phantom SUV then vanished completely from the streets of California and has never since reappeared. The writer has been told that speeding, drinking on or off-duty, and the parking of agency cars in the same driveways with kids, dogs, or significant others are all things of the past. Police have reformed, so it is told. And the Phantom SUV has retired to reminisce over a day gone by. It is possible to find ourselves in situations we can never talk our way out of. (But it is a good bet that we partially talked our way into them!) Anyway, the point is clear. Let’s turn over some rocks and see what else we come up with. I’ll get a pry bar, and you watch for the sergeant.

____

Maybe it might be a good idea to adjust our focus a little. It is most amazing how this necessary step so often escapes some would-be theorists of the professorial type as well as far too many administrators who want to run things—and not necessarily in any productive direction.

Law enforcement is formatted in three basic methods to further our interest in protection and service. All three are needed. The majority of all law enforcement work is accomplished by uniformed officers performing patrol and traffic functions. There is no attempt to conceal the law enforcement status or purpose of the personnel involved, and many advantages are obvious. Some crimes are actually prevented by the clear presence of officers…others are displaced in time and space, maybe. (No, we are not going here! The volumes of paper burned up serving the interests of would-be scholars and researchers publishing on this bridge to nowhere have caused the destruction of more trees than the 793,880 acre Yellowstone Fires!) Returning, the obvious status of uniformed officers is critical to their ability to step in to protect and maintain order. Patrol itself is referred to as the backbone of law enforcement, yet it is the least appreciated within and outside of the profession. These people—the police—at the basic street level with the public have by far the most demanding job in enforcement. Their function has and will change the least, and they are actually quite similar to their counterparts in other modern nations.

Much of what they initially deal with is picked up and subsequently dealt with by a second method: formal investigation. The somewhat awkward term formal has been deliberately employed to make a point. (Trust me, there actually is a point!) We know that investigation is basic to all areas of enforcement. But with the formal investigative method, the entire nature is about investigation. Uniforms are not worn, and we dress more plainly, thus the alternative description plain-clothes work. Partially, this is a law enforcement compromise. In addition to freeing up the rollers (patrol) to return to their duties (and the stacked-up dispatches that await!), there are also some practical disadvantages to investigation in a uniform. Imagine that, in this information-gathering process, it is necessary to visit a local bank to check a suspect’s signature or ask some questions regarding the description of a check passer. The appearance of a uniformed officer in the bank will disrupt business as employees and customers alike immediately come down with blue fever in fearful speculation of the officer’s purpose. An appearance of a marked unit in front of a citizen’s home, even for the most minor reason, will nevertheless trigger phone calls and neighborhood-gossip sessions for days. So, in plain clothes, our law enforcement status and authority are not hidden entirely but dramatically subdued. It should be said that this approach is used predominately by the federal investigative agencies (FBI, DEA, ICE, ATFE, etc.) and by many state-investigative agencies as well as by the detective divisions of uniformed police departments and sheriff’s offices. In the interest of being frank, at the expense of being popular, the latter two groups of investigators broken out of PDs and SOs are different animals altogether from those without initial patrol experience. (Easy, PD and SO guys: this is meant as a professional compliment from your author, who has done both.)

The third method used by law enforcement is the undercover method. Concealment of the officer’s purpose and official capacity is absolutely essential. All that is practical is done to effect this concealment. This is because the information and evidence that is obtained through the undercover investigation can be obtained in no other way than through such concealment. We might imagine that the corner bartender is selling heroin. Obviously this man is not going to sell to a uniformed- or plain-clothes officer; nor is he going to divulge to them any information concerning his activities. Evidence can only be obtained by someone whom he believes he can trust to keep his activities secret. This may be because he feels that the person is not in sympathy with law and order or because he believes him to be a fellow law violator. The known police officer fits neither description. It is obvious that there is a tremendous advantage in the undercover approach; however, there are also serious disadvantages that must be overcome in various ways.

Central to the message that will appear throughout these pages is the important observation that officers must always perform two tasks: they must do their job effectively and must do it safely. The disadvantages of the undercover approach are in both areas. This book, in part, concerns itself with the methods of dealing with and overcoming these disadvantages. Undercover officers must acquire information and evidence that cannot otherwise be obtained; their official capacity and tools are of little use. The officer cannot threaten the suspect with arrest, use his badge or uniform, obtain a search warrant, or issue the suspect a citation. His primary tools are also the most important ones used by his plain clothed and uniformed brothers: communication and the ability to persuade.

After due consideration, the writer has reached a conclusion. Inasmuch as he has made his publisher mad by including an irrelevant tale because he promised some of his former compatriots it would be included, the only fair and equitable thing to do now is to make him equally mad by including another tale, which he promised would not be included. And this takes us directly to:

The Great Rock Fight

Someone once said, It wasn’t God nor the Declaration of Independence that made all men equal, it was Colonel Sam Colt. Regardless of one’s theological views or degree of political correctness, this statement underlies several valuable notions: one is that the difference between a 250-pound UFC contestant and a 130-pound undercover officer will not balance on a scale against the weight of a good sidearm (or other suitable attitude-adjustment tool, properly employed.)

Once working on the West Coast was a young undercover officer who had never heard of John Moses Browning. The only Colt he knew anything about was a yearling on his father’s ranch in Sonora. He thought that Smith & Wesson were the names of two high school dropouts living in East Los Angeles. Moreover, he was convinced that the carrying of a sidearm was a waste of time, fit only for those who needed something to counterbalance the weight of handcuffs on the opposite side. This would prevent one leg from growing shorter than the other. At the beginning of his career, he happened upon a suspect who professed to have (1) a dreadful fear of guns; and (2) an intense interest in selling stolen diamond rings. The suspect suggested that neither of them bring any artillery when they meet for the sale. He said that he would search the officer and allow the officer to do the same.

When they met for the deal, both conducted their searches. Sure enough, both were clean. This was evidence that things were on the up and up. Then the suspect displayed his wares, and the officer agreed to buy. The officer removed his money and began to count it out. Apparently, the suspect felt slighted that the officer would become so involved with this counting that