Can Police Officers be Trained to “Listen Better”? A Meta-Relational Analysis of Listening in US Police Training and Practices

Abstract

This article examines police reforms through a meta-relational framework: one that resists resolution and foregrounds the tensions, contradictions, and partial truths that shape institutional life. Focusing on active listening in U.S. police training, particularly the Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) program, it shifts the question from whether such reforms “work” to how listening becomes a site where care, control, legitimacy, and resistance intersect. Drawing on the ICAT curriculum, ethnographic fieldwork at a North Carolina police academy, and interviews with trainees, the article argues that listening is not merely a communicative skill, but a relational technology shaped by institutional logics. Within this frame, reformist and abolitionist perspectives are treated not as opposing endpoints but as partial, coexisting lenses that illuminate different dimensions of the same policing terrain: reform highlights the openings that listening trainings may create, while abolition underscores their structural limits. Through three vignettes: the case of Sandra Bland, a role-play training scenario, and video-recorded police–civilian encounters, the article traces how police listening can both reproduce institutional power (“the trap”) and generate moments of relational reconfiguration (“the emergent”). It concludes by arguing that police listening must account for the relational, historical, and institutional conditions of listening itself.