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"I own the train! You know this!" yells a belligerent, delusional TRAX passenger who has not bought a ticket. "This train belongs to me, and it needs to go. This train needs to move!"

Murray police Officer Troy Peterson cannot arrest the man immediately for trespassing. Here at the Crisis Intervention Team Academy, Peterson's job is to prevent the role-play scenario from escalating and secure the "scene" in the classroom long enough for backup to arrive.

It is the kind of training police watchdogs have sought more of since a Salt Lake City police officer fatally shot a man who struck him multiple times with a snow shovel during a fight that left the officer with two broken bones. Body-camera video moments before the Jan. 8 shooting shows James Barker's demeanor quickly shift from calmly wary to outraged as Officer Matthew Taylor questions Barker about a neighbor's report that he was acting suspiciously. When Taylor reaches forward, Barker jumps back and then swings the shovel at Taylor. Utah police fatally shot two other people within a week of Barker's shooting.

Prosecutors deemed the shooting justified, and Taylor's union called his behavior "professional and respectful."

Critics counter that the shooting reflects a failure by Taylor to defuse the dispute. More than a thousand people have signed a petition calling for more officer training on de-escalation and dealing with people suffering from mental illness.

"The officer … could have stepped back. His tone could have changed," said former Salt Lake City Councilwoman Deeda Seed. "What we would like to see are more police officers who have the sensitivity and the awareness to be able to make that judgment. If he had been able to de-escalate by stepping back and letting James Barker have a chance to breathe and not feel so threatened, James Barker might still be alive. It might be a bad situation still, but a bad situation that didn't involve someone dying."

'Resonate calmness'

For most Utah police officers, formal de-escalation training takes place early in their careers. At the state's police academy, about 30 to 34 hours — or 6 percent of class time — are devoted to conflict resolution, community relations and mental-crisis intervention, said Scott Stephenson, director of the academy.

After that, de-escalation training is more difficult to quantify, said Salt Lake City police spokeswoman Robin Heiden.

Salt Lake City police, like most departments in Salt Lake County, spend time every year in scenarios with live actors or video simulation; some of those scenarios test officers' ability to de-escalate encounters. In video simulation, trainers can adjust the behavior of the video characters, making them more or less aggressive in response to the officers' communication skills.

Then officers are critiqued in front of the class, Heiden said, a practice that adds pressure but also reinforces department values.

"That's what you need when you do that type of training," she said. "You don't want to be the one who screws up."

All new recruits in Salt Lake City also go through the weeklong Crisis Intervention Team Academy, which holds training sessions around the state. The academy instructs trainees on mental-illness symptoms and diagnoses — an analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune shows that 43 percent of Utahns shot to death by police in the past decade were threatening suicide or had further history of mental illness — and teaches officers to communicate with subjects in crises.

In the scenarios at the city's Public Safety Building, detective-cum-actor Mark Falkner tests 40 officers and firefighters from multiple departments as he threatens suicide, preaches urgent conspiracy theories and shrieks at Peterson, the Murray officer, about the TRAX train that won't leave.

Peterson, in turn, does a lot of the things he was taught. He introduces himself as "Troy," not "Officer Peterson." He tips his head sideways in a receptive, listening posture as Falkner rants at him. He addresses Falkner's delusion without challenging it, assuring Falkner that the train will get moving "as soon as we resolve this." Peterson doesn't issue orders but repeatedly says his job is to "see how I can help you out." He identifies the target and source of Falkner's agitation — the supervisor who has ordered him off the train and is still yelling at him — and steps between them to block Falkner's view of her.

He nods a lot. This is key.

"What do all people need?" instructor Brandee Casias asks the students, who chorus back: "Validation."

"We need to know someone's listening to us," says Casias, a Salt Lake City police detective. "We need to know someone cares."

That can mean recognizing and labeling emotions to let a subject know the officer is considering those feelings, Casias says. It also can mean asking agitated subjects to explain their feelings.

Pointing to the video from Barker's shooting, instructor and hostage negotiator Detective Mike Hardin notes that Officer Taylor asks Barker to "calm down" — two words that in many disputes can be ineffective or upsetting.

"That's whether you're married, or it's your boyfriend, girlfriend, friend," Hardin said. "What I've been able to do, if [a subject] is yelling, is ask, 'Sir, why are you yelling at me?' They instantly stop to think about that one statement."

Plugged into the acronyms and procedures taught at CIT Academy are a lot of other broadly applicable communication skills and tactics that seem obvious — until they have to be executed amid intense stress with unpredictable, emotional subjects. Students are told to remember "DBEAT" on their calls: distance, backup, empathy, awareness and time. They memorize the "5 R's": to be "reassuring, respectful and reliable," keep instructions "relatively simple," and "resonate calmness."

The last one — resonate calmness — might seem obvious if an officer's goal is to prevent subjects from becoming mistrustful, fearful, agitated or hostile. But some critics say that wisdom collides directly with another message officers receive in training and from police and popular culture.

'You could die today, tomorrow or next Friday'

In a 2014 edition of Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine, the cover photo features a hoodie-adorned man pointing a gun at the reader and screaming, his teeth bared. The image is surrounded with headlines such as "Fighting The 'Never Say Die' Killer" and "Foot Chase Turns Lethal." In the magazine's masthead, the letter "o" is a gunsight. It is an extreme expression of the focus on danger in policing; a few months later, the cover of the same magazine featured an officer listening to a sobbing domestic-violence victim. But Seth Stoughton, a Florida police officer-turned-law professor at the University of South Carolina, argues that attempts to train officers in the nuances of de-escalation are being sabotaged by what he calls an overemphasis on risk.

"It's reinforced through the messages that officers get from the time that they're in the academy, from their peers, from their supervisors, from their instructors: Your first priority every day is to go home." Stoughton said. "That implies, if you don't take extraordinary efforts, that may not happen."

That message starts with movies and TV — most officers' first view of the job — which show police to be relentlessly under deadly attack. But Stoughton, who worked as an officer in the Tallahassee Police Department and as an investigator for the Florida Department of Education, says the fear is carried into police culture, where YouTube videos of officers being killed are urgently shared through the ranks, professional publications focus heavily on assaults on officers, and cadets are, in some cases, explicitly taught to view all civilians as potentially lethal threats.

Stoughton points to proposed lesson materials from the police academy in New Mexico, where a rash of shootings in Albuquerque has drawn national attention to police tactics. Officers would be warned that "most suspects are mentally prepared to react violently," and "you could die today, tomorrow or next Friday. In traffic stops, materials urge officers to "always assume that the violator and all the occupants in the vehicle are armed," regardless of "the nature of the offense involved. IT DOES NOT MATTER ALL STOPS ARE UNKNOWN THREATS."

Cadets at Utah's academy receive far more-moderate messages, Stephenson said.

"At least in my class, we teach that the majority of the public are good, they support you, and they don't pose a threat. But internally you have to be ready for anything because you're dealing with humans, and we can be unpredictable. … We've got to spend a lot of our [training] time on something that may never happen. The challenge is this idea — that, 'I don't want to be paranoid, but I've got to be ready for anything.' "

Stoughton said statistics on police-officer killings should be reassuring, pointing to federal data showing police have about 63 million encounters with civilians annually; On average, 51 officers are feloniously killed each year, according to the FBI.

"It's not that policing isn't dangerous, but the facts are: Policing is much less dangerous than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and it's much less dangerous than officers are being trained it is," Stoughton said.

"It's much safer than officers are being led to believe."

If officers internalize messages that exaggerate the risks of the job, Stoughton argues, they will be less likely to use the communication skills they have learned.

"When a police officer is confronted with someone who is verbally resistant, or even failing to physically comply — [the officer says] 'Turn around and put your hands behind your back,' and then the person says, 'No, go to hell' — an officer who is trained to look at the fear-based side of things certainly has a stronger inclination to use 'shock and awe' techniques: immediate, overwhelming force to establish unquestioned control," Stoughton said.

"But immediate, unquestioned control is exactly the opposite of good mediation and de-escalation tactics: allowing the other person to have as much control as they can without sacrificing the police mission. If that means letting them rant for five minutes before you can talk them down, that's fine. But that's time consuming, and from a fear perspective, it gives the suspect additional time to resist. Going hands on, aggressively, doesn't."

The tension between de-escalation and threat perception is a critical issue in the academy, Stephenson said. A change to firearms training, for example, could ratchet up officers' sense of threat and detract from training in conflict resolution or defensive tactics. In such a case, trainers have to decide whether the firearms-training update is truly necessary for officer safety, or identify opportunities in other courses to "add an objective to not make that officer paranoid," Stephenson said.

"You don't want to ever compromise de-escalation," Stephenson said. "The majority of de-escalation is delivery and body language. … That may the difference between you ending up in a fight, or them saying, 'Not today, I'm gonna comply.' "

Stoughton said integrating training in use of force and conflict resolution can help prevent mixed signals.

"When all of your prior training tells you that you could die if you don't use force, that's an awfully tough message to un-train," Stoughton said. "And it's an awfully tough message to ignore."

'It's a delicate, delicate dance'

For officers, de-escalation does not mean ignoring the potential of a deadly threat, said Salt Lake City police Detective Greg Wilkins. Instead, officers must learn to size up hazards and mentally brace for hostility — while projecting a much more amicable vibe.

"It's a delicate, delicate dance," Wilkins said. "It's a comfort level that you have to have, and that your partners have to understand. They have to trust that, even though you appear to be letting your guard down to a degree, you will recognize the signs of someone who's going to turn at a moment's notice into your worst adversary. … You've got to be disarming and yet be ready."

Wilkins, who spent more than seven years policing "on the street" before moving to an office role, said it took "a long time" to become truly adept at de-escalation.

"These are techniques I use a lot … but it's an advanced skill," he said. "It's a tightrope that you're walking constantly. You're picking up on visual cues, on body language, demeanor, stance, proximity to possible weapons."

In understanding the effect of their own social cues, officers also have to find the balance between seeming relaxed and establishing "a command presence."

"If you're perceived as a person that can be taken advantage of, if your command presence isn't there," Wilkins said, "then there are people out there who will say, 'I can punk you because you are punkable.' "

But when command presence drifts into aggression, officers create problems. New officers quickly "get a reputation as a good person to work with or a bad person to work with," he said. "When you're talking about a person who's not a very good communicator, they're the ones who are going to take a situation that should be minor and turn it bad."

Neither Wilkins nor Casias is shy about relaying memories of calls gone bad when fellow officers flummoxed their efforts to keep subjects calm. In CIT class, Casias recalls approaching a group of four or five men who had been drinking. They reacted well to her initially, she says, but then "another officer stomps in, and he's 'the man.' What do you think happened? We all ended up fighting."

Casias warns the CIT trainees that "radiating calm" may feel counterintuitive.

"When you're on the way to the scene, sometimes your heart rate goes up," she says. "Sometimes you get tunnel vision. Sometimes you start thinking of all the things that could happen. What do we do? Breathe. You don't want to be the angry one walking into the door; you want to be the calm one walking into the door."

Wilkins recalled a training shift years ago as a new recruit, when he and a supervising officer were called to remove a drunken man from a church gathering. After being handcuffed, the man moved around while Wilkins held him.

"My training officer grabs the guy and throws him to the ground," Wilkins said. "Then the fight is on." The man flailed all the way back to the cruiser, where he kicked out a window and spat on the officers, Wilkins said. What could have been a chance to network with the congregation ended with the pastor upset about the display of force. And at the end of the shift, the training officer scolded Wilkins for being too passive.

"That was not the kind of officer I wanted to be," Wilkins said. The training officer later moved away and subsequently tried to return to the department, which wouldn't rehire him.

"This profession in the past 20 years has changed dramatically," Wilkins said. "You can't amp it up and thump 'em — which used to happen, I'll be honest. But there's a different way to police. Times have changed."