Verbal Judo

Article

‘Verbal judo’: the police tactic that teaches cops to talk before they shoot

The de-escalation technique espoused by George ‘Doc’ Thompson in the 1990s, inoculating officers against high-stress scenarios, is making a comeback in the face of high-profile police shootings

Tom Dart
@Tom_Dart

Thu 21 Jul 2016 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 5 Jun 2019 04.17 EDT

Verbal Judo: ‘We know that the most deadly weapon we carry is not the .45 or the 9mm, it is in fact the cop’s tongue’.

Bored with his life in academia, George “Doc” Thompson left his prestigious career and went on to teach a million police officers to ask questions first and shoot later.

Thompson was a judo black belt who ran a dojo, studied rhetoric and persuasion at Princeton and had a PhD in English literature. But after 10 years of teaching university classes, Thompson wanted a change. He took a sabbatical and decided to become a cop, working the midnight shift as a patrol officer in New Jersey.

The father of a tactical communication style known as “verbal judo”, he wrote his first book on the subject in 1983 and became a successful law enforcement trainer.

“Anybody can teach English,” he said in one of his training video from the 1990s. “Not anybody can talk a knife out of somebody’s hand.”