It wasn’t long after becoming a police officer in the northern English town of Hull in the 1980s that Django Sibley realized patrolling without a gun meant “policing by consent.”
His beat was the town’s public housing tenements, and Sibley said he quickly worked out that people responded better to persuasion than threats of force or arrest. De-escalation hadn’t yet hit the mainstream in law enforcement, but Sibley recalled spending most of his days doing just that.
Instead of taking a “more coercive” approach, Sibley said, he tried to persuade people to act in their own self-interests.
“You have to deal with violent situations usually through … taking the time to listen to people, get to know them,” he said.
Those early lessons have stuck with Sibley, 52, since moving to L.A. more than two decades ago and recently becoming executive director of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the civilian panel that oversees the police department and reviews shootings by officers.