Holding eye contact, or "gaze," with hysterical citizens is one of the most effective methods police officers can use to calm them down, according to new research conducted by the University of New Hampshire that relies on footage of the FOX TV show "COPS."
The study by Mardi Kidwell, assistant professor of communication, "Calm Down!: the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the police," was published recently in Discourse Studies.
According to Kidwell's research, regulating gaze is central to face-to-face interaction. For police officers, it's an important factor in gaining compliance from and calming hysterical citizens.
"A great deal of police work involves encountering people who are in crisis, people who are distraught, agitated and sometimes hysterical over the circumstances that have necessitated a police response. Moreover, as police departments nationwide transition from a more traditional model of policing, with its emphasis on catching law-breakers, to a model of community policing, with its emphasis on prevention, they have sought to adapt more humanistic, more dialogic approaches to their communications with citizens," Kidwell says.
Kidwell's research relies on police-citizen interactions obtained from the FOX TV show "COPS," now in its 19th season. She used footage from "COPS" because most research on police-citizen interaction does not rely on a real-time, in-the-moment unfolding of events. In addition, police departments are reluctant to provide footage of their police-citizen interactions.
In the "COPS" segment discussed in the study, two police officers are trying to calm down a woman whose grandson has been shot. The six-minute segment shows the officers arriving on the scene of the shooting, inspecting the victim, questioning witnesses, discussing the case with other officers and, finally, seeking to calm the victim's grandmother, who herself has been shot at.
The officers are forced to use increasingly stronger verbal tactics ,called directives, to get the woman to look at them as they try to calm her down. The woman repeatedly looks at the officers and then looks away, and continues to be hysterical. Finally, one officer gently touches the woman's face and turns it toward him, forcing her to look at him. Eventually, the officers are able to keep eye contact with her long enough so as to calm her down, help her regain a normal breathing pattern and compose herself so she can drive to the hospital to see her grandson.