It's 11pm on a Friday and a probationer is sent to a flat where a man is shouting at his neighbour on the landing. There's no weapon and nobody is in immediate danger, just noise, adrenaline and two people who have stopped listening to each other. Her radio, cuffs and baton stay clipped to her belt for the whole call.
What she uses instead is her voice: tone, timing, a couple of open questions, enough space for the man to calm down without losing face in front of his neighbour. Ten minutes later, both parties are talking to each other instead of shouting past each other, and nobody's been touched.
That call didn't get a mention in her last personal safety training session. The restraint techniques did, the handcuffing drills did, the Taser refresher did. The conversation that actually resolved the situation, the one she used, isn't a line item on any training register. According to the College of Policing's own figures, that's not an isolated gap. It's the norm.
In 2020, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs' Council ran the National Police Safety Survey, gathering more than 40,000 responses from officers and staff across England and Wales, described at the time as the largest survey of its kind the service had carried out.
Officers were asked which tactics they used regularly that may have been taught during personal safety training. The answer was consistent: non-physical, communication-based skills came out well ahead of anything physical. Between 73% and 91% of respondents said they used non-physical conflict management skills regularly, compared with 63% for restraints and 44% for takedowns, according to the College of Policing and NPCC's Officer and Staff Safety Review.
Take the upper figure and nine in ten officers are telling their own service that words are the tool they reach for by default, more than any physical tactic on the list. The same review found that a quarter of officers (26%) felt not enough time was spent training essential communication skills, and only half (52%) said their training had actually taught them how to defuse a confrontation.
Nine in ten officers say words are their default tactic. Barely half say their training taught them how to use them.
This isn't a new idea inside policing's own frameworks. The College of Policing's National Decision Model already treats tactical communication, the deliberate use of verbal skills, tone, questioning and active listening to de-escalate a situation, as officers' first tactic, ahead of any physical option. The conflict management guidance built on the 2020 review says the same thing directly: realistic, scenario-based practice is the most effective way for officers to build and maintain these skills, not a one-off classroom session.
If communication is the tactic officers use most, curriculum time should reflect that. In practice, it rarely has. The same Officer and Staff Safety Review found that personal safety training allocation varied wildly by force, from five hours a year in some services to sixteen in others, with content, delivery and course composition described as “sporadic and inconsistent,” sometimes folding in unrelated activities like first aid refreshers and fitness testing. More than a third of officers surveyed (34%) said they were dissatisfied, or only neutral, about the training they had received.
The College has since acted on this. Since April 2024, all forces in England and Wales have had to deliver a new national curriculum for public and personal safety training (PPST), with a minimum of 12 hours a year built around realistic, scenario-based practice rather than fixed drills.
That's a meaningful step up in consistency, and it directly addresses the old five-to-sixteen-hour postcode lottery. Set against how often officers say they actually rely on communication, though, 12 hours a year still buys a fraction of the practice time that restraint, control and use-of-force refreshers typically receive across an officer's wider training calendar.
There's a structural wrinkle here too. Home Office use-of-force statistics, the official national dataset used to monitor how force is applied across England and Wales, record specific physical tactics such as handcuffing, ground restraint and Taser use in detail. Tactical communication doesn't appear anywhere in that tactic taxonomy.
A force can report exactly how many times its officers used a limb restraint last quarter. It has no equivalent national record of how often they talked someone down instead, despite that being the tactic officers themselves say they use most. Curriculum time, assessment and data collection all tend to follow whatever is already being measured, and communication has largely sat outside that measurement.
Share of officers and staff who say they regularly use each tactic on duty.
The strongest recent UK evidence for training communication properly comes from a trial the College of Policing itself commissioned. Researchers at King's College London worked with the College to test the new PPST curriculum in a year-long stepped-wedge randomised controlled trial involving 1,843 serving officers at Avon and Somerset Police, with different groups of officers trained on a rolling basis so their use of force could be compared before and after training.
The results, published in the Justice Evaluation Journal in 2024, found the new scenario-based, communication-led curriculum cut the likelihood that an officer used force in a given week by 10.9%, with “hands-on” tactics like ground restraint falling by 14%. The likelihood of a member of the public being injured during a use-of-force incident fell by around a third. Critically, there was no corresponding rise in the risk of an officer being injured.
A communication-led safety curriculum cut officers' use of force by 10.9% and public injuries by a third, with no increase in harm to officers.
That result lines up with older research on procedural justice: the idea that people are more likely to accept a decision and cooperate with police when they feel they've been treated fairly and listened to, regardless of the outcome. The College's own conflict management guidance points to an earlier Greater Manchester Police trial by Wheller and colleagues (2013), in which officers were trained either through a classroom-only session or through realistic role-play scenarios followed by personalised, one-to-one feedback on their communication during traffic stops.
Members of the public who dealt with officers from the role-play group reported higher satisfaction with how they were treated, and independent observers rated those officers as more consistently procedurally fair, than the public and observers rating the classroom-only group.
A similar pattern shows up outside the UK. Engel and colleagues' 2022 evaluation of de-escalation training with the Louisville Metro Police Department, also run as a stepped-wedge randomised trial, found reductions in use of force alongside fewer injuries to both officers and members of the public in the period after training.
The US context differs enough from England and Wales, in legal framework, equipment and typical call volume, that the figures shouldn't be read across directly. What transfers is the underlying mechanism: scenario-based communication training with structured feedback keeps showing up as the format that changes what officers actually do on shift, not just what they know in theory.
MacQueen and Bradford (2015) ran a randomised controlled trial with Police Scotland that gives a useful counterpoint. Officers were given a scripted procedural-justice statement to read out during routine traffic stops. Public trust and satisfaction among the drivers who got the script went down slightly, not up, a result published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology.
The gap between that result and the Sanders and Wheller findings comes down to what officers were actually asked to do. Reading a script at a driver is a different task to practising a conversation and getting feedback on how it went. The first is a line to deliver. The second changes how an officer handles the next situation.
Reductions recorded after officers completed the new PPST curriculum, versus before training.
None of this is an argument for training communication instead of physical tactics. Officers still need restraint, control and use-of-force training, and nothing in the College's own evidence suggests otherwise. The argument is narrower and, for curriculum leads, more actionable: the tactic officers report using most often is currently the one with the least dedicated, assessed practice time, the thinnest evidence base built into most legacy PST content, and no line in the national statistics that tracks it. Put together, the evidence points to three practical shifts for anyone designing or licensing conflict management training.
1. Treat tactical communication as a trained skill, not an assumed one. Officers already default to it on shift. What's missing is deliberate, assessed practice at the specific micro-skills involved, reading a situation, choosing an opening question, adjusting tone under pressure, rather than an assumption that officers will simply pick these up through experience.
2. Build in repetition, with feedback attached. The trials that show real behaviour change, Sanders et al.'s PPST evaluation and Wheller et al.'s Greater Manchester study, both involve officers practising realistic scenarios more than once and receiving personalised feedback each time, rather than sitting through a single briefing or memorising a script.
3. Measure it like a tactic, because it is one. National use-of-force data has no category for tactical communication, which leaves forces without a national picture of the tactic officers say they use most. Local recording, even informally through post-incident debriefs or supervisor sign-off, starts to close that gap and gives curriculum leads something to point to when making the case for training time.
This is also where technology can extend what instructor time allows. Scenario-based AI roleplay, of the kind Bodyswaps builds for pedagogically grounded practice, lets learners rehearse a difficult custody conversation or a domestic incident multiple times, each with personalised, AI-generated feedback on tone, questioning and de-escalation choices, before they ever face the real thing.
It doesn't replace instructor-led PST or supervised role-play with colleagues. It adds repeatable practice at the specific skill the evidence says matters most, at a scale that's hard to match with instructor time alone. The point isn't unique to Bodyswaps: in a recent Bodyswaps webinar on tackling misogyny, David Knowles, a former police officer now researching police ethics, sexual misconduct and VR as a PhD researcher at the University of Portsmouth, made the same point about frontline conduct more broadly: changing what officers actually do in the moment takes repeated, structured practice with feedback, not a single briefing or a policy document.
The College of Policing's own research already makes the case that officers lead with words. What's missing is training time, curriculum design and measurement that catch up with what that evidence shows. A growing share of that training now happens before recruits ever join a force.
Under the Policing Education Qualifications Framework, most new officers in England and Wales complete a degree or degree apprenticeship in policing or a related subject, delivered by university and college justice studies programmes, which means curriculum leads in higher and further education are increasingly the first people building these skills into a learner's routine, months or years before their first independent patrol.
Treating verbal conflict management as a trained, practised and measured skill from that point onward, rather than something officers pick up through experience on the job, has a genuine evidence base behind it: fewer uses of force, fewer injuries to the public, and no cost to officer safety.
Bodyswaps' Policing & Justice Studies Immersive Learning Research Project gives justice studies, criminal justice and police foundations programmes supported access to build exactly this kind of scenario practice into their curriculum, alongside dedicated onboarding to design a graded learning activity rather than a one-off demo.
Apply to the Policing & Justice Studies ILRP
→ Our pedagogy: the evidence behind Bodyswaps' scenario design
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1. College of Policing and National Police Chiefs' Council (2020). Officer and Staff Safety Review.
2. College of Policing (2020). National Police Safety Survey — final results.
3. College of Policing / NPCC (2 September 2020). “New conflict management guidelines released.”
4. College of Policing. Conflict management skills, Authorised Professional Practice.
5. College of Policing. National Decision Model, Authorised Professional Practice.
6. College of Policing (2023). “New safety training for officers.”
7. Sanders, M., Bancroft, K., Hume, S., Chetwynd, O., and Quinton, P. (2024). “The Impact of Training on Use of Force by Police in an English Police Force: Evidence from a Pragmatic Stepped Wedge Randomised Controlled Trial.” Justice Evaluation Journal, 8(1), 20–39.
8. King's College London (14 November 2024). “Police use of force: study finds significant reductions through new training.”
9. MacQueen, S. and Bradford, B. (2015). “Enhancing public trust and police legitimacy during road traffic encounters: results from a randomised controlled trial in Scotland.” Journal of Experimental Criminology, 11, 419–443.
10. Wheller, L., Quinton, P., Fildes, A., and Mills, A. (2013). The Greater Manchester Police procedural justice training experiment: technical report. College of Policing.
11. Engel, R. S., et al. (2022). De-escalation training evaluation. (Cited via Sanders et al., 2024, for international comparison.)
12. Home Office (2024). Police use of force statistics, England and Wales.
In the College of Policing's 2020 National Police Safety Survey of more than 40,000 officers and staff, between 73% and 91% said they regularly used non-physical, communication-based conflict management skills, more than for any physical tactic recorded in the same survey.
Before 2024 reforms, personal safety training ranged from 5 to 16 hours a year depending on the force. Since April 2024, all forces must deliver a minimum of 12 hours of Public and Personal Safety Training (PPST) a year on a shared national curriculum.
Yes. A 2024 randomised controlled trial of the new PPST curriculum, run with 1,843 officers at Avon and Somerset Police, found it cut the likelihood of an officer using force in a given week by 10.9% and reduced public injuries during use-of-force incidents by around a third, with no increase in harm to officers.
Tactical communication is the deliberate use of verbal skills, tone, questioning and active listening to de-escalate a conflict without physical force. The College of Policing's National Decision Model treats it as officers' first tactic, ahead of any physical option.