De-escalating Aggressive Encounters between Frontline Workers and Citizens (DE-ESCALATING)

Frontline workers have direct contact with the citizens they serve. Most encounters with citizens unfold smoothly, but a non-trivial proportion escalates aggressively. Compared to other employees, frontline workers face the greatest risk of exposure to violence. Employers and policymakers recognize this issue and show willingness to address it. However, there is a lack of applicable and evidence-based strategies. This has led frontline worker stakeholders from law enforcement, health care, transport, and service provision to reach out to us, requesting preventive and de-escalatory strategies. The current project, DE-ESCALATING, meets that stakeholder call. Our path to impact follows two steps: First, we address the surprising lack of knowledge about how frontline aggressive encounters unfold in real time. To dissect this, we will use the gold-standard method of systematic video analysis to examine over 4,000 clips of real-life events captured by body-worn or security cameras. This is then triangulated with cutting-edge methods to delve deeper into the mechanisms of de-escalation, including wearable devices that measure physiological stress, video-elicited interviews about motivations and attitudes of conflict parties, and ethnographic fieldwork in hotspots. These insights will be synthesized into the first theory of escalation and de-escalation in aggressive encounters between frontline workers and citizens. Second, we develop a series of field experimental intervention studies—targeting dynamics empirically identified to hold the largest de-escalatory potential. These tailored interventions will be co-created and implemented with our frontline worker partners, after consideration of their feasibility with respect to organizational and societal constraints. A total of 20 organizations and around 1,700 staff members will be involved in the experiments. The outcome of this project will be a compendium of evidence-tested interventions. The scalable impact of our interventions on the involved frontline worker groups will be secured through our collaborations with partners and an ambitious dissemination strategy.