Nobody plans to have a bad day…
It starts by stubbing your toe, then knocking a glass off the counter breaking into a million pieces, which turns into spilling hot coffee on yourself because you stepped on a piece of glass… And that spirals into one bad thing after another, after another.
You may even say to yourself, “Could this day get any worse?”
Then you take your ‘bad’ morning into work and proceed to take it out on everyone in your path. At the end of the day, you wish you could crawl back into bed, pull the sheet over your head, and take back everything you said and did… but the damage has been done.
Memphis Officers and Emotional Rage
In public service, when you escalate a situation with Emotional Rage onto a community member, a co-worker, or a person on a traffic stop, and you apply un-necessary excessive force… Game over!
Emotional Rage can lead to:
- Physical harm or death
- Wrecking your family
- Police Department distrust
- Community Distrust and Civil Unrest
- End of a Police career
Causes of Emotional Rage
Emotional Rage occurs when one feels a threat to their pride, their position, their ability to deceive others, their self-deceptive beliefs, or their socio-economic status.
Everyone has their own triggers for what makes them angry. Common situations include feeling:
- Threatened or attacked
- Frustrated
- Powerless
- Disrespect
- Trigged Hot Buttons
- Childhood Issues
- Personal Issues (financial, health, addiction, divorce)
- Implicit or Explicit Bias (Lack of Racial Intelligence)
If you’ve ever had to step in for your partner, because they were escalating the situation out of control, you witnessed BLOCK OUT.
You could saw them heading into Block Out… so you STEPPED in, TAPPED out, and TOOK over before they did something stupid, possibly ending their career.
The RITE Response is seeing Block Out in a moments notice, and taking ACTION. Every officer has a Duty to Intervene, without hesitation. Every agency must have this SOP in place, and practiced during in-service training.
Block Out Syndrome:
When a situation gets escalated in a moment’s notice, and the only solution you see is YOUR outcome. You allowed your Emotional Rage to take over.
If any of us live too long in a place of BLAME, ANGER, or HATE… we become a ticking time-bomb that will likely lead to a Block-out escalated encounter.
Before they head into Block Out
Everyone deals with stress at some point in their life, that usually has nothing to do with their job. Things that can pull us all ‘Down our Ladder’ might be:
- Separation or divorce
- Financial debt
- Kids getting into trouble
- Taking care of aging parents
- Being bullied
All these factors can pull someone down to the bottom of the RITE Ladder (photo). The more we live down towards the bottom, the worse we feel.
The worse we feel for any length of time, the more we tend to pull others down the Ladder with us. This is also known as Crab Bucket Mentality
https://riteacademy.com/crab-bucket-mentality-and-workplace-misconduct/
Learn to Control your Anger Before this Anger Controls YOU… Recognize when you are heading into Block-Out by learning to control your EMOTIONS!
Block Out Happens
- Just a routine situation (traffic stop)
- Something pisses you off – your Hot Button gets triggered
- Emotions get escalated with actions of Anger, Hate, or Fear
- Low Behavioral Self-Control, you react aggressively
- See only one outcome (you don’t hear or see anything but your own thoughts)
If you’ve reached #5 it’s too late… You are IN Block-Out and OUT of control !
It takes 2 seconds to flash into Block-Out Syndrome. RITE Training Emergency Response teaches partners to immediately intervene.
An Officer’s Duty to Intervene must be an SOP policy in every police agency. The RITE Training Emergency Response is to Step in, Tap out, and Take over
It all starts with Emotional Intelligence!
That is the RITE Response every agency should have in place. Training or lack of training… only one will hold officers accountable.
Professional workplace culture should include
- Department-wide standard procedures on professional workplace
- In-service training on professional workplace culture
- Emotional Intelligence Tools
- Protocols for proper employee behavior
- Address displays of unprofessional behavior
- Diffuse abuse of power – arrests due to bias-nature, or hot buttons
- Create Duty to Intervene protocols
Chief Rob Hicks says it best:
One of the key things I got out of this Training, was even though you may have a bad start, you’ve had a bad day, you’re “low on the ladder” and you realize that your interaction is not going well… you can stop… It’s not too late, you can always De-escalate.
RITE Training Classes
At RITE Academy, we provide training to fire, police, EMS, 911 operators and corrections officers. Emotional Intelligence exercises and EI Tools help each person personally be in control of their emotions, while holding everyone accountable for their actions.
With every class, the LADDER, Stop-Light, and NEW DAY Tools and Banners are included in the training, and left behind for the agency to use. RITE is not a one and done class!
RITE Academy Stats
- Trained over 1000 agencies on Professional Workplace Culture
- Created over 950 RITE train-the-trainers
- Gave out more than 550,000 RITE Tools for employees
- Provided hundreds of newsletters for agencies to give to their employees
- Helped agencies reduce their use-of-force incidents by 65%
- Educated local governments, state, and federal representative on public safety reform