‘Verbal Judo’ Sometimes Is Best Weapon

As the members of the Christopher Commission investigate the beating of Rodney King, and all its ramifications, they’ll try to determine to what extent training might have prevented the assault.

The examination has already begun. Retired Assistant Chief Jesse Brewer has briefed the members on the Los Angeles Police Department’s instructional methods. But the commission and its volunteer attorney-investigators will have to dig deeper, down to the street level.

They’ll want to know, what motivates cops to use such force? Is there a way of controlling, or even avoiding, force?

These are the questions that arise at the Los Angeles Police Academy most weeknights during an unusual class called “verbal judo.”

Verbal judo is just that--the art of using persuasion to make someone obey you. The teacher is a former small-town Kansas police officer and college English teacher named George J. Thompson. Instead of karate chops, he teaches cops how to avoid unnecessary violence by tempering their words and controlling their body language and behavior.

For instance, a motorist is stopped for speeding and becomes belligerent. Before knocking the speeder’s block off, the verbal judoist would check his temper and calmly explain to the motorist in a non-threatening way that he’d been speeding. This kind of soft talk, according to the theory, defuses the situation.

I’d heard about verbal judo from a veteran cop who told me he had found it a useful supplement to the knowledge he had picked up in 20 years on the street. “After five years, I learned I didn’t like to fight,” said the officer, who nonetheless looked tough enough to handle himself. “Your ribs get hurt and your uniform torn. I found that if you take two minutes and talk, you can often avoid a fight.”

Two minutes. Enough time to have saved Rodney King from a terrible beating, and the Los Angeles Police Department from disaster.

Verbal judo had its beginnings long before the King affair. A year and a half ago, Chief Daryl F. Gates persuaded the City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley to appropriate the money to hire Thompson as a consultant.

Even so, the impact of the King arrest and the videotaping of his beating was evident at the class. The night I attended, the class consisted of some of the department’s toughest and most elite officers, members of SWAT and Metro.

“The world is out there with a camcorder,” Thompson told the officers. “You’ve got to do things differently.” Any mistake, any unnecessary force, he said, will make an officer the target of “a three-piece, tassled-shoe SOB: the defense attorney.”

Thompson is a husky, middle-sized man who holds a black belt in judo. His sharp-featured face and lively eyes become animated, even wild, as he prowls the room during the eight-hour session. If they made a movie about him, he’d be played by Robin Williams.

Have a professional presence, he told his pupils, but with a different face for different people. “Not that Mount Rushmore face, not that Jack Webb face. Not for America in the 1990s.” He went though several types of encounters, pointing out ways of avoiding a fight. Try being Columbo, he said, instead of Jack Webb.

If talk doesn’t work, use your hands, handcuffs or even a baton before you reach for your gun. In all cases, think. Use your head.

Most listened quietly, impassively, although some nodded in agreement. A few were skeptical, reminding Thompson that some of the people encountered on the street are as dangerous as they come.

“One of the things about this job is self-preservation,” said one officer. “You don’t know if you’re being set up.”

I imagine that if the Christopher Commission looks around the Police Academy, its members will be as tantalized as I was by a footnote to the King case.

It’s found in the records of Sgt. David Rock, who is in charge of LAPD in-service training. Rock told me that among the officers scheduled to attend Thompson’s class on March 18 were Sgt. Stacy Koon and rookie Officer Timothy Wind. On the list for the following night was Officer Theodore Briseno.

The three cops never made it to class. On March 3, they and Officer Lawrence Powell had their encounter with King. When an amateur cameraman’s chance videotape of the beating was shown to the public, they were suspended.

What if the class had been scheduled before March 3?

What if Koon, Briseno and Wind had sat in that room for eight straight hours and heard Thompson say “you should treat others as you would like to be treated in the same circumstances.”

Would such training have spared Rodney King? That’s for the Christopher Commission to answer.