REVIEW OF WHAT WE COMMUNICATE

Before revealing a face, heart and personality of the profession (policing) and its task (service), let us extract from a list of truths certain undisputed facts in order to establish future direction. Feel free to add to this list.

Facts

1. Police officers and citizens are accountable to the community.

2. Police officers and citizens are accountable to themselves.

3. Perception becomes reality.

4. Changing perception is difficult. You can only assess your own motives.

5. Effective policing necessitates effective communication.

6. What we believe about ourselves may determine how we perceive the importance of communicating with another person or group of people.

7. Communication is bidirectional, requiring listening, hearing and understanding other viewpoints.

8. Certain fears provide fertile soil for attitudes of prejudice to ripen and proliferate.

9. Fear is an emotional response. Prejudice is an attitude.

10. Fear can be disabling if you allow it to control your mind and emotional state.

11. Fear can become contagious when people delay identifying cause and effect.

12. Since prejudice is an attitude, attitudes are changeable when the willingness to change exists.

13. Differences are challenging; acknowledging differences makes learning reachable.

14. No two people think or behave exactly alike and for this reason, developing attitudes that transform into practices of disparate treatment toward another human being can become an outgrowth of implicit bias and fear.

15. Differences make each person a separate and unique member of society.

16. Using an ethical compass serves to guide a person to making decisions based on doing what is right, not necessarily, what is popular.

What common characteristic do you find expressed implicitly or explicitly in each fact? If you identified communication, you are correct.

C-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n

C Connecting with
O Openness, sharing a
M Message of desire for
M Mutual
U Understanding
N Never neglecting
I Integrity and the importance of
C Citizen perception and collaboration,
A Acknowledging the need to access non-protected
Information that might explain police actions with
T Transparency, truthfulness and trust.
I Information presented with
O Optimism for strong future
N Networking.

I want to underscore one undisputed fact; what we believe about ourselves may determine how we perceive the importance of communicating with another person or group of people.

Leadership instructors White and Pennypacker ((2016) provide an interpretation of effective communication within the context of leadership; "the aim is to get people to think, feel, and act in a specific way after they receive your message". In any given situation, everyone holds a leadership role. Therefore, the importance of communicating effectively extends outside the supervisor-subordinate relationship. Foremost, when people communicate, what does either party want to accomplish?

The goal of communication is to create connection, engage in conversation through meaningful and comprehensible dialogue, without contradictory gestures or nonverbal behaviors. Consider the word communication as an acronym representing characteristics expressed as an organizational mission statement.

Connecting – Openness - Message - Mutual -Understanding, Never neglecting Integrity - Citizen Perception and collaboration, Acknowledging – Transparency – Information -Optimism – Networking

Depending on conditions, most communication is bidirectional. However, based on conditions, bidirectional communication becomes unfeasible, bringing us to fallacies embraced equally by citizens and police.

First fallacy states, police or law enforcement officers only give commands and that explains the harshness of some. Second fallacy, communication between police and citizens is one-way never intended as a bidirectional exchange of information.

Unquestionably, there are times when someone must take the lead in initiating a conversation or giving direction. In exigent circumstances such as during crowd control, medical emergencies or active crime scenes declared unsafe, etc. communication is one-way with the desired outcome being to get people to act in a certain way for safety. When the emergency subsides, communication becomes bi-directional.

How do you effectively invalidate a fallacy? Understanding comes from hearing the truth. To invalidate a fallacy, people need exposure to new information or training to identify what is accurate. In other words, someone must communicate facts. How do people communicate their message? What are we communicating in the message?

What we communicate

The confusion is perceptual given that people seldom dispute the content of a message; however, people file complaints about how people communicate their message when speaking and from inferences drawn from body language sometimes not in sync with spoken words. Here are examples for consideration.

Example#1- Everyone is guilty of being too harsh or condescending in tone at one time in his or her career and personal life. Harshness and speaking in a condescending tone is problematic when the conduct becomes an ongoing pattern of behavior.

Example#2- Equally disconcerting is when someone demonstrates disregard for or lack of understanding of power inherent in their position and becomes unnecessarily authoritarian when conveying their message. The only potential outcome from this behavior is miscommunication, lack of understanding, communication shuts down, conflict and confusion.

Everyone has been guilty at one time or another.

A leader infrequently needs to announce his or her presence at an incident when they have command presence. What is command presence? First, command presence is not limited to those within the rank structure. Fee (2014) explained it is impossible to ignore someone with command presence. This individual conveys command presence in the way they behave, with a nonthreatening posture of authority (never compromising officer safety), using appropriate eye contact, which in turn reduces fear in the listener. Demanding attention...