Listening Skills for Effective Policing

Developing and honing effective listening skills for trainee, new and existing police officers at all levels.

Learning how to be an effective listener is one of the most vital communication skills for successful policing. Drawing on the author’s vast experience as a specialist frontline police officer, this book is informal and easy-to-understand, with a sprinkle of humour, making it highly readable and accessible. It introduces an effective, tried and tested model to guide difficult conversations and covers a range of key topics of relevance to operational policing, including issues connected with diversity and with suicide. Supported by academic research, including counselling theory, it provides real-life examples to demonstrate how the tools work in practice, and questions and exercises to encourage personal reflection.

Introduction 

Chapter 1: Stop 

Chapter 2: Introduce yourself 

Chapter 3: Make it possible to listen 

Chapter 4: Purpose 

Chapter 5: Listen 

Chapter 6: Empathise  

Chapter 7: Listening to save someones life 

Chapter 8: Listening to save a police officer’s life 

Chapter 9: Listening during protests 

Chapter 10: Things I have learnt 

Chapter 11: Things I wish I had known 

Chapter 12: Treat everybody the same? 

Chapter 13: Yeah, but what do I say? 

References and further resources 

Index 

Andrew Fairie was a police officer in England and Scotland for 30 years. As a hostage and crisis negotiator for 12 of those years, listening was essential to the safe resolution of over 115 incidents where there was a high risk to the individuals involved. He helped select, train and develop police negotiators and pioneered the use in Scotland of negotiation tactics to improve the way the police listen to those engaged in protest activity. He has utilised the skills learnt and enhanced them to become a cognitive behaviour therapist, helping people overcome issues such as low mood, anxiety, phobias and PTSD.