The job of hostage negotiators has changed over time as negotiators deal not only with standard hostage situations but also with barricaded criminals and terrorists. The goal continues to be to ensure that everyone stays alive.
Pressure to move up the force continuum often increases as a hostage situation continues. Working together with the tactical teams can mean greater effectiveness. Globally police agencies are starting to use outside consultants, psychiatrists and psychologists to help in the hostage negotiation process.
History offers no prescriptions on how to bargain for human life. The circumstances of each case differ, but lessons can be learned: Empathy is necessary but not sufficient. People holding hostages are seldom moved by humanitarian concerns. They trade lives. Terrorists take hostages to free imprisoned comrades, extort ransoms and protection payments, demand political concessions, end sanctions, prevent peace, and create crises. Hostage situations put enormous pressure on governments. Desperate family members give heart-wrenching interviews.
Research on how to effectively negotiate hostage situations began in the 1970s. One of the primary motivators for finding better ways to negotiate was the terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics in Munich (West Germany), which resulted in 22 people dead- all ten terrorists, and all eleven hostages. This deadly situation brought international attention to the need for new approaches to crisis negotiation.
In 1974, recognising the significant benefit trained negotiators could bring to resolving hostage situations, the FBI adopted the NYPD model. After the tragic event at Waco, Texas, in 1993 the FBI created the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) and turned the negotiation program into the Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU).
Hostage negotiation is defined as the use of dialogue to resolve a conflict in which a person/ persons is being held and threatened in order to force a third party to do, or abstain from doing something in exchange for the safe release of the hostages. Negotiations under such circumstances have the purposes of obtaining additional information and resources, gaining the release of the hostages, and buying time to assemble and prepare a tactical assault team.
Active listening
A major change in the FBI Hostage Negotiation Program was to focus on active listening skills (ALS), copied from the mental health counselling field pioneered by American psychotherapist Dr. Carl Rogers. ALS armed FBI and police negotiators with clearly identified tools to use in their communications with a wide range of hostage takers and other highly expressive and emotional perpetrators.
Active listening is the most important set of communication skills that a crisis negotiator must use properly. Active listening allows people’s emotions to calm down and lets them know they are being heard. It is also an essential tool for finding out what is at the source of the conflict. Allowing intense emotional levels to calm is essential before substantive processes can unfold, which is one reason hostage situations may take many hours to resolve. Hostage takers may have a variety of psychological issues, including unstable relationships, identity disturbances, and difficulty controlling anger. They may also experience stress-related feelings of being treated unfairly or harassed.
Research on the personalities of hostage takers has classified some as inadequate personalities. The inadequate personality is seen as being ineffectual in responses to emotional, social, intellectual, and physical demands. While such a person appears neither physically nor mentally deficient, he does manifest inadaptability, poor judgment, social instability and lack of physical and emotional stamina.
As a hostage taker, the inadequate personality is likely to begin negotiating by making excessive demands, or he may refuse to negotiate with the police. This is because he fears further failure. Suicide rather than surrender is also likely for the inadequate personality.
The Stockholm syndrome seems to be an unconscious emotional response to the traumatic experience of being a victim. It affects hostage and hostage-taker alike and serves to unite both, being victims of the siege environment. This positive emotional bond between victim and subject is a defence mechanism of the ego under stress. The Stockholm syndrome may save the life of victim and subject alike, as it reduces the subject’s tendency towards violence. This has been debated.
Police response
The proper management of a terrorist hostage siege requires close coordination between the principal components representing the authorities. This is a law enforcement function. The law enforcement incident commander should constantly consult with both the negotiation team leader and the tactical team leader.
The chance that something bad will happen is greatest between 15 and 45 minutes into the situation. The four approaches to hostage situations are to: (1) contain, isolate, and negotiate with a hostage taker; (2) contain and demand a surrender; (3) use chemical agents to force a surrender (4) use tactical SWAT teams.
Most experts agree that tactical force is the last option, provided that none of the hostages has been wounded.
Hostage negotiators must continually manage and assess multiple goals to reach the point of influencing the hostage taker to surrender.
Rogan and Hammer proposed SAFE as the acronym for the demands that must be managed during hostage negotiations and communication dynamics that are used to address these concerns. SAFE stands for Substantive (instrumental) demands, Attunement (relational) concerns, Face (identity) concerns, and Emotional concerns.
Substantive goals in hostage negotiation cover the range of requests from peripheral demands, such as food and drink to meet the hunger needs of the hostages, to central demands, such as requests for a car or a plane for escape.
Attunement demands have to do with the relational concerns between the parties involved. In hostage situations these concerns include threats to the hostage taker’s power and control as well as the need for the hostage negotiator to convey empathy.
We can observe at the beginning of a hostage situation, relational concerns do not begin at a neutral starting point. The hostage negotiator is already at a deficit in terms of trying to establish trust because the hostage taker is surrounded by police. Nevertheless, the hostage negotiator’s ability to build trust with the hostage taker is crucial for hostage negotiations to resolve well.
Face concerns are those that promote, protect, or defend from threat to our own identity as well as the identity of the other party. Brown and Levinson differentiated between positive face, which is the identity a person puts forward, such as being competent, kind, tough, or knowledgeable, and negative face, which is a person’s autonomy, or the right to have one’s time and decisions respected.
Emotional concerns are particularly important to attend to in crisis negotiation because they involve intense emotions of anger, fear, and frustration that prevent the negotiation from moving forward by using normative processes. In hostage negotiations, when trust and liking between the hostage taker and the hostage negotiator achieve a level that is relatively stable and high, cooperative outcomes are more likely. But when trust is low, power struggles are likely to occur.
One of the longest phases in the process, it is during this stage that the hostage negotiator works at building rapport and trust with the hostage taker while also working to understand the issues that are at the root of the crisis.
Much of what we know about good conflict management includes the assumption that relational concerns are an important part of working through conflict with another party. But how we think about relationships during negotiation can be complex. Principled negotiation recommends “separating the people from the problem” and being “soft on the people and hard on the problem”.
SWAT intervention
Perimeter Control and Containment Teams are typically formed as an immediate response to an ongoing incident and primarily responsible for containing the incident, evacuations and establishing incident command.
Once a perimeter is set, law enforcement units should establish an Immediate Action Team in the event that the situation suddenly changes, requiring officers on scene to take immediate action.
Primary responsibilities of the “Immediate Action Team” are to prevent escape and to take the suspects into custody- if surrender occurs. This team should continuously assess and identify its limitations and assist in scene transition to SWAT when appropriate.
As the final result when dialogue is fully exhausted and fails there is a clear call for SWAT action. This would typically require a Team Commander and Tactical Operations Coordinator to run a command post, Sniper/Observer Teams to cover all sides of the structure, SWAT members for containment, a Reaction Team- to plan and rehearse a safe rescue plan. The risk profile calls for incorporating a medical element into all phases of these rescue operations.
The future of crime fighting is being defined by Artificial intelligence (AI), automation, extended reality, and all the most important trends we identify across other sectors are equally making their mark in policing.
One network of devices that are specifically built to help tackle violent crime is ShotSpotter. This consists of an array of microphones attached to city infrastructure, such as street lights- that detect the sound of gunfire. It then issues real-time alerts to police officers who can react more quickly-even to a hostage taking crisis. Hostage negotiation is a vital skill for police, to save lives. Nothing must be left to chance or fate-this is real life police duty.
(The writer is author of Target Secured- Police the Special Task Force)
