U.S. Police Leaders, Visiting Scotland, Get Lessons on Avoiding Deadly Force

 Scottish police officers simulated a riot at the Jackton training center in Glasgow, Scotland, where police leaders from throughout the United States gathered to discuss department tactics.

 TULLIALLAN, Scotland — The United States and Britain are bound by a common language and a shared history, and their law enforcement agencies have been close partners for generations.

But a difference long curious to Americans stands out: Most British police officers are unarmed, a distinction particularly pronounced here in Scotland, where 98 percent of the country’s officers do not carry guns. Rather than escalating a situation with weapons, easing it through talk is an essential policing tool, and is what brought a delegation of top American police officials to this town 30 miles northeast of Glasgow.

 Forty minutes into a Scottish police commander’s lecture on the art of firearms-free policing, American law enforcement leaders took turns talking. One after another, their questions sounded like collective head-scratching.

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 €œDo you have a large percentage of officers that get hurt with this policing model?” asked Theresa Shortell, an assistant chief of the New York Police Department and the commanding officer of its training academy, where several hundred officers graduate each year.

 American visitors looking on as Scottish police officers acted out a possible confrontation.

 â€œHow many officers in Scotland have been killed in the last year or two years?” Chief Shortell added.

 Bernard Higgins, an assistant chief constable who is Scotland’s use-of-force expert, stood and answered. Yes, his officers routinely take punches, he said, but the last one killed by violence was in 1994, in a stabbing.

 There is poverty, crime and a “pathological hatred of officers wearing our uniform” in pockets of Scotland, he said, but constables live where they work and embrace their role as “guardians of the community,” not warriors from a policing subculture.

 €œThe basic fundamental principle, even in the areas where there’s high levels of crime, high levels of social deprivation, is it’s community-based policing by unarmed officers, Constable Higgins said. We police from an absolute position of embracing democracy.

 From Eric Garner on Staten Island, to Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Laquan McDonald in Chicago, fatal police confrontations have fueled public anger across the United States and have prompted police leaders to reconsider established tactics and entrenched thinking on when and how to use force.

 On Monday, the Justice Department announced that it was opening a civil rights investigation into the practices of the Chicago Police Department after one of its officers was charged last month with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Mr. McDonald, 17.

 The killing, in October 2014, was captured on video that the city released under a court order hours after the officer was charged. And just as protests had previously swept New York, Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, demonstrators have taken to the streets in Chicago to demand change.