MARANA- The Marana Police Department is focused on positive communication with the community.
The department recently hosted a training course for law enforcement around Southern Arizona on de-escalation.
An instructor with the company “Command Presence” led the class in the Marana Police Department’s Community Room.
“Part of the class that he’s really talked about is how we respond to people and what’s going on there to help the process and creating an environment for people to de-escalate,” said Sergeant Adam Lawson with the Marana Police Department.
“The ultimate goal of law enforcement agencies and police officers is to meet the needs of the public. And when we deal with individuals who are in crisis, the goal of the training is to give the students a wide variety of tools, tactics and strategies that they can employ to meet the needs of the individual in crisis,” said Victor Lauria, Trainer with Command Presence.
Lauria said he is noticing an increase in law enforcement agencies from around the country utilizing their services.
“I think de-escalation has risen to the top as far as training categories because of recent incidents that have been in the news, but law enforcement officers have been utilizing a wide variety of de-escalation strategies and techniques for years. We’re now focusing in on the best strategies tactics and tools for officers to employ when they encounter and individual in crisis,” said Lauria.
“One of the perspectives that he has, which I’m going to start integrating is the fact that we have no ability to de-escalate someone, they have to de-escalate themselves. But, what we do is create a positive environment,” Lawson explained.
“Every day is a different situation. You might have the same scenario, but people are very different. They can be in crisis and sometimes it could be a very basic scenario, but you never know what you’re going to get and being able to be a part of this training gives me more knowledge that I need to be able to be the best patrol officer that I can be to be able to help people,” said Patrol Officer Stephanie Rivera with the Marana Police Department.
“I just want everybody to know that we are, as officers of Marana, we’re trying to better our understanding of the public, better our understanding of mental illness and just gain tools that we can better communicate and better serve those we live around and work around,” said Patrol Officer Robert Reller with the Marana Police Department.
“We want to make sure that we’re not anyone to be afraid of. We want to make sure we can help people as best we can and we want to use all the resources we can before a situation arises to physical force or any type of aggression…We’re always training and working on things to be able our community. Every officer that I’ve worked with is always doing some type of extra training to better themselves and make sure we take care of our community,” said Officer Rivera.
